May 26: Dracula
Irish author Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was published on this date in 1897. Many critics have commented on the best-selling book’s implicit anti-Semitism: Dracula’s`blood-sucking,’ his aversion to the crucifix, his strange “Eastern” accent that switches “v” and “w,” his hoards of gold, his lack of true nationality, his lust for women, his parasitism, all conform to anti-Semitic stereotypes that were peaking at the close of the 19th century, when Eastern European Jewish emigration to Britain was at a height. The 1931 film version starring Bela Lugosi made the anti-Semitism explicit: Dracula wears a Star of David prominently around his neck. Bram Stoker, however, was politically liberal and even joined an artists’ protest against anti-Semitism in 1905. He “did not think of himself as anti-Jewish,” writes Joseph Valente in Dracula’s Crypt, “publicly exhibited no anti-Jewish sentiment whatever, and, with his biblical name [Abraham] and odd surname, was probably taken for Jewish on more than one occasion.” The original 541-page manuscript of Dracula, believed to have been lost, was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania during the early 1980s.
“My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.” —Dracula
George Jochnowitz -
In case anyone is interested in the etymology of Dracula:
The Romanian word for “devil” is “drac.”
The definite article in Romanian is a suffix, and the way to say “the devil” is “dracul.”
Romanian has a vocative case used when addressing someone. In the masculine, the suffix is -e, just as it is in Latin (Et tu Brute), pronounced like the -e- in “bet.” When talking to the devil, one says “Dracule.”
gloria levitas -
II taught a course on the Anthropology of Evil some years ago, and when I showed the original German film “Nosferatutu” to my students, I was stunned by the anti-semitism it expressed. Dracula very definitely inspired numerous cartoonlike portraits of Jews distributed by the Nazis; the fact that he was a “blood sucker”, that women were attracted to him (another of the beliefs about Jewish males being attractive to Christian women), that he carried a jar of earth from his homeland (something Jews often did with earth from what is now Israel, and was then Palestine) , and that he was associated with rats (again , Jews were believed to have caused the plague because so many of them escaped illness because of their sanitary habits and isolution– really nailed the anti-semitic message for me.. As a somewhat more amusing aside, the film Ratatouille used the figure of Dracula to protray the critic. As film makers often pay hommage to past masters, this was undoubtedly a tip of the hat to the film maker of Nosferatu. See it for yourself.
I did not assume that Stoker was an anti-semite: but many of his interpreters used Dracula to depict Jews in a truly despicable and derogatory way.
Anna Wrobel -
The complex anthropology of European regions is too onion-layered to permit any one statement or premise concerning the mythologies of antisemitism. But with a view to an arc of time, from the 1000′s C.E. blood libel and expulsion from England and Jew burnings in German principalities of the same era, to the 19th and early 20th century Eastern European pogroms and propagation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (with blood libel well in tow), the passing of time and the movement (and expulsions) of migrational Jews from region to region, can produce a general thesis regarding the nature of Christian (European) antisemitism, even when some of that earlier “Christian” hostility was grounded in pagan beliefs and rituals not yet fully acculturated to the newer ‘moralistic’ Christian regime. That Jews would be conflated with vampires, witches, and Gypsies is as much a testament to Christian fears of residual paganism as it was of the unfamiliar (and un-Christian) Jew. The witch in Hansel and Gretel is a prime case in point. Depending on the particular fears and superstitions of a specific peasant location, the witch could either be an anxiety-inducing pagan remnant or a Jew. And like the medieval German tale “The Jew in the Thornbush,” no matter how much the Jew has been transgressed upon by unruly (but innocent) Christian youth, the Jew is ALWAYS guilty, because anything stolen from a Jew was not really theft, but merely appropriation of what the Jew had stolen from Christians in the first place. And no Christian court (as in “Jew in the Thornbush”) would ever find for the plaintiff Jew against the inherent innocence of the youthful Christians accused of robbing the Jew. What a lesson to teach to children -”Thou shalt not steal,” to be sure, but…it’s not stealing (and perhaps it’s not ‘killing’ as in “Thou shalt not kill”), if the object (not subject) is a Jew. John Donne could write a poem about the “death of strangers” with the most universal compassion and empathy, but write other pieces condemning Jews as being outside of any human consideration – to be excluded from an otherwise universal vision of compassion.
Anna Wrobel -
“Europa, My Love” (poem / Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel / 5-2011)
Europa, my love, I must get over you.
You poison the well with
bodies of so many murdered,
then turn and say we did it
to you with our magic spit.
You spread plague with cat-hate
and with unwashed hands
point to quarantined ghettos
for proof we aided Hell.
You spill the blood of so many
children, yours and ours,
then look for tell-tale droplets
in the hollows of our bread.
You screamed “Kill the Jews” as
Dreyfus was stripped and condemned
and today his headstone needs cleaning
for the occasional swastikas painted there.
You yelled for centuries in your hate
“Jews, go back to Palestine,” and
today many scream as loudly and as
deadly, “Jews, get out of Palestine.”
I can draw but one conclusion and
it is not confusion that afflicts you.
You know exactly what you do
and forgiveness is thus moot.
You put all prayers and trust
and grace in one Jewish soul
while all others are hounded and
hung, cast out and crucified.
Europa, you would have but
one Jew, and which Messiah
would it be? Christ or Marx?
While for the millions who were
neither, the continent opened up
in flames, and many times
swallowed whole or in parts
the children of Isaac
the inheritors of Job.
And though we did not always
“come forth as gold,”(*) yellow
radiance of Jerusalem’s hills
and roofs will for us suffice.
We are not the walking dead
you made of us in your fear.
Neither are we the perfection
of your required prophecies.
We are just Jews in the land, and
while this, too, troubles you, we
will drink wine, defend borders,
dress children for Purim ‘spiel’
and fill our world with the light
of many, many chanukiot.
(*) from the Book of Job