By the time Marr penned his diatribe against the Jews in the 1870s,
most of the elements of the modern concept of race were already in
place. The idea that human biological characteristics such as skin
colour, shape of nose, type of hair, and size of skull were associated
with ingrained cultural and behavioural traits was well established.
It was widely held that level of ability to use reason, capacity for
‘civilization’ and the arts, and tendencies towards sexual
lasciviousness, for example, could all be read off from a study of the
outward appearance of human beings.