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
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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.”
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.