Cedric Dover, an Indian-born botanist and acolyte of W.E.B. DuBois, was a proponent of a program of "positive eugenics" that would have used his knowledge of Mendelian genetics to homogenize the population of the British Empire and, thereby, reduce or eliminate the possibility for racism amongst its subjects. In the course of his study, Dover learned of the work of three medieval, Arabic-language writers whom he came to consider primordial theorists of race. Among the three was Judah Halevi, the twelfth-century poet and philosopher whose work across genres manifests racial animus as it was understood during that period. Dover sought to understand Halevi's conception of race and to situate it, at least in part, as a product of Halevi's sense of himself as a member of a religious minority group in a time of great social and political change.