What had also captured the Victorian imagination was the fear of infiltration by
Eastern Europeans, namely, Jewish Europeans. By 1882, 15 years before “Dracula” was published, 46,000 Jews lived in England, many having been chased out of Russia and Poland by antisemitic pogroms. Many Jewish merchants and bankers soon reached prominence in their fields, and their otherness became a threat to English cultural identity. In his landmark essay “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’,” Jack Halberstam identifies vampires as “a race and family that weakens the stock of Englishness by passing on degeneracy and the disease of blood lust.”
Halberstam references an 1899 essay from The Spectator that configures Jews as “a parasitical race with no ideals beyond the precious metals.” In fiction, Dracula, a foreigner with a penchant for wealth hoarding, lives in a house so “neglected that yer might ‘ave smelled ole Jerusalem in it.” These dog-whistles are more like foghorns.
Halberstam recalls British histories of eugenics in noting that “racial stereotyping depends upon the visual.” The shape-shifting Count Dracula, in his various forms, is described as having “bushy hair,” ears “extremely pointed at the top,” “extraordinary pallor” and “a beaky nose[,] black mustache and pointed beard.” Dracula’s
nose gets a lot of attention; he is also described by a zookeeper as “a tall thin chap with a ‘ook nose.” These supposed cultural markers, as well as his degeneracy and obsessions with wealth, do more than enough to draw attention to Stoker’s situating of the vampire as a metaphor for the Jewish outsider.
