The legend of the “Wandering Jew” seems to have been incorporated into the Dracula story. The Wandering Jew, like Dracula, is cursed to live forever. I figureit might not be so bad to live forever, but in bothinstances it’s looked upon as a negative “curse”.
I don’t see how being UnDead connects with a degenerate race or criminal type. If anything, being
degenerate and/or criminal would suggest a shortened lifespan.
Also, far from being a degenerate criminal, Dracula is a wealthy aristocrat (not unlike Baron Rothschild).
Besides being cursed with immortality, the WanderingJew, if not rich, isn’t poor either. He has a magic
wallet that is never depleted, and can always pay his way. Dracula buys British real estate without even
having seen it first.
Dracula is a good movie subject due to his mobility. He hires various conveyances; besides
being able to fly as a bat, there’s galloping horse-drawn coaches and storm-tossed ships at his
command.
Supposedly the legend of the Wandering Jew is founded on Jesus’ words given in Matthew 16:28:
“Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see
the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
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When all was ready, Van Helsing said, “Before we do anything, let me tell you this. It is out of the lore
and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the UnDead. When they
become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality. They cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world…
Dracula - Bram Stoker
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Weinstock, Jeffrey A.
Circumcising Dracula: the Vampire as Anti-Semitic Trope
Vampirism and Judaism are intricately connected. Through an examination of the “blood libel”, the charge that Jews murder Christian children to obtain their blood, as well as the charges that Jews spread disease and as satanic disciples, steal and torture the communion wafer, one can argue that the evolution of the vampire myth is inseparable from mythologies of anti-Semitism. Also noted is the commonplace derogatory characterization of Jews as “bloodsuckers”.
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Paul Marchbank - Dracula: Degeneration, Sexuality and the Jew
…one interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) missed by many readers is the novel’s anti-Semitism: Dracula’s distinctive physique, his parasitical desires, his `blood-sucking’, his aversion to the crucifix and Christianity, and his rapacious relation to money, parallel stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representations of the Jew.’ However, because no direct reference is made within Dracula which unequivocally establishes the Count as Jewish, it would seem difficult to establish this relationship. Nonetheless, if a comparison is made between the representation of the vampire and the perceived image of the Jew, then a startling analogy arises. Dracula, like the perceived image of the Jew, seemingly transmits an inherent connection between blood and gold, between a threatening sexuality and ethnicity which seems to confirm the novel’s depiction of the vampire as the anti-Semite’s Jew.
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Judith Halberstam
TECHNOLOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Dracula, I thought, with his peculiar physique, his parasitical desires, his aversion to the cross and to all the trappings of Christianity, his blood-sucking attacks, and his avaricious relation to money, resembled stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representations of the Jew. Subsequent readings of the novel with attention to the connections in the narrative between blood and gold, race and sex, sexuality and ethnicity, confirmed my sense that the anti-Semite’s Jew and Stoker’s vampire bore more than a family resemblance. The connection I had made began to haunt me; I uncovered biographical material and discovered that Stoker was good friends with, and inspired by, Richard Burton, the author of a tract reviving the blood libel against Jews in Damascus. I read essays by Stoker in which he railed against degenerate writers for not being good Christians. My conclusions seemed sound, the vampire and the Jew were related, and monstrosity in the Gothic novel had much to do with the discourse of modem anti-Semitism.
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Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature
Carol Margaret Davison
Arguing that “anti-Semitism has remained a consistent and readily adaptable component in British identity construction” (p. 14) over three centuries and more, Carol Margaret Davison focuses on the figure of “the Wandering Jew” in Gothic romances from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and beyond.
