Dracula: Antisemitism and British Gothic Literature

Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to The Dybbukast. I'm Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk.

We are excited to continue to share with you recordings of our conversations and presentations connected to theatre dybbuk's work.

This episode is a rebroadcast of an online Zoom event that was recorded live on August 10, 2025, as presented by the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program and hosted by Shirel Horovitz. The program was edited for the podcast by Julie Lockhart and Mark McClain Wilson. You can learn more about the Jewish Community Scholar Program at www.occsp.net.

Titled "Dracula: Antisemitism and British Gothic Literature" this episode features a discussion between me and Professor Carol Margaret Davison about Bram Stoker's Dracula, exploring the ways in which the societal concerns present at the time of its publication intersect with the prejudices and beliefs that are embedded in the text.

Professor Davision acted as a consulting scholar on theatre dybbuk's new world premiere production, Dracula (Annotated), which opens in Los Angeles on September 26, 2025 and then tours to Tucson and Cincinnati in the weeks that follow. In the piece, we use a unique blend of scholarly investigation and heightened theatricality to weave together the gothic characters and plot of Dracula with references to the forces at play in Victorian England that are still timely today.

And now, “Dracula: Antisemitism and British Gothic Literature”

Aaron: It's such a pleasure to be with you all and glad to be back with this community and Carol, great to be in conversation with you. So just to frame before we dive in a little bit, theatre dybbuk, which you just heard a description of, so I won't go into too much detail, has a new show coming out, which opens September 26 here in Los Angeles and then tours to Tucson and Cincinnati and perhaps some other cities.

This new work that we are creating is diving into Dracula and looking at the antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and other sentiments that may be embedded in the text, whether consciously or unconsciously and otherwise. And so we are literally combining Dracula with Victorian era history and kind of jamming them together as they are presented to the audience.

And this is the second in a series of annotated works we're doing. The first some of you may have seen in Orange County was The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), which did something similar with Elizabethan history. And when I was deciding on approaching Dracula from this perspective, I started doing research. And I came across one of the first books I came across was a wonderful book called Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature by Dr. Carol Davison. And I read it and it really inspired me and it became one of the foundations for the work we're doing it really, its trajectory helped me understand the way that Dracula was in dialogue with past British Gothic literature as well as with, again, the sentiments of its era and the time before. So I reached out to Carol and I said, can we work together on this? And Carol was kind enough to say absolutely and has served as a consulting scholar on the piece. So we've had some learning sessions together. Carol has lectured the cast and the ensemble so that we all have a base to stand on as we explore this work. So I can tell you more about the piece at the end, but I wanted to give you a little context of our history and how we came to know each other and how instrumental Carol has been to the work we are doing. So that's all to say. Let's dive in. What do think, Carol? Sound good?

Dr. Carol Davison: Sounds great.

Aaron: Great. So because the subject is antisemitism in British Gothic literature, I think for some context, please give us an overview of what we mean when we discuss British Gothic literature, the timeframe, repeated themes, artistic choices, examples of work, however you want to frame this, but so that we understand what British Gothic literature is and how it operates.

Carol: Before I jump into that, I wanna say it's a pleasure to be here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. It's been very exciting to work on this project with Aaron and theatre dybbuk. And I have to say, I'm looking forward to this conversation, although the questions are broad, Aaron. It's a challenge to give you a concise history, crash course, as it were, on the Gothic, but I'm gonna try and do that. But for the individuals interested in further reading, I'm going to do a little bit of self-promotion for my book on the Gothic, which came out in 2009, often used in classrooms. And the early Gothic stages usually listed as 1764 to 1824. It's a 60 year period, but the Gothic breaks through those boundaries as it is want to do, and it continues today. So I'm going to try and provide a synopsis, kindly bear with me because what I'm gonna try and outline here is relevant to Stoker's Dracula.

The Gothic is a subgenre of the novel that made its appearance in Britain in the mid 18th century. It was first put forward in a novella, in a very short book by Horace Walpole, who was the son of the then prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. And the Castle of Otranto had a subtitle. It was “A Gothick Romance”, Gothic spelled G-O-T-H-I-C-K. And Walpole was very bored with what he thought were the insipid romances of his day. And he decided that what he wanted to do to make things more exciting was to usher in elements from the medieval romance. And he had had this nightmare. And it's interesting to me and noteworthy that many Gothic works emanate from nightmares. Keep track of your nightmares and write them down because there's a history of this. Even with Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, these are all gothic novels. Horsewaffle had such a nightmare and he ushered in knights, ghosts, castles, and the supernatural into the novel to excite it, re-energize it as it were.

In the eyes of many critics, The Castle of Otranto is basically a frivolous tale, but it's important. It's hugely significant in fact, because it laid down the recipe and the key ingredients for the Gothic recipe. But before I get into some of those key ingredients, and I can only really go over the main ones, I wanted to try to capture for you the Gothic's essence in terms of its driving ideas in relation to intellectual history.

Because if I were asked to identify what lies at the core of the Gothic, I would say that, in its essence, it plays out a collision between two sets of values and belief systems that are figured as belonging to two different generations. One associated with the past with old world values and one associated with newer, more modern present day values.

There's a battle, a generational, an intergenerational tug of war at the Gothic's core. So at its inception in the mid 18th century, pre-enlightenment values and ideas like the supernatural end up in collision with what were then described as enlightenment values and belief systems, like a belief in reason and rationality. And these collided.

The Enlightenment proclaimed that we are now beyond those past childish beliefs along with the unenlightened institutions and tyrannical governments that supported them. We're moving forward into a more modern era. What the Gothic does is quite fascinating. And this is why I have a particular interest in it, because it steps in. And it undermines those smug enlightenment certainties and the faith in reason over the irrational and the new modernity, the idea that we're in a new modernity and we've stepped beyond the sins of the fathers, that old world. And it reminds us that we as human beings are far more complicated, even contradictory than we care to admit. The Gothic says, we're not just rational, we're often very irrational. We may think we've moved ahead into a new age that has cast the beliefs of our father's generations aside, but those ideas still lurk and are percolating just underneath the surface. The terror often lies in the threat that they may return.

To bring a famous slightly modified line from Shakespeare's Hamlet to bear on what the Gothic does, it reminds the age of enlightenment with its mantra of reason that, quote, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in enlightenment philosophy. So well in advance of Freud and his ideas about the unconscious and the return of the repressed, the Gothic suggests that irrational ideas, desires and values remain at play. And they can, especially when least expected, come back to haunt us.

We can't just compartmentalize and bury the past and make a clean break from it. So in the Gothic, what is played out often in the form of undead creatures, monsters who emblematize and embody that past, the vampires especially, the zombies, the ghosts, is the past that is refusing to stay buried, the past rising up and returning to remind us that we're not as advanced or as civilized, as modern, as we like to think we are.

To make matters even more terrifying, the Gothic shows us that not only can we not successfully bury those monsters, we ourselves have actually created those monsters. Indeed, and this is perhaps the most damning revelation of all, we are the monsters. Horror of horrors, the monster is us. And so the monsters in these texts, often mirror the human. But the monsters don't really exist. We fabricated them. We humans have created them. We, like Victor Frankenstein with his monster, have created them and they reflect our monstrosity. What we project them onto, right, changes over time and in the Gothic, but they don't really exist. They're a fabrication of our imagination. They show where our panics lie, where our anxieties lie, et cetera.

Now, while the Gothic traffics in exploring the titillating but terrifying dark side of individuals, of nations, of cultures, their monstrous underbelly, it often ends up by returning the reader to the same daylight world with its safe assurances. But after those experiences, we can often see ourselves in the world around us through new lenses as we've been exposed to those darks, that dark side.

And what I hasten to add in here is that while these works often seek to consolidate certain worldviews and ideas, the role of the cultural critic, like yours truly, is to identify and unpack their meaning. Right, we can see a lot more in retrospect than we can at the time they're being produced. But the contact with the monster transforms us.

It's supposed to give us a new way of seeing. Again, it sometimes consolidates, it's sometimes contradictory, consolidates and contradicts and questions and contests our worldviews. As it turns out, Walpole's little novella turned out to be extremely adaptable and it spawned various other subtypes of the Gothic fairly early on. And I just want to quickly run through a few, for example.

The female Gothic in the 1790s shows up. Women writers hijack the form in order to explore and express their concerns around issues such as marriage and motherhood, domestic ideology. We see this, for example, in Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is the most famous female Gothic novel in the 1790s. But we also see it in a lot of Victorian literature, like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

The 1780s and 90s are also an era of revolution. I'm talking to some Americans there, right? We're on the heels of the American Revolution, in the throes of the French Revolution, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the Haitian Revolution is on the horizon. And we see another subtype of the Gothic appearing and the two most famous authors that I like to talk about with regard to that are Mary Shelley's parents. Mary Shelley who writes Frankenstein. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the proto-feminist, considered quite a radical – “hyena in petticoats,” as Horace Walpole called her in the day, a monster herself, writes Gothic novels too. Her husband, William Godwin, writes Gothic novels, even though he's a political philosopher, he decides to use that form in order to make his ideas to circulate them, to disseminate them, and to make them more understandable in a fictional way.

So Mary Shelley in 1818, when she's writing Frankenstein, comes by it quite honestly. And she writes, like her parents, these novels of ideas, these Gothic novels of ideas. And that changes the face of the Gothic, really, to the point where we end up with what I like to call the metaphysical Gothic in the, let's say, following, subsequent to Frankenstein. We see a lot of this in American literature, in British literature.

And the metaphysical Gothic opens up what I call the big questions, big ontological and existential questions around what it means to be human, the possible existence of God and the afterlife. It flirts with the potential dangers of and the ethics of us using our new scientific technologies. It wrestles with capitalism and our drive to accumulate and to colonize, et cetera. Racial issues are explored, even in Frankenstein, by the way. We find examples of this subtype in something like Herman Melville's American Gothic novel, the Bible, a great book, Moby Dick. A lot in Hawthorne's books as well. And I'm writing a book right now on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, where it's so multifaceted in the questions that it engages with. It's an astonishing work of literature. Again, a novel, a Gothic novel of ideas.

Quickly, I've just turned quickly to identify some of the key elements in the Gothic. Probably the foremost element is where these novels are set. The haunted, contested castle, which taps a whole slew of issues from inheritance to property issues, family values, past family history, even genetics. When we get to The Picture of Dorian Gray at the end of the 19th century, that question is really large in the wake of new scientific ideas.

But the castle is crucial. It's the physical space that is used to explore the psychic space of the protagonists in the stories. There's always a reflection. It's like a mirror of what's going on and engagement with their anxieties and concerns and desires as we see with Jonathan Harker in the castle there, Aaron, that's what I'm thinking of with him at the vampire trinity.

Also with the castle, it changes over time class wise. We move from a castle to a manor house, to a house by the 20th, 21st century horror film, or into cabins in the woods. But these architectural spaces are so very crucial to these authors explorations of the character psyche. And we really go internal in the Gothic, especially starting in the Victorian period through to the 20th and 21st centuries.

Another key figure in these works, another key element is the Gothic villain. He serves as the monster figure. He starts out nefarious, heartless, evil. He can barely conceal his evil. This changes over time, becomes a much more complex character so that we now talk about the hero-villain in the Gothic.

And as I said, the Gothic lays out intergenerational debates and collisions. And when we get into the 19th century, there's huge anxiety around science and medicine and all of that, starting from Frankenstein onwards. So we get this group of experimental doctors and scientists who for a variety of reasons, some even psychological or especially psychological, challenge the powers of God transgress against the powers of women.

And they fit that bill as hero villains. So thinking right here of the best example, of course, is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And of course, with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson is also taking up issues around secret engagements like homosexuality, criminal behavior, and those two things were actually conflated at the time.

So the 19th century sees its what I call monster pieces, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, these hybrid human monster blends, and they tap into different panics of the era, and I'll just end off there by saying in Stoker's Dracula, we even see this concern, although they're never represented, these sequences where Dracula attacks men, for example, they're never actually represented. They tap into what's going on with Oscar Wilde at the time, who by the way, was a friend of Stoker's for some time. They both hailed from Ireland and Stoker's wife actually had a brief relationship with Oscar Wilde.

But Dracula is shown to be an equal opportunity bloodsucker. He's a sexually perverse monster. And that's just one of the many anxieties that are raised in that novel.

Aaron: Thanks. So that is a great foundation for us to kind of stand on as we think about the case you're making around antisemitism and British Gothic literature to help us understand the ways in which the concerns, the anxieties of the time, the changing levels of society and engagement opportunities are showing up in these novels. And so I think about that. And so I think the next step would be, tell us a little bit about what's contained in your work, Antisemitism in British Gothic Literature. Help us understand the case you're making about antisemitic beliefs and prejudices and how they are present in that work especially given all you've already shared about what those works are a vessel for. So please, please take us through that.

Carol: I might not have given a clear sense of how the Gothic, especially in the early era into the Victorian period, was so engaged with theological questions, but when I first came to this form and started to ask questions about it, anti-Catholicism was front and center. And there had also been a book about Protestantism and Calvinism, its various sects and their role in the Gothic.

But let me just quickly say about anti-Catholicism: these Anglican and Protestant writers of the early Gothic were intent on differentiating themselves from their previous history, right? The history of their fathers. Let's go back to that opening commentary that I gave about what the preoccupations are here. And they wanted to distinguish present day Britain from their Catholic past. A Catholic past that they represent in these novels as tyrannical, brutal, outdated, antiquarian, and they wanted to move beyond that. In American and Scottish Gothic, you see a preoccupation with Calvinism and the dangers of certain sects of Calvinism.

When I first started my PhD at McGill and decided on a dissertation, there had been mention made of Dracula and his engagement with Judaism, the Jewish question is what I call it now. And we can certainly see where the blood libel is obviously at play, which dates back to the medieval era, era where Jews were said to kill Christian children, usually boys, to either reenact the crucifixion or to use that blood in the Passover seders and other rituals.

Scholars claim that Dracula exploited that idea. And one sees that certainly in the opening sequence in Transylvania in the novel, where the count goes out at night and returns to the trinity of vampire women and throws in that baby in a bag, a live baby, for them to feast on. It's a very disturbing sequence.

And certainly the blood libel is again referenced when Lucy Westenra after being transformed into a vampire later in the novel becomes what the children call a bloofer lady, a very treacherous creature in a cemetery who in order to survive lures and attacks children at night and consumes their blood.

After reading these comments, and there were few, but they were interesting to me, I was convinced there must be a forefather. There must be some other Jewish type of figure and engage it with the Jewish question in the Gothic tradition. So essentially, my dissertation set out to undertake what I would call a genealogical deep dive into the cultural history of the Gothic to trace the lineage of Stoker's monster.

So I went back into the tradition and one of the first figures I came upon was Shylock, of course, wanting his pound of flesh, blood libel issues there as well. But I also discovered an engagement, proliferation of the figure of the legendary wandering Jew. A figure who was especially popular in German literature, said to have been cursed to walk the earth until the second coming for mocking Christ on his way to Calvary. And what I noticed about the descriptions of this figure in 18th and 19th century British literature, he was on the stage, he was in novels, he was showing up in weird places, was that he was associated with alchemical science, the way the Jews had been represented and associated with that history of alchemy. And he's more like a magic magician. There was some sort of black magic magician, I want to say, engaged in satanic rituals.

He's not the Wandering Jew you expect to find. And he shows up in the Gothic in William Godwin's novel, Saint Leon, where he's a threat to the national economy. He's stigmatized, there's something very concerning around his, whenever he shows up. And then in Matthew Lewis's The Monk, he is a tremendously supernatural figure and engages in satanic-like rituals.

So I found some father figures, as it were, in the tradition. And I found a wonderful book by reform Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg on the devil and the Jews in the medieval period, that did an incredible job at delineating by way of text and visual iconography, the longstanding association between the Jew and the devil. So this gets into this new monster, this new configuration of the Wandering Jew.

What I noticed in these materials was that over time, the Wandering Jew becomes increasingly dreaded and diabolical and even vampiric. And I, the case that I make in the dissertation and in the later published dissertation, of course, is that Dracula represents the culmination of that tradition. He is initially in the Wandering Jew legend, especially, meant to be an example for the edification of sinners, but he becomes this, as I said, anti-Christ style magician who poses a threat to the British nation and its values. So the question was, what's he doing there? What does he mean? What does he signify? What's his role?

And there was another literary critic published a book in 1995, Michael Ragussis, whose work sort of has aspects of mine, like it aligns with some of my insights and some of my engagements, although he doesn't really deal at all with the Gothic. He publishes that book in 1995 and he says, the English turned to Jewish questions to answer English questions. And that's precisely what I would say happens.

In terms of the question, what does it mean to be a Christian Britain? Well, the figure of this demonic Wandering Jew is set up to represent what Christian Britain should not be, right? This is part of the creation of the monster projecting onto a monster what Britain's national values are. And these authors become what I would say are a type of spin-doctor propagandists who graphically describe the monstrous vampiric Wandering Jew in order to identify and clarify what the Christian Britain is not.

And it's funny when you get into the Victorian period because you see big figures who take on these resonances and these Gothic, this Gothic paraphernalia and clothing as it were, like Anthony Trollope's Augustus Melmoth in The Way We Live Now, published in 1875. A man who was a Jewish financier becomes an MP and is later revealed to be a total and utter charlatan.

You see gothic aspects in his portrait. And what the threat that's being raised here, as far as I can understand it, and this is my argument, is that the Wandering Jew threatens to convert Britain, Christian Britain. He threatens to Judaize Christian Britain for all intents and purposes. And conversion extends here well beyond theological conversion.

It becomes a trope for a variety of values and behaviors from economic to the sexual, and economic anxiety seem really to underpin a lot of this. And I think that we see that from Shylock onwards, but it's there in Dracula as well. If I go there, I'll get into maybe a confusing argument, but the economic concerns are I think writ large in terms of this figure. And of course the figure of Shylock is at play, but you can see it as well. 

You can see the formation of this monstrous Wandering Jew, even in such figures as Dickens’ Fagan in Oliver Twist, a pederast fence, a criminal through and through, who in keeping with the blood libel threatens children sexually and otherwise. In fact, in his conversion of those children into criminals, it may result in their deaths because there were 222 capital crimes listed in the bloody code of Dickens day that made pickpocketing punishable by hanging. So Fagan may be seen to be enacting the blood libel, and placing the lives of those Christian children at risk. But he's also described by Dickens as possessing fangs.

The iconography around Dracula and living in filth and his extreme mobility through the slum areas of London, he's almost supernatural the way he's described as gliding. A lot of that also informs Stoker's portrait.

So, Stoker’s Dracula is an amalgam of a variety of antisemitic stereotypes that develop over time, but we can discern certain preoccupations there. And as I say, economic, sexual, you know, I mentioned Fagin, he's a pederast, he prays on children in a new and very concerning way, disgusting way, and Dracula is, just to end off here a little bit about Dracula, in terms of how Freudian scholars have read him, he's the polymorphous perverse. He's an equal opportunity bloodsucker. Men, women, whatever's going, he's on it. But I would also bring it back in a few minutes to his focus is on women. And I can open up that can of worms shortly.

Aaron: Yes, thank you, Carol. So a couple of things I want to kind of follow up on that you brought up. One is I really appreciate how you captured the essence of all the considerations at play, right? There are, as you said, underpinning or economic concerns and then often the blaming of Jewish power, Jewish figures for economic challenges and difficulties or for the economic system overall. You just brought up some topics around around women. Also, because for those who are listening, one of the things the play deals with is the fact that the late Victorian era, right when Dracula was published in 1897, is a time of huge change in society. We have giant technological advances that are occurring. We have the rise of the new woman, which I know you may talk about. We have the height where, you know, we're in the midst of Eastern European Jewish migration to England, the US, Canada, right? The In huge numbers. So, so we are seeing all of these concerns kind of collide in, in Dracula. And I think you helped us understand how the imagery really speaks to that in some clear ways. So I'd love to hear from you a little bit more about those intersections. You you just talked about women. And you just talked about the changes in society and, you know, it reflecting as much on England as it does on Jews, if not more, as you said. And so I think that it would help us to understand how these antisemitic notions and tropes kind of cross with those other concerns, especially around the changes around women, because I think that is so important in the novel and how Dracula is a figure that you know, deals with that. So please, please, I'd love to hear a little more about that.

Carol: Well, maybe as a preposing way in, I don't want to sit here and delineate all of the antisemitic aspects of Dracula, but there are a good number of them and I can't even list them all, but they're in my book for sure. But what Stoker does is to bring those antisemitic ideas into play in regard to contemporary concerns of his day.

So in terms of the blood libel, for example, there are still blood libels in Britain at this time. You have also a tremendous number of Jews moving into Britain. I think there's, I'm gonna try to get my quote on the numbers here. Jules Zanger saying the number of foreign Jews in England increased by approximately 600% between 1881 and 1900.

Of course, they were fleeing pogroms, expulsions and anti-Jewish legislation in Russia and Eastern Europe. And yet they're moving to Britain where there are still claims of blood libel. In fact, it's interesting that there was a great deal of antisemitic propaganda around Jewish kosher butchery at this time, which positioned and represented the Jews as a blood drinking people.

It's very disturbing material that also linked in to the Jack the Ripper murders, where the claim was in terms of the Jacob the Ripper theory, that Jews were behind the Jack the Ripper murders. And particularly there was a Polish butcher that they tried to frame for these crimes. And so the blood libel's continuing, these horrible statements of claims are being made. And yet there are other things that are being, that are on the radar in late Victorian England that connect the Jews, that are connected to the Jews.

Since the 15th century, the Jews were linked to the spread of syphilis. This is an era, a century in advance of the HIV epidemic, of syphilophobia. Syphilis was rampant. It was a bloodborne disease. It was claimed by some to be largely a Jewish illness. Sandra Gilman is very good on this.

It's associated with prostitutes. And Dracula's bite, for example, is a form of displaced sexuality and his female victims do experience a type of infection. And they are certainly presented as prostitute types of women. I can come back to that in a moment. Issues around deviant sexuality, homosexuality. Sander Gilman is again very good on laying out that history around the Jews as homosexuals. There's different scholars, at the time doctors, looking for these ideas, concerns around degeneration and criminality by different social scientists at the time, some of whom were themselves Jewish, promoting this notion that the people were degenerating in the cities around the empire, but the Jews were especially degenerating. They were degenerates. They're natural born criminals.

I mean, it's an era of grotesque and rampant antisemitism. And it continues through into the 20th century. I was just looking over my dissertation again and came upon theories by Sir Arnold White. There are a lot of books written about the Jews at this time. And basically all of the social concerns and what were considered to be disorders of the day were being linked to them. It's shocking. And what's perhaps even more shocking and yet fascinating is how Stoker in his novel tries to pull those ideas together.

And maybe I'll just pause here and sort of come back to what I consider to be the two main threats at play in the novel and how Stoker brings them together. The first is that external threat of alien invasion that's happening in Britain with these great numbers of Jews coming into the country, fleeing persecution. There's a refugee crisis in essence involving legal Jewish immigrants. Yet in Stoker's novel, they are portrayed, as he pumps up the volume on the terror, as an invasion into the country, one that threatens national security.

Hand in glove with that is an internal threat that he sees in the proto-feminist group known as New Women. And New Women had varying philosophies, but they were questioning traditional female roles within the family and marriage, the requirement of becoming a mother. They wanted more of a choice in saying, who their husband should be, possibly engaging in sex before marriage, for having more options for work outside the home. And of course, this is just in advance of the suffragette movement where women were demanding the vote and willing to engage in militant action in order to secure that vote.

But as far as Stoker is concerned, these women are immoral, they're prostitute-like, they're to be avoided, and they're a national threat, right? They're threatening family values. They're threatening the British race, the future of the British race. And this is an era where there's all this discussion around racial degeneration, right? We're looking at the 19th century with these notions of race science. The white supremacist movement has taken over, especially in the British empire.

Jews are not seen as white. There's so many different theories being put forward to distinguish Caucasians, British people from Jews, et cetera, et cetera.

And so what Stoker does with this external threat of invasion and this internal threat of women agitating for a new society, really, is he brings the two of them together, brings the two of them together and suggests that, well, there could even be a further danger if there is intermarriage between those Jewish others entering the country and white women, white British women. We're looking at the potential eradication of the race. And so that Anglo-Jewish intermarriage is another prospect that threatens British racial identity.

That's a type of conversion that can happen. And we gotta remember what the vampire's threat is in Dracula. He threatens, by way of his bite, to de-racinate his victims. He can dissolve identities. He threatens to obliterate British identity and re-racinate those women as his vampire kin. He's really looking, in my view, to create in a new harem in Britain. He talks about how his old world is full, the blood is old. So there's a Darwinian at the core of Stoker's Dracula. If I move there and I get these women, I can create my own new race, as it were, right? New race.

And he does so undercover. He comes in, right? We don't know he's a vampire. The Britons don't know he's a vampire. He's buying real estate in England. He's a crypto Jew in essence because Stoker conflates vampirism and Judaism in the story. And the crypto Jew is particularly concerning. He seems to have assimilated into Britain. He seems like one of us, as it were, right? But he's represented in the novel as a type of terrorist sleeper cell who has the nefarious objective, hidden objective of taking over Britain. And of course the manner in which he threatens to do that is by attacking these New Women that Stoker describes in his figures as type of sexual deviants because they want male prerogatives. Those new women are a liability and their combination, the combination between Count Dracula and these women will pose the end of civilization as we know it. That's the threat.

But there's other things there in that I think you and I have discussed before around what's really hidden at the core of this book are geopolitical concerns, right? That the British Empire was on the wane at this time.

Lenin talks about 1897, the year Dracula's published as the apogee of imperialism, and the rest is going to be history. There's cracks in the armor of the British empire. There's great debates in parliament about how much it's going to cost to defend, et cetera, et cetera. And so a worry is because they see America is on the rise. Germany is on the rise. And there's novels that show this anxiety is percolating. They're going to overtake us. What are we gonna do in the future? We can't afford this empire anymore. And what's happening in the novel is that the empire strikes back in the figure, in the form of Dracula, right? What Dracula does to Britain is what Britain's done around the world. So the monster, as I have said, mirrors Britain's imperialist activity.

But it's interesting to me, what's most interesting is that in the wake of this and in the midst of these geopolitical concerns about America and Germany, what Stoker opts to do is to focus his attention on this, for all intents and purposes, Jewish vampire, because there were great concerns voiced and written on paper. Sir Arnold White, who I just referenced in his book, The Modern Jew in 1899, is concerned that the Jews are taking over secretly.

And by the way, Sir Arnold White was a patron of the Lyceum Theater, which is where Stoker's boss, Henry Irving, the most famous Shakespearean actor of his day, worked. Stoker worked for him, and there's no doubt in my mind that he knew Sir Arnold White, who in advance of publishing that book in 1899, had published a lot of articles, antisemitic articles, about the Jewish question across the 1890s. And White declared that quote, the engine of international finance is under Jewish control.

He was also a strong supporter of the Aliens Act of 1905 that effectively prevented further immigration of Jews from Russia into Britain. And that was the vast majority before that time. And it also put in jeopardy and caused tremendous fear among those recently immigrated Jews who were just making, trying to get their feet, trying to get settled in Britain. That 1905 British Aliens Act is a disturbing and and really hateful antisemitic act that was born of these, this immigration.

So there's concern around Dracula bringing his money he's dabbling in real estate, you know, one thing about Dracula that I think scholars often fail to mention, and it might really lie at the heart of why he's so terrifying, is he's a chameleon. He's adaptable. He's not just sitting on his treasure of gold and treasures and coins, and then he's brought those to England too. And we see that about him. That's old money. That's old capital. And that's considered bad capital in the novel because it's not circulating in the economy.

He's adapting for the future, dabbling in real estate, et cetera. That's where I think he is most threatening and dreaded. So I think that Stoker opts to demonize the Jews as opposed to the Germans and the Americans in the novel we see with the Crusaders. The brotherhood is forged between the Americans and Van Helsing, the Dutch Van Helsing, to counter that terror of Dracula.

And the last thing I'd say about Dracula that's also quite interesting is how in Stoker's novel, the invasion, the person invading is a count. He's an aristocrat. He's not these disenfranchised, impoverished refugees coming in. Right? It's interesting that Sir Arnold White will distinguish between the established money classes of Jews in Britain, the Anglo-Jews, they're not so worrisome to him, but the immigrants recently arrived are a worry. I think in Stoker's novel, what we see presented is that the threat is twofold. It's emerging from both, again, inside and outside the country, from those Jews long resident in England and the new immigrants. They forge, Stoker forges a lethal combination in the figure of Count Dracula.

Aaron: So Carol, I'm going to hop in for one second just because we're going to start to transition to questions. So this is, so first, thank you, because I think something you've presented us with is, first of all, how packed this book is with all the considerations and sort of the ways in which these show up and as you just captured with the figure of Dracula himself or itself, depending on how you want to frame that figure, kind of capturing both sides of an anxiety, a prejudice, a concern, however, you want to frame it. And I even want to say you know we in the play deal with the fact that the way we often think of the book of you know these heroic figures going and defeating the threat, the way we frame it is the English and northern Europeans and the American ally go and chase down the foreign threat to his own land and strike him down on his own land on a kind of, as you said, crusade, which is a reframing, I think, of how we often think of the heroic actions in the novel.

So I just want to acknowledge, thank you. I know we are in the last eight or nine minutes, so I want to transition to some questions. A few came to me about Stoker, and was he actually antisemitic himself. What do we know about that? A few other things, but I'm going to turn it over to our host to lead this discussion. I am sorry if we don't get to all the questions that came up because a number did, and we'll go from there.

Carol, thank you so much. Shirel, I'm going to turn it over to you.

Shirel Horovitz: Thank you, Carol, so much. Thank you, Aaron. Maybe we will start, because I see we got some double questions, and I do want to start with the ones you mentioned. So maybe you can just phrase them, and we'll pass them on to Carol. And then we also have some questions relating to your work together and to the play itself. So we'll start with the ones that you mentioned.

Aaron: Great. So Carol, just there is a question about was Stoker known to be personally antisemitic and did he interact with Jews? know, and anything you want to offer on that of what you know from the research.

Carol: I haven't looked at Stoker's biographies in years. I don't recall anything that stood out in that regard. So I really can't comment. What I can say is, you know, in terms of other representations of Jews and the theater that might be relevant here, but it's not with Stoker, is Oscar Wilde – quite an antisemitic moment in Dorian Gray, where the Jewish theater manager is described very negatively to put it mildly. But I don't know about Stoker's own personal engagements there at all. I can, I mean, Lyceum Theater, they would have Jewish patrons, but I don't know about his interactions with them at all.

Aaron: Great, thank you. Shirel, I'm going turn it over to you. Let's see what else came up.

Shirel: We have way more many questions. One is actually about the name Dracula, where that comes from and the choice of the name, if you can say something about that.

Carol: Well, the origin is again, Transylvania. Stoker had never been to Transylvania. He'd looked at books. It's an Eastern European word. I think Serbian, there's different connections with etymological, the etymological connection to dragons and the devil. And Vlad Dracul, who Stoker is partly basing this figure on, that was his name. But I can't remember much more about the details of the exact etymology.

But it's certainly Romanian.

Aaron: And one thing I will share in our research is that Stoker, in his notes on the novel, does reference Vlad Dracul, this kind of local governor, that often people think Dracula is based on. I think the evidence seems to suggest that he pulled the name and some details, but the actual construction of the figure of Dracula is not a one-for-one. It's that he used the name and some details, but really it was a jumping off point or a framing it was not the base for the character. That seems to be the case based on the limited evidence we have.

Carol: Yeah, the Romanians don't like when you make that association; they get very incensed. I went to a conference in Romania in 1995 and that was a big, that was the center centrifugal force of the major argument that was happening. But Vlad Țepeș was a tyrant, a bloodthirsty tyrant. He skewered people literally on these poles as a propagandistic method to to retain his power. He was a hellish tyrant. So part of a, again, complex portrait of Dracula, this is informing part of that, but that's only like a little piece of it, really.

Shirel: Thank you. Okay, this next question is kind of to both of you. I'll start with you, Aaron, if you can say a few words about the choice of doing this play now and what of the themes that Dr. Carol kind of covered did you choose to pull in to the play?

Aaron: Great. So the why now, I'll start there really quickly, which is that, you know, after we did Merchant of Venice (Annotated), where you have a very clear Jewish figure and we wanted to kind of ask questions about how that figure is being treated and how the play is dealing with it. I wanted to kind of flip that and say what if we take something that people don't often think of as Jewish and kind of look at how there is messaging and coding that might be present. And how artistic works and other works of any era are a vessel, whether consciously or otherwise, for the belief systems, again, prejudices, etc., for, of the time. And I thought Dracula is such a perfect vessel to do that, and especially in this era of asking questions of both covert and overt antisemitism, unexamined beliefs that may be present that people are not alive and awake to. And I thought, Dracula is a perfect opportunity to look at that. So much of what Carol actually said is covered in the work. I mean, we really look at the time period. We really look at the ways in which all of these concerns, the New Woman, colonization, the coming waning of the imperial era, how these all collide and create a perfect opportunity for blaming the other, and that other being these new Jewish immigrants, and also the moneyed Jewish people who had been in England for a longer time. And so so much is present there in the work of what you heard today in a very direct manner so that you can really hear it and process it. So I would say quite a bit.

Shirel: Thank you. And Carol, this is for you: coming in and consulting for this play and learning together with them. Like, how do you see your role? Also, did something new come to light based on working with Aaron on this play? How kind of can you say a bit of your experience with this?

Carol: Well, I had previously worked with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for a ballet production of Dracula in the 1990s that was later filmed by Guy Maddin. And so that was a different experience because they were looking more for visual iconography they could bring onto the stage, like the connection between Jack the Ripper and the vampire that Stoker himself put forward, you know, was used there. And that was exciting to see when it was finally staged.

In this case, it was much more intellectual, and it took me back to this work. I haven't, this dissertation is like, I realized the other day, is like 35 years old. And I hadn't really done this deep dive through the antisemitic lens for some time. So a lot of what I was saying today about what I'm realizing about Dracula, those revelations came as I was working with Aaron. Aaron put me to my paces, I have to say, in an exciting way because he asked these really provocative questions and I could see what a brilliant idea I really felt it was to resurrect this baby now in relation to what's happening, especially in the United States and around the world and this, we've become more Gothic, we've become more nightmarish than ever before. And there are so many points of contact.

It's been eye-opening again for me to return to this and look through those lenses at the news as I'm watching the news each night, right? There are so many points of contact. So it's been inspiring for me. It's been very exciting. It's been very disturbing, very disturbing overall in terms of what we see going on around the world. The monsters are us. We’ve projected so many horrific things. We're the scariest species on the planet. It's, I have a daughter who's 17 and I have my concerns about the future, I have to say.

Shirel: Thank you. Aaron, I want to turn this to you for kind of maybe a closing question before we close the session. I apologize to all the people with the many questions we didn't get to ask, but hopefully we got to as many. Aaron, last question is from you.

Aaron: Yeah, first, I just want to say one other piece of framing, I mean, Carol, what you just said and what you said earlier in your talk about the monster being us. I mean, the piece deals with this directly. There's a very famous sequence in Dracula where Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving glass and only sees himself and not the monster behind him, does not see Dracula. And it's, of course, become famous largely because we identify it with, oh, the “Dracula cast no reflection in the mirror,” but in the play, we very directly align that with the colonial and imperialist endeavors of Britain to show how what's being seen is our own actions. And we're kind of blaming the monster. We're saying, where's the monster? But there we are right in front. So the play is also theatrically playing with the very themes that Carol is touching on.

So I guess, Carol, I would just, I'm going to ask a kind of wrap up question, which is that, is that as you think about this work, and as you think about as you just eloquently talked about our world, I mean, I guess I'd leave you with, what do you want to leave us with in terms of how we can either process the art we've been presented, such as all this Gothic work, or create work. I mean, how does processing this work, I mean, you are focused on studies of the Gothic. How does that inform how we look at our world today? How does it inform how we receive art, how we receive literature?

I just, it's an open question of just reflecting on the Gothic and what it has to teach us about our own world today. You've talked about some of this, but I'd love to just hear any last reflections.

Carol: Well, I think we have to be as critically minded as possible and not just swallow information that's given to us. I mean, you know, we see AI on, We can't even discern now what's real from what's fictional. And yet I think the the gothic monsters, the fictional and the real are blended, and they have, they have so much to teach us but we do have to ask the right questions, always keep those critical lenses on, be skeptical, probe further, and just be aware of the tradition. Like, you know, I know you were perhaps going to ask me a question about where did I find these semiotics, this image, this iconography of the vampiric Wandering Jew in later things. It's everywhere in propaganda, political propaganda.

And that wasn't just in Germany with the Nazis. It was in America. And we see it popping up everywhere. I saw a very controversial and disturbing image of Prime Minister Netanyahu as a Nosferatu vampire in a Quebec magazine, a newspaper rather, in La Presse. And while we can be critical of that regime, it's certainly never okay to resurrect antisemitic stereotypes at any time. And so it's always mind boggling to me how this very tired imagery, this monster imagery never dies. It just gets reconfigured and resurrected. And it's a very confusing time for some people in regard to processing what's real from what's fiction, and these stereotypes are deadly. They are literally deadly. And how we foist them onto other groups of people results in mass murder. The propaganda that we see of using this political, this antisemitic iconography resulted in the murders of Jews, the genocide. They prop up these horrifying realities. We like to think sometimes culture's over here and real world's over here. Not so. They go hand in glove. And we cannot afford to forget that.

Aaron: Thank you. I think that's a powerful and important place to wrap up. That wherever we sit, politically or otherwise, we see these images show up and they have real world implications and they have real world impact and they are repeating and repeating, as you just mentioned, in Nazi Germany and beyond. And so I really thank you for that wrap up. I think it's important to hear.

Carol, before I turn it over, just want to say personally, as people are watching, thank you for all your good work and helping us understand this work so that we could create something meaningful. And this time meant a lot. Thank you. Thank you.

Carol: Thank so much. Thank you.

Shirel: Before I thank the two of you, I'll just have a small plug-in because those of you who want to see the performance and are able to, the upcoming performances are going to be in LA starting September. We will send the links for you to purchase tickets and after LA it's going to go to Tuscon, Arizona and to Cincinnati, Ohio. And while it's in LA, CSP is gonna probably find a way to bring a group of our people to see the show. So make sure that, you know, if you can go see the show and we'll send all the information, obviously also all the links to the books and much more. Thank you so much, both of you. I'm just echoing some, I don't know if you've got to see some of the thank yous in the chat from spectacular to amazing to informative and so much more. So thank you both of you very, very much.