Since his first book, an analysis of the theme of “counter-history” in Gershom Scholem's studies of Jewish mysticism (Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]), David Biale has been pre-occupied with uncovering and interpreting the latent, unacknowledged forces that underlie the public discourse of Jewish tradition. The present volume builds upon earlier studies, such as Eros and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), deftly uncovering the powerfully over-determined, symbolic meanings of blood in Jewish ritual, religious, and political thought from ancient to modern times.

The present study moves beyond Biale's earlier works by incorporating a more recent aspect of his interests—the study of Jewish cultural tradition as a kind of “joint project” shared in by the Jews themselves and various non-Jewish cultural interlocutors (see his three-volume masterpiece of editorial imagination, Cultures of the Jews [New York: Schocken Books, 2002]). Thus, the fundamental argument of this new volume, fully articulated and defended in remarkable detail, is that the meanings symbolized by blood in Jewish tradition must be understood in the context of an ongoing, often tormented, conversation with Christian (religious and post-religious) culture over the role of blood in representing both the boundaries of religious community and its essential identity.

The argument of the book is spread out over five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses upon the various meanings carried by the symbol of blood in the Hebrew Bible's sacrificial thought, with special attention to the apparently anomalous “baptism in blood” described in Exodus 24's account of the covenant at Sinai. This chapter serves as the foundation for chapter 2, which explores ways in which early rabbinic and Christian successor communities to the biblical heritage worked with the symbol heritage of blood in defining and defending their distinct claims to embody and perpetuate the original covenant community of Israel. The third chapter explores the salience of blood in the social and cultural transactions of Jews and Christians during the European Middle Ages. This chapter is perhaps the most wide-ranging and demanding, dealing as it does with matters of official Catholic theology (for example, the question of the presence of Christ's blood in the wine of the Eucharist), rabbinic martyrology (the redemptive nature of blood spilled in resistance to Christian violence), and popular Christian and Jewish piety (the so-called “blood libel,” the covenantal meaning of the blood of circumcision, and so forth). The final two chapters update the conversation over the diverse meanings of diverse kinds of blood into the modern period, chapter 4 focusing upon the novel and traditional appropriations of anti-Jewish blood-themes in the creation of modern anti-Semitism, and chapter 5 teasing out some surprising echoes of the whole range of blood themes embedded in Jewish popular and academic thinkers associated with European Modernism.

Biale has brought together prodigious reading in primary sources as well as secondary studies, and he seems to display nearly a specialist's mastery of the entire body of arcane material that he surveys—from biblical criticism to the arcane plot-lines of popular Zionist fiction in the 1920s. One of the main achievements of this study is that each chapter marshals material well-known to specialists but reads them in an interestingly novel way that often sheds new light on otherwise well-known sources. Secondly, Biale expertly wields the resources of the cultural historian's synthetic imagination in binding the whole study into a coherent and convincing narrative in which diverse discourses come together to constitute a larger pattern of meaning. Readers who may not have given much thought to the topic of “blood” as a unifying symbolic theme in the Western religious tradition will now find many nights of sleep lost to obsessive reflections on the implications of Biale's analysis.

Nothing in this world is perfect, however. Many passages of Biale's prose are murky and serpentine, revealing perhaps the stresses and strains of trying to work all of his diverse plotlines and subthemes into coherent form. This makes the book a dense read, a trait that will probably limit its readership to a professional scholarly audience well-used to wading through dense work in search of some nuggets of insight. The book's topic and argument are important enough to warrant presentation before a broader readership. Still and all, this is a remarkable study that will have an important impact upon current reflections on the ambivalent heritage of blood in the Western tradition.