Includes bibliographical references and index.

A history of the short-lived preudoscientific discipline "seroanthropology", adepts of which claimed that it was possible to identify a person's race through blood analysis. Although, for at least two centuries, there was widespread belief in a connection between a person's origins and his blood (as manifested in expressions such as "pure blood", "Jewish blood", etc.), there were two factors that preconditioned the emergence of seroanthropology: the discovery of blood groups in 1900, and the disappointment of anthropologists with skull measures and physiognomy as criterions of race. Seroanthropology was especially popular in Germany, where it was seen as a tool to preserve the purity of the "German race" and was motivated by nationalism and antisemitism. One of their main tasks, as viewed by German seroanthropologists, was use of blood tests to distinguish a person of Jewish origin from the "pure German". Blood science was taken up by the Nazis in the 1930s. Although many German anthropologists were skeptical about regarding the blood test as a racial criterion, blood rhetorics were widespread in Nazi discourse. It affected not only publications of "Der Stürmer", but also the Nuremberg Laws and the writings of Nazi theoreticians. The belief of the Nazis in "blood defilement", which could come about not only through sexual intercourse with Jews but even by blood transfusion from Jewish donors, was common. The pseudoscience of seroanthropology bears part of the responsibility for the Nazi genocide as a motivating factor.,(From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

SACFinal081324