According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning “divine portent or warning.” The notion of a monster as a type of warning lurks just across the threshold of consciousness in the psyche of Gothic fiction, where the monster often functions as an embodiment of transgression. Works of Gothic horror provide spaces where the deepest, darkest passageways of the human mind and soul can safely be explored. Inevitably inhabiting these deep, dark passageways is some form of a monster; in Gothic horror, the monster is an actual physical entity, but in the human psyche, the monster is the cultural Other-that which goes against the status quo of its particular place and time. Gothic fiction provides an outlet for a culture to project and deal with its fear of Otherness and with its concerns about the potential threat of the unknown. Abundant in scholarly work on Gothic literature are interpretations of the Other as the female and the homosexual; surprisingly lacking from the body of Gothic critical work is a category of people that have perhaps been the most culturally scorned of all-the Jews. In the deeply Christian context and tradition of Gothic horror, Jews are the ultimate Other, with their differences in beliefs, rituals, language, and dietary laws. The stereotypical image of the Jew eventually came to be embodied in the vampire, an anti-Semitic demonization that seems to have its roots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula character.

In the Middle Ages, when Europeans were beginning to live together in larger and larger groups, Christianity was the dominant cultural adhesive. As civilization grew, any person suspected of non-Orthodox adherence to Christianity was considered a heretic and was “black-listed” in the community. The idea of practicing any other religion was utterly unthinkable. Individuals or groups who willfully rejected the notion that Jesus Christ was G-d were agents of the devil (Stephens). The Jews received the brunt of this belief because the Church had conveniently forgotten by the Middle Ages that Jesus himself was Jewish, and that it was the Romans who crucified him, not the Children of Israel. The astonishingly absurd and horrific rumors of blood libel that were popular in the Middle Ages (and which sadly persist in some Arab cultures to this day) made the Jews especially subject to persecution. It was believed by Christians that Jews kidnapped Gentile children and killed them in order to drink their blood as part of cannibalistic religious rituals. Jews were said to ambush Christian children in their bedrooms, and then bring them to temples where they would be slaughtered and drained of their lifeblood. Entire communities of Jews were wiped out on these Satanic allegations, burned on the pyre for their religion. Because of further rumors that Jews could re-animate themselves and others Jews after bodily death, their corpses were often decapitated or a stake was driven through the charred heart (Stephens). These rumors obviously provided the basis for the Jew-as-vampire image.

It was this paradigm of anti-Semitic fear and superstition that the Western world had inherited when London experienced an inpouring of Eastern European Jews in the 19th century. A certain cultural apprehension already existed in Western Europe at this time because of several other changes that had begun to threaten the old Christian patriarchy. Women were slowly starting to free themselves from their total dependence on men. Sexual transgression was snowballing; sexually transmitted diseases were on the rise, and cities were becoming overpopulated. The popularization of Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with other exponentially increasing advancements in the sciences, were undermining more and more Christianity’s monopoly on Truth. These changes brought about an intense concern with the idea of cultural purity and infection in the collective unconscious of late 19th century England (Spencer 203). This is where the vampire tale comes in, with its horrifying notions of demonic infection and the downfall of civilization as it was known.

The decade in which Stoker composed Dracula was the decade that anti-Semitism seemed to peak across Europe (Herbert 106). The parallels between the character of Dracula and the 19th century stereotype of the Jew are striking. Physically, he is made to resemble an Eastern European Jew: Dracula is a dark-featured, pale-skinned man with a prominent “hook nose.” He comes from the East and speaks with a strange accent, switching his “v’s” and “w’s” and sometimes “t’s” and “s’s”-morphemic characteristics of Hebrew. Just as anti-Semites saw the Jewish people, Dracula is selfish, materialistic, evil, and his “child’s brain” is emphasized throughout the novel. Further, like the Jews cast out of Israel into the lands of the Diaspora, Dracula as a vampire has no true nationality to claim. He has pride in tracing his ancestry back to the Turks and the great warrior Attila the Hun, but he has no present ties to any geographically fixed ethnic group. He is forced by his very nature to remain on the outskirts of civilization, hunted and, as the Christians imagined the Jews to do, hunting down innocent people. Van Helsing and his “Crew of Light” make it their mission to destroy the threat that Dracula poses to their way of, and do so wholly in the name of Jesus. Van Helsing summarizes the Crew of Light’s mission in Chapter XXIV, telling Mina,

Thus are we ministers of G-d’s own wish: that the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He has allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel toward sunrise; and like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.

They are fighting for Jesus, for Christianity, and for G-d. Their mission is to destroy all the “monsters” that oppose Christ, all beings whose “very existence would defame Him,” evil beings that stray from the Christian cultural norm-in this case, the Jews. Central to the Crew of Light’s arsenal of weapons against the vampire are the crucifix, the Host, and vials of Holy Water, all of which were believed at some point in history to repel and to otherwise adversely affect Jews. Further, the method of destroying vampires in Dracula is identical to the methods used to execute Jews in the Middle Ages: the vampires are staked through the heart and then decapitated in order to prevent them from re-animating themselves. Clearly, anti-Semitic beliefs infected Stoker’s writing of Dracula just as much as it was feared that Jews would infect Christianity and Western civilization as a whole.

The vampiric incarnation of the Gothic monster embodies anti-Semitic superstitions and traditions that were passed along from the Middle Ages to Victorian times. Gothic vampire tales, Dracula in particular, represent the anxiety of a patriarchal Christian society in facing the unknown. By demonizing the Jews, whose very foundation of life was completely foreign and utterly threatening to the Christian paradigm, and projecting this demonization onto a character that is ultimately destroyable, these anxieties could be dealt with cathartically. Anti-Semitism in the vampire story is ultimately a testament to the psychological function of Gothic horror: confronting what is considered to be Other and dealing with it in whatever way seems appropriate-no matter how far from reality and human decency “appropriate” ultimately is.