Since over a century ago when the archetypal Counts Dracula and Orlok came into being, scholarship about Bram Stoker's quintessential 1897 vampire novel Dracula and F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent film adaptation Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror has thoroughly explored the anti-semitic attitudes underlying both narratives as well as their functions as metaphors for disease. Both texts were freated in the context of anti-semitism; the turn of the century brought rising tensions regarding "the Jewish question" due to mass immigration out of Eastern European regions1, and Nosferatu's release in 1922 Germany followed similar Jewish immigration due to displacement from Transylvania during World War I. Anti-semitic beliefs have often tied Jews to diseases such as syphilis and the Black Plague, both of which are frequently associated with Dracula and Nosferatu respectively. Tuberculosis is another malady that fits into this equation, both in metaphor in the novel and in theory about the inferior Jewish body. The vampires of Dracula and Nosferatu represent not just the diseased body but specifically the Jewish tubercular body, drawing on cultural fears about both the spread of illness and the disruption of a Christian society. While Stoker and Murnau were not writing while sick, they wrote while surrounded by both sickness and anti-semitism, and this context cannot be separated from their ideas of horror.
"His face was a strong--a very strong--aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion ... his ears were pale and the tops extremely pointed." (Stoker 25-26). Stoker's initial description of Count Dracula, told through the journal of Jonathan Harker, is an immediate indicator that Dracula is to be interpreted as racially Jewish. The high bridged nose, bushy eyebrows, and pointed ears are all markers of common Jewish stereotypes in the historical context of the novel and in Stoker's own work. Throughout the novel, Dracula's nose is described as "aquiline" (Stoker 314), "high" (Stoker 353), and "beaky" (Stoker 193), and two of his vampiress disciples are described similarly (Stoker 47). Though this trait may not necessarily be associated with Jewish stereotype, Carol Margaret Davison notes in her chapter "Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siecle Fears and Bram Stoker's Dracula." that Stoker had previously explicitly associated the aquiline nose with Jewishness in his work Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Additionally, Stoker describes the only explicitly Jewish character in Dracula as having a "nose like a sheep" (Stoker 356), evoking a similar contour. Beyond the first impression, Dracula and his disciples are often described as having red eyes or "eyes that seem to be burning" (Stoker 353). In "Nazis, Jews, and Nosferatu", Marie Mulvey-Roberts surmises that this is an example of the red eyed Jew trope, which arose from the myth that Jews were prone to eye disease. This trope was used by Charles Dickens in both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist (Mulvey-Roberts 134). These physical characteristics alone give the picture of Dracula as an anti-semitic caricature. Count Orlok, Murnau's Nosferatu counterpart to Count Dracula, displays many of these traits to an even more advanced degree. Max Schreck, who portrayed Orlok, wore a false beaked nose for the part, and the character is bald with long fingers, pointed ears, bushy eyebrows, and an effeminate, ratlike manner. Similarly, the film's estate agent and agent of evil Knock is hunched and bald with thick eyebrows, using the visual language of anti-semitism to provoke distrust. Between Dracula and Nosferatu, it is clear from the visual depictions of the Counts themselves that the threat in the stories is a Jewish one.
Aside from the appearance of both vampires, Dracula and Nosferatu invoke a number of anti-semitic myths in their plotlines to heighted the horror of the invading Other including the Wandering Jew, the blood libel, and association with the devil. Th Wandering Jew is a mythical figure of an immortal Jewish man who is fated to wander from place to place as a punishment. The Wandering Jew and the Vampire share an unnaturally long life, and the constant movement is reflected in both Counts' relocations to the Western world. Mulvey-Roberts describes how "In the absence of a homeland, the Jewish diaspora has been reviled as feeding off the body politic of other nations." (Mulvey-Roberts 131). This constant migration, disappearance, and reappearance has led to associations with the undead. In the context of Dracula, Mulvey-Roberts notes the 600% increase in the English Jewish population between 1881 and 1900 that followed financial collapse and anti-Jewish measures in Germany and theorizes that this wave of immigration triggered Stoker's anti-semitic portrayal of the Count's relocation. A similar wave of Jewish immigration hit Berlin, the birthplace of Nosferatu, following the invasion of semitic Transylvania during World War I. Another anti-semitic trope that can be connected to vampirism is the blood libel, the myth that Jewish people kill children and consume thier blood in rituals (Pugh). This is clearly mirrored in the vampires' consumption of living blood as well as the murder of children by the English women turned into vampires by the Count in Dracula. Jews are often associated with the devil, both in metaphor and visual depictions of Satan that portray heightened Jewish traits. Throughout Dracula characters refer to the Count as such, referring to his progeny as "semi-demons" (Stoker 62) and describing a "devilish passion" (Stoker 314) in his red eyes. In Nosferatu, the vampire is described as "unholy" (Nosferatu 18:00). Furthermore, in his history of the Count, Van Helsing recounts that Dracula was a scholar at the Scholomance, a folkloric school run by the devil in Romania. Included in this is a myth that the tenth scholar of the Scholomance would have to remain as the Devil's servant, and it follows that Dracula may be this tenth scholar (Mulvey-Roberts 139). These myths place Jews in opposition to Christianity and "pure" Christian society, and this is depicted in Dracula and Nosferatu as the direct invasion of Western cities by a terrifying bloodsucker.
These more archaic myths are accompanied by anti-semitic stereotypes that are disturbingly present even in modern times, such as the idea that Jews are miserly or obsessed with money and want to infiltrate and manipulate Western society through their cunning. Dracula is obsessed with England, studying "new social life, new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science." (Stoker 356) so that he might assimilate to and corrupt it. He is also a collector of currency; as Jonathan Harker is exploring the castles one of the rooms he finds contains "a great heap of gold in one corner--gold of all kinds ... None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old." (Stoker 57). This points to the Count's unnatural age, but it also indicates his preoccupation with money as it is gold that represents his age instead of other ancient artifacts. His obsession is also not only a thing of the past, as when the men are fighting Dracula in one of his homes in England, Harker slices his coat and "a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold [fall] out.: (Stoker 340). These points of Dracula's character add to the full picture of him as Stoker's prejudiced view of the Jew.
To drive home their horrific elements, Dracula and Nosferatu utilize not only cultural anti-semitism in the context of Jewish immigration and myth, but also the language and imagery of disease in societies intimately familiar with illness. Lucy Westerna, Mina and Jonathan Harker, and Hutter's wife Ellen all display issues that are initially addressed by doctors through the lend of medecine but which are in fact a vampiric influence. In Nosferatu, the castle is shown swarming with flies (Nosferatu 24:22), and in Dracula there are constant references to foul air that makes the characters feel ill. Three of the maladies that fit these metaphors particularly well are syphilis, the Black Plague, and tuberculosis. Syphilis is often named as a disease that has invaded from another country (Pugh 171), and is associated with Jews both through racial images of difference and its discovery by Jewish bacteriologist August Von Wasserman (Gilman 195). As a sexually transmitted infection, it is also linked to the sexual overtones in the vampires' bloodsucking. The Black Plague is invoked directly in Nosferatu, and gains credence in both narratives due to the myth that it originated from Jews in the Middle East (Gilman 198). Tuberculosis (TB) is less often posited as the disease for which these vampires are metaphors, but Lucy experiences common symptoms of TB rather than syphilis or the plague and in the early twentieth century TB was similarly "coded as an illness with a particularly Jewish racialized visage." (Yudkoff 11). These diseases work on their own as subjects for which vampirism is a metaphor, but gain deeper significance in the context of the Jewish racialization of the Counts in both Dracula and Nosferatu.
In Martin Willis's "'The Invisible Giant', Dracula, and Disease," he describes the vampire as a symbol of Victorian anxieties about impurity and corruption arising from disease. Given this interpretation, it follows that the illicit nature of syphilis is a perfect subject for the vampiric metaphor. In Dracula, Lucy is depicted as at least romantically promiscuous, lamenting to Mina about her multiple proposals: "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" (Stoker 71). Mina also has concerns for Lucy's reputation when she sleepwalks only in her nightgown. Willis describes Lucy as "sexually provocative and innocently ill at the same time, an oppositional doubling that illuminates the social embodiment of disease in late Victorian Britain as indicative of both unforseeable physical misfortune and individual irresponsibility, often perceived as sexual transgression." (Willis 316). Later, when Mina is in the process of becoming a vampire, she describes herself as unclean, shouting that "Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!" (Stoker 329) when she is burned by a communion wafer. Mina's rejection by God signifies the moral corruption that is inherent in the infection despite her lack of wrongdoing, implicitly associating her affliction with sin and sex. This association also "resonates with anti-Jewish interferences of pathology and contamination" (Mulvey-Roberts 139), and syphilis specifically has been mythologized to be spread by Jews (Mulvey-Roberts 140). With regards to Nosferatu, Pugh posits that the features of Count Orlok and Knock are not only Jewish but also syphilitic, pointing to the deformation of the cranium, mental illness (especially in the case of Knock and his Dracula counterpart Renfield), hair loss, fatigue, and fang like teeth (Pugh 171). Syphilis bridges the gap between the allusions of sexual and religious corruption by the invading vampires through the cultural perception of the disease as Jewish in origin.
In Nosferatu, the most obvious contagion associated with the vampire is the Black Plague. The film claims to tell the story of a "great death" in Wisborg, German, and the plague is referenced both implicitly and explicitly throughout. Even the name, Nosferatu, is derived from the Greek nosphorus meaning "plague bearer" (Pugh 161). Orlok is said to "[live] in sinister caves, tombs, and coffins, which are filled with cursed dirt from the fields of the Black Death" (Nosferatu 18:00), and the missive received from Transylvania states that "a plague epidemic has broken out" (Nosferatu 55:35). Later, the town is quarrantined to stop the spread of the illness. The Count is also compared to and placed in relation to rats, carriers of the plague2. Though rats weree known by the twentieth century to be the vectors of the Black Death, a fiction persisted that it was Jews who had introduced the plague to Europe. Hitler used this imagery in Mein Kampf, presenting Jews as the cause of the Black Plague in Germany (Gilman 198). The vampire in Nosferatu is the plague itself, with his destruction by the sun and the purity of a Christian woman bringing about the healing of the whole town. His corrupting influence come from both his disease and his Jewishness and the narrative shows that both can be overcome by morality and light.
Tuberculosis, the "deadliest infectious disease of all time" (Green), was a part of life for both Stoker3 amd Murnau. This slow-moving but ultimately deadly illness had been identified as the work of the TB bacillus in 1882 (Barberis), but effective treatement would not be available until after the discovery of antibiotics in 1928, and the sources of TB were still highly contested4. Many of the symptoms of disease in both Dracula and Nosferatu can be likened to TB, and TB has its own associations with Jews taht make it a strong contender for the vampiric disease. In "Consumption and teh Count: the pathological origins of vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula.", Katherine Byrne makes the case for tuberculosis as this subject. She notes that vampires are described as both ill and upper class; unlike syphilis, which was seen as a disease of the poor, TB had associations with wealth through the development of sanatoriums and its place in popular literature. Consumption, as it was aslo called, was even seen in the 18th and 19th centuries as a sign that someone was being fed upon by a vampire, as their blood and flesh would seem to waste away. In Dracula, Lucy's illness follows an unpredictable course that features many of the hallmarks of tuberculosis. Showcasing the inconsistency of the illness, Mina describes how Lucy "lost the anaemic look she had" (Stoker 86) and shortly after claims that Lucy "[is] even better than the previous morning" (Stoker 108), but only a brief time later describes that Lucy is "paler than her wont, and there is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like." (Stoker 110). This inconsistency is similar to the progression of TB, which is far from a linear disease and frequently goes into remission for unpredictable amounts of time and then returns (Green). The symptoms Lucy experiences are also reminiscent of TB. Mina recounts that "she eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys the fresh air, but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping as if for air." (Stoker 110), and Lucy herself complains that "my face is ghastly pale, and my throat pains me. It must be something wrong with my lungs, for I don't seem ever to get air enough." (Stoker 125). The impact on Lucy's lungs is indicative of TB over syphilis or the plague. Stoker's descriptions of Lucy frequently match the pale, frail tubercular body but also its elevated sexual appeal that is often present in Gothic literature. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that TB was "thought to produce spells of euphoria, increased appetite, exacerbated sexual desire ... Having TB was imagined to be an aphrodisiac, and to confer extraordinary powers of seduction" (Sontag 13). This is depicted in Dracula through Lucy's many suitors. Lucy is not the only character to be affected by the Count's vampiric disease; Jonathan and Mina also fall victim to him in different ways. The Transylvanian nurse who takes care of Jonathan warns that "the traces of such an illness as his do not lightly die away." (Stoker 115), eliciting the chronic nature of TB, and when Mina reunites with him she calls him "thin and pale and weak-looking." (Stoker 119). When Mina is infected by the Count, she displays similar symptoms of weakness and lack of color. The depictions of the illness brought on by Dracula are characteristic of tuberculosis, and the sickness carried by Count Orlok is comparable. Before his arrival, Ellen is pale and delicate, and her anxiety is described to the narrator as "some sort of unknown illness" (Nosferatu 38:55). This reflects the mysterious nature of TB, which was often not diagnosable until the patient reached the dramatic stage of coughing up blood. In both Dracula and Nosferatu, the infection of vampirism is often described using the language and symptoms of tuberculosis.
Aside from the symptoms themselves, Dracula and Nosferatu use both miasmatic disease imagery and germ theory to describe the infection, mirroring the tensions between the two in turn of the century medecine. Miasmatism is the theory that illness is caused by bad air and that environments predispose people to disease, and prior to germ theory was in competition with contationism-- the idea that disease spreads through contact between individuals and can be controlled through quarrantine (Willis). Miasmatism was the logic behind much of the industry of TB treatment, which sent patients to sanatoriums in places with dry air under the assumption that the disease had been caused by foul air in the city. Though germ theory gained popular acceptance at the end of the 19th century5, both of these modes of understanding were still present in the public consciousness, and this is apparent in both narratives. The female vampires that try to feed on Jonathan appear as "quaint little specks floating in the rays of moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way." (Stoker 55). This gaseous imagery is removed from the vampire's bite which is the obvious vector of infection, so its inclusion invokes the theory of miasmatism. More frequently, the vampires' breath is described as foul and deathly. Upon meeting Dracula, Jonathan describes his breath as "rank", and later the odour of one of Dracula's lairs is said to smell as if "it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it [also] seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt ... Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness." (Stoker 279). In the film, it is said that "The deadly breath of Nosferatu filled the sails of the ship" (Nosferatu 1:02:18). These descriptions relate not only to miasmatism generally but to tuberculosis, as one of its less romantacized symptoms is foul breath. Dracula and Nosferatu also invoke contagion and germ theory in their descriptions of disease. Van Helsing in particular combats the miasmatic logic of Lucy's mother when she removes the vampire-repelling garlic from Lucy's room (Stoker 151), and Seward describes the attitude of Lucy's mother using the metaphor of a tubercle, saying "It is something like the way Dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact." (Stoker 137). These moments use advanced medical knowledge for the time to lend credence to the ability of the novel's doctors. Another description reminiscient of tuberculosis is Van Helsing's description of Dracula: "He is known everywhere that men have been ... [he] cannot die by the mere passing of time." (Stoker 267). Like the vampire, tuberculosis has been present in human society for thousands of years and is remarkably long lasting and resilient. The use of both ancient and modern descriptions of disease to explain a malady that has existed throughout history ties the vampire to the eternal threat of tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is yet another disease associated with the Jewish body, though not as romantically as it is associated iwth the Victorian English poets who made it fashionable. The weakness and effeminacy that was prized in wealthy, gentile consumptives was negatively attributed to Jewish men-- in Tubercular Capital, Sunny Yudkoff writes that "All the positive cultural associations of consumptive beauty-- pallor, delicacy, and refinement-- that had been so glamorized in the Romantic period were resignified on the tubercular Jewish male body as indicative of racial inferiority. The tubercular Jewish male was not genteel but weak, he was not delicate but emasculated, and he was not inflamed by the fever of tuberculosis as much as snuffed out by it." (Yudkoff 13). TB was common among lowe class Jews as it was in many populations, and Jewish consumptives were derided not only by gentile anti-semites but also by Zionists who believed that the turn of the century was a time when Jewish strength needed to be prioritized. These individuals would not tolerate the glorification of TB and even connected Jewishness to TB by comparing Yiddish to tuberculosis, calling the language a blight on the lungs of Israel. Yudkoff writes that "Tuberculosis was metaphorized as the illness of exile, as the language of diaspora, and as a disease that could be cured through Hebrew breathing-- linguistically and physiologically." (Yudkoff 15). Tuberculosis in the Jewish context existed in the literary imagination as an inferiority that could infect and corrupt those who were pure, which in this case means neither Jewish nor consumptive.
It is impossible to understand the vampires of Dracula and Nosferatu without first understanding anti-semitism, and it is impossible to understand the vampire as Jewish outside of the context of disease. The closer one gets, the more the three feed into each other in a never ending cycle. There is certainly more to be explored in the intersection between disease, anti-semitism, and vampires, especially if one were to look to the complex themes in modern vampire media. As two of the model vampire narratives, however, Dracula and Nosferatu give a strong basis for this association. Dracula and Orlok are implicitly Jewish figures that seek to corrupt the pure, Western women and societies that the protagonists hold dear through infection and invasion, and their modes of sickness and infiltration directly mirror anti-semitic cultural norms present in the times the texts were written. The Jewish tubercular bodies of the Counts are vectors not only for consumption, but for immorality.
1 Interestingly, Theodore Herzl's first Zionist congress which was a response to dangerous levels of anti-semitism took place in 1897, the same year Dracula was published.
2 The rats of Nosferatu are parallel by imagery in the Nazi propaganda film of 1940 called The Eternal Jew, which intercuts shots of Jews with shots of swarming rats (Gielson).
3 Stoker was related to multiple physicians. His brother George Stoker lived with him for a time and worked as a physician at the theater Stoker worked at, and his brother Thornley was also a doctor and became the president of the Irish Royal College of Surgeons in the early 1890s. Additionally, Stoker’s uncle was an eminent doctor at the Dublin Fever Hospital (Willis).
4 An 1897 publication from the London Vegetarian Society by Joshua Oldfield suggested that tuberculosis was contracted through the consumption of meat from tubercular animals and that as meat is not a necessary part of the diet, the risks of tuberculosis from eating meat outweigh the benefits.
5 However, similar theories were introduced as early as the 9th century by the Persian philosopher and physician Ibn Sina, who described the source of illness as "tainted foreign organisms that are not visible by naked eye" and suggested garlic as a treatment for TB.
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