i always think it’s so fun to be like ~okay well what keeps a vampire away if you’re not christian :3 would a magen david do it for a jew haha*~ but i do also frankly think it’s like. like… moderately deep sigh. we all KNOW why it’s jsut christianity that keeps the blood-sucking fiends away, right? like we’re all on the same page about what the bottom line here is, right? we all get it? before we have fun and get silly… do we all… like… does everyone actually know why we’re here?
#*it would not bc that’s not how cultural differences work. cannot simply copy-paste jewish necklace over xtian necklace & get same result.
and i have said a lot in the replies of this post that i just want to consolidate but essentially: this is not just that (as in the tag) you can’t just copy paste one symbol with very specific cultural connotations to replace another one with very different ones, this has to do with e g what cultural anxieties vampires embody. so like the vampire is a very literal amalgamation of literal beliefs about jews (that they drink the blood of christians, that they are attempting to infiltrate the upper class or that they are in fact already dispersed invisibly throughout it and thence forth exert undue influence, etc) in addition to other cultural anxieties around (in the case of dracula, eg) reverse colonization and concerns around immigration and xenophobia (…in this case: towards eastern european jews), as well as cultural anxieties around sex and sexuality (…not for nothing but this is often a component of antisemitism from medieval times well into the present day)
so like i think it’s fine to be doing this kind of fun thought exercise it just really feels like it’s missing the point to sit down and be like how would a jew fend off a vampire when a vampire Is a jew, in the sense that a vampire is an embodiment Of antisemitic stereotypes and canards and so forth and so on. the horror of a vampire is “jews exist and are out there, invisibly preying on good christians and trying to infiltrate the echelons of power”; that IS the thing that is overpowered by the crucifix (a sign that christianity Is the true religion). the crucifix is “solving” that cultural anxiety around the jewish by positing the supremacy of the christian. that’s its function in this mythology, which makes it doubly ineffectual to simply replace it 1:1 with a jewish religious symbol - the vampire is inherently an interfaith monster in many ways, it is about (among other things) the interplay between differing religious groups, and any kind of Take has to at least partially take that into effect or at least think about these things.
what does it mean that (for example) willow rosenberg, a jew, put a crucifix on her wall to keep out vampires? there’s something to be said there about assimilation, so like i do Get why it’s more fun to be like, well what if she could just use a magen david instead, right? but that doesn’t in any way grapple with what the Source of the horror of vampires is (i.e. the sexual and religious other who preys on the faithful and can be overpowered by christian religious authority).
imo a more interesting Take is, like, the vampire existing In the social space Of antisemitism; the horror of vampires from a jewish perspective being for example the looming threat of violence and retaliation and antisemitism; being forcibly identified As a monster against your will; seeing the living (un-living) stereotype as what it is and being unable to communicate that. something more in that space.
like, this is not to say that jewish folklore doesn’t have these kinds of undead spirits and monsters - obviously, it does, and i am also interested in vampire Takes that draw more on a jewish worldview and existing folklore. but part of the Fun or Impact of the vampire Is its cultural omnipresence and legibility as an extremely Recognizable kind of monster, and playing with the … underpinnings and understandings Of that very specific cultural, like, milieu… is part of. the fun. so i like a jewish take on vampires i am jsut… less compelled by trying to figure out what the 1:1 jewish equivalent of holy water is than i am by trying to actually tweak on Themes and Resonances
I’ve seen confusion about this a few times so let’s clear something up:
With closed traditions, you are COMPLETELY 100% ALLOWED to:
Think about them
Talk about them in conversation
Learn about their history
Follow and talk to members
Ask questions about it in good faith
Think it’s very interesting and cool
Find aspects of it relatable to your own philosophy
Accept willing gifts from members, or buy what they are willingly selling
Attend events if you’re invited, or events open to the public
Eat or cook traditional food
Listen to traditional music
A lot of people seem like they’re scared to interact with people from closed traditions because they’re afraid somehow even looking our way will offend us. We’re not angry people with secret social rules, we’re just people. Like just be nice and you’re fine
This exactly. A lot of white gentiles heard about cultural appropriation and decided it was the perfect platform to virtue signal, and started yelling over actual members of these cultures they’re claiming to “protect.” Who needs to actually learn about other cultures when you can just hiss at people to stay away from them?
I’ve encountered spaces that straight up BANNED any mentions of closed practices to “protect” them from appropriation (and would even ask you to edit said culture out of your intro since who knows, you could be lying.) They genuinely told me “You can be Jewish, just not here.” Imagine being such a good ally for Jewish people that you ban them from your discord server
Ppl are already getting those damn number tattoos from season 4 of Stranger Things and like…so y’all dont see the issue? Hello?
absolutely insane to me that THIS will happen which is so obviously ignorant and antisemitic i dont even have to say anything about it but also like. one of the places stranger things season 4 was filmed was a prison in lithuania that previously imprisoned and killed thousands of jews. you can now PAY TO STAY IN A CELL INSIDE THE PRISON for a true “”stranger things experience.”” the lack of respect or even acknowledgment of the holocaust is truly fucking horrifying and painful to see as an eastern european jew. like i actually cant fucking believe it though i shouldn’t be surprised.
in the wake of dracula daily and subsequent ongoing discussions of the antisemitism that drives the book, i thought i’d throw together a verybrief primer based on little strands of research i’ve done in the past around some of the history that scaffolds dracula.i’m not trying to scold people for participating in the more lighthearted end of this cultural moment – i love dracula,i’m also reading dracula daily and enjoying everyone’s little jokes about jonathan harker and his paprika and so on – but i amtrying to provide what i hope is a somewhat useful resource for deeper engagement with the text, a necessary critical skill if you want to have anything meaningful to say about it. i’m not really interested in coddling people’s feelings about antisemitism, and i think it’s in everyone’s best interests to provide a little bit of a framework for how we approach and think about and talk about what is a pretty unambiguously bigoted book.
for what it’s worth, i find the most productive way to approach this text, as with any text that emerges from a tradition of immense violence (ie. pretty much any work of english literature from the nineteenth century, all of which write from the heartlands of imperialist plunder and the formation of nationalist cultural norms) is as a historical document. there’s a difference in these discourses between a piece that’s made today, where we might ask whywe’ve allowed particular cultural conditions to facilitate the telling of narratives that are attempting to naturalise conditions of bigotry, and one created in 1897, where our relationship to that historical moment should be one of self-reflection and analysis with an eye to informing our understanding of present-day violences. my point is that a text which locates itself within the british antisemitism of the late nineteenth century is one which can enhance our understanding of that antisemitism and its present-day legacy.
i also want to clarify that i don’t intend to reduce the bigotry of draculatojustthe antisemitism – it is clearly shaped by broader strokes around racism and imperialist race science in particular, but the specific british-jewish cultural history within which it is grounded happens to be the one that i have a relatively coherent understanding of, and wanted to share. i don’t at all intend to frame this as a complete account – i’m more just putting what i have to hand out into the world for others to do with what they will and ultimately come to their own conclusions about the text and how best to engage with it.
i think it’s worthwhile to also touch briefly on the fact that draculais by no means alone in invoking antisemitism where vampires are concerned – what often gets missed in discourses around what vampires can represent (parasitic capitalism being an incrediblycommon discursive invocation, to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing that so-called marxists can’t make the very short leap) is that much of the vampire mythos is shaped by antisemitism. the draining of blood closely resembles a blood libel, ie. the smear that jews drink the blood of christian children; the state of being repelled by a crucifix should be self-explanatory; the construction of the vampire as a parasite leeching off of communal social formations forged within white imperialist societies closely reflects anxieties regarding the allegedly parasitic presence of jews both in eastern + central europe andnew immigrant communities in britain. the vampire is immortal as the jew is eternal – the ‘eternal jew’ is a nazi smear drawing from the antisemitic canard of the ‘wandering jew,’ which in turn dates back to the thirteenth century. the vampire threatens the national body and so does the jew. the rush to point to the vampire as an apt metaphor for the parasitism of capitalism too quickly falls into the mire of discourses that entwine capitalist violence with jewish populations (jews are all moneygrabbing leeches and so on), and redirects anger towards capitalism into antisemitism. whilst the history of the vampire as a folkloric figure is far richer than just ‘jews bad,’ it is undeniable that this cultural scaffolding exists,and informs draculaeven before stoker comes to personally intervene in discourses of antisemitism specific to the conditions from which he was writing.
this excellent paperondraculaand the gothic response to anxieties of imperialist decay – ie. fear of a ‘reverse colonialism’ – that did the rounds on this website a few days ago covers a lot of important and helpful ground for this text, and i would highly recommend giving it a read. what it misses, however, is that draculais rooted not only in these abstract notions of imperial decline and external threats to ‘britishness,’ but in the very definite, concrete historical moment in which new discourses of antisemitism were emerging in britain – and that is the history that i want to touch on now.
in 1882, in the wake of the assassination of tsar alexander ii for which the jewish population of the russian empire were scapegoated, a set of highly repressive laws known as the ‘may laws’ were passed. in short, these laws heavily restricted jewish freedom of movement within the empire, almost entirely limiting jewish settlement to the pale of settlement (a portion of land in the westernmost part of the russian empire, encompassing modern-day belarus, lithuania, and moldova, and parts of poland + ukraine) and restricting property ownership + establishing strict administrative quotas across various sectors that severely limited jewish participation in russian society. this in turn brought about expulsions of portions of the jewish populations of moscow and st petersburg where these quotas were exceeded. crucially, these repressive laws were tightened over the next decade, which, alongside a series of brutal pogroms, caused mass emigration of the ashkenazi population from the russian empire. one significant epicentre for jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century was the east end of london. this was, of course, coterminous to the writing of dracula,in which an eastern european man imbued with a number of antisemitic smears attempts to inculcate himself within the population of london and imitate britishness with the eventual intent of sucking it dry – you see the very obvious lines being drawn here.
it goes without saying that the establishment of a new immigrant population in london would stoke the sort of reactionary sentiments that we can locate in dracula; however, we might look beyond just a loose historical correlation and consider the possible relationship between the whitechapel murders (colloquially known as the jack the ripper murders – whitechapel is located in the east end if you didn’t know) and stoker’s novel (published seven years after the last of the murders) amidst the adjacent discourses that said murders generated. in addition to the fascination with an ‘underside’ to victorian society in which sexual + social moralising was inverted and voyeurised by the moralist bourgeois class that these murders, targeting poor sex workers, amplified (think the kind of sensationalism we see with true crime culture today – very much the prototype of that), the projection of sensationalised sexual degeneracy and lechery onto the murders in turn invoked antisemitic discourses in which the east end’s jewish population became a nodal point of sorts where these spectral anxieties could be projected. a physical description of jack the ripper at one point included a dark beard and a foreign accent, with a sketch that added a hooked nose, and the famous goulston street graffito in 1888 which read ‘the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ has, though unproven, been treated as though it were written in connection with the whitechapel murders. john pizer, a jewish man, was at one point arrested for the murders (and later released), and police reports around this referred to emergent broader anti-jewish sentiment in whitechapel. the point is, there’s a case to be made for the whitechapel murders having amplified already-extant antisemitism in the east end, and a furthercase to be made for this specific blood libel adjacency to have shaped bram stoker’s novel. (to compare; this is, for example, the same discourse that scaffolds the joke in what we do in the shadows about laszlo being jack the ripper.) whilst we don’t knowthat stoker consciously, explicitly had jack the ripper in mind, 1) it is a theory that has been critically posited before, and 2) at the very least, the novel’s unambiguous antisemitism that locates itself most prominently within a blood libel would have been informed by discourses specific to london, of which this was a major one.
that dracula himself is something of an antisemitic caricature is, i would hope, obvious; and of course, the text is laced with the language of physiognomy and the fear that an immigrant might sufficiently imitate britishness to the point of being able to pass himself off as british wholesale. to take this further, we might, for example, think about how stoker depicts lucy westenras – a ‘blonde, demure’ white woman representative of the british imperialist fantasy of white womanhood becomes a vampire and feeds off of the same children that she (as a white woman) is socially conditioned to care for and reproduce, thus rendering the vampiric threat as one that targets white women and their reproductive roles within the imperial social formation. we might similarly point to the whitechapel murders and the simultaneous sensationalising of sex workers’ murders against the figure of the ‘good’ bourgeois white woman + the subsequent anxiety that the jewish population of the east end might represent a real, immediate threat to london’s womanhood.i don’t want to be overly didactic about this book, and i think that after a certain point this scaffolding is such that people can go away and do the work themselves – like, i’m not going to sit here drawing out point after painstaking point about how draculais peppered with the language of race science and imperialist anxiety at points x, and y, and z. my intention here was to provide a bit of specific background context for how & why this novel came about, from the relatively meagre well of information that i have to hand. my closing remarks might be that we could use all of this discourse as a launchpad for thinking about the points of convergence of subjugation within the vampire myth, and what that can tell us about how imperialism refortifies itself + against which values it does so – in dracula,in sheridan le fanu’s carmilla,in samuel taylor coleridge’s christabel,and in the broader corpus of myth to which all of these texts are responding, we can identify repeated convergent themes of othering the jew, the irish population (le fanu was anglo-irish and a popular reading of carmillais as representative of the colonisation of ireland), the homosexual (draculais incredibly homoerotic, and both carmillaandchristabelare fairly explicitly lesbian), the racialised + colonised populace, and the projection of lechery and sexual degeneracy onto all of these subjects in the ultimate interest of reifying white gentile imperialist sexual formations. the somewhat effete feminising of dracula comes against the masculinising of the imperial british man, for example; the ‘othered’ populace exists in threat & opposition to the imperial norm (and the feminised jewish man is a classicof antisemitism, eg. as far back as the medieval smear that jewish men menstruated). all of these figures clustered under the broad umbrella of the vampire are rendered as threats to reproductive white heterosexuality, and as such, to the reproduction of the imperial order, and to capital, and i’ve always found this to be the most elucidating angle from which i can engage with the text critically. i hope at the very least this is a helpful little conjunction of Thoughts that people can do something with?
