Anidjar's wide-ranging book is aptly described as the uncovering of a mystery. How is it that we in the West, despite the link of life and blood in Genesis 9:4, have come to differentiate some bloods from other bloods, in order to make blood the mark of a distinct nation, or community? A typical answer might be that the move to particularize blood is a mark of bad religion (whether coded as paganism or tribalism, or as the secularized theology that underlies the nation-state). Yet as Anidjar shows, such an answer is simply inadequate; the history of Western culture is one in which Christian authorities and texts create such an arbitrary answer, deploying the rhetoric of blood to privilege their own particular brand of exclusivism, which goes under the name of “universalism.”

The first step in this argument is to show how it is that Christianity, and not Judaism or Israelite religion, is responsible for this ethnicization of blood. Going against historians of religion such as William Robertson Smith, who saw in the Hebrew Bible an account of “blood-based kinship,” Anidjar shows how the relevant identity markers in the Hebrew Bible are organized around flesh and bone (see Genesis 29:14 and Judges 9:2), with the language of “flesh and blood” only beginning in the Pauline epistles (see 1 Corinthians 15:50). It is the Christian theological notion of justification by Christ's blood—a liquid that is unique and not shared by all—that allows for communities to mark a difference between those who partake in that blood in the Eucharist and those who do not. This, for Anidjar, is what enables the fifteenth-century statutes on limpieza de sangre, as well as later allegedly secularized notions of blood purity, to have the force that they do. Thus, Christianity marks the beginning of a “theologico-political history that has further produced the necessary (if, perhaps, not sufficient) conditions of what we call nationalism (or racism)” (65).

This story is one in which “blood” is conjured as something with apparently preordained social and political effects from out of an arbitrary rhetorical matrix. In the later chapters of the first part of Blood, Anidjar shows how these conjurings ground political realities (“the vampire state”) in the cases of the one-drop rule in US law and the papal revolution in the eleventh century, as well as economic realities. In this latter respect, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice becomes the paradigm example of how the protection of Christian capital from Jews demonstrates Marx's assertion in “On The Jewish Question” that “the Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.”

The second half of the book is comprised of three essays under the rubric of “Hematologies,” in which Anidjar both counters alternate genealogies of blood and shows the benefits of what one might call “reading for blood.” In the first and longest of these, Anidjar pays attention to a large number of instances of blood-talk in the ancient Greek corpus (primarily, but not exclusively, Homeric) in order to show that the broad lexical applicability of blood-rhetoric in ancient Greece still omits blood as a figure for kinship. In other words, the Christian introduction of blood as a marker of difference cannot be blamed on the Hellenistic context of early Christianity. The second of these chapters is a puzzling bagatelle (only thirteen pages without endnotes) on Freud and vampires; the last is a genuinely dazzling interpretation of Melville's Moby Dick, in which Anidjar shows how Melville develops a counter-rhetoric of blood that joins people together, in resistance to Christian blood-rhetoric.

Like all wide-ranging academic books, Blood can be a frustrating read, especially when the examples come so fast and furious that a reader can feel more pummeled than taught. (As an example, on three pages near the end of the chapter on Freud and vampires, one can find citations of Freud, Stoker, Hadejwich, John Wesley, Catherine of Siena, Benjamin, Nietzsche, and Hegel.) The costs of this approach are outweighed by its generativity; what Anidjar has done in effect is to outline one highly productive rhetorical strategy by which Christianity became the “Son religion,” to use Freud's phrase from the end of Moses and Monotheism, and displaced Judaism. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that after almost two generations of scholarship in which Christianity has been re-rooted in its Jewish context— with, as an effect, making the date of the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism ever and ever later —it is odd to read something that so firmly (and not unpersuasively) claims that Judaism and Christianity are essentially different from one another. If Anidjar is correct, then whence Paul's invocation of blood as a figure for Christian kinship, for which there is neither Jewish nor Greek precedent? What kind of system of causation would allow for the emergence of Christianity, which is by his lights completely novel? In examining the rhetorical strategies by which blood circulates through Christian and secularized-Christian cultures, allowing those cultures to counterpose themselves to others, Anidjar has palpably raised the question of how a strategy could ever have gotten started.