”…i always have when the Count in near; but at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazer which a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.” (33)
In the Judaic tradition, the consumption of blood can be two very different things. In Judaism, blood is considered to be the source of life. For this reason, meat is not considered to be kosher unless the animal is slaughtered by cutting the jugular, draining most of the blood, and then salting the meat, so as to drain the rest of the blood. However, these traditions were commonly ignored throughout history in cases of blood libel, where Jews were accused of ritually murdering young Christian children around Passover and using their blood to bake matzah. While reading this passage, I saw a parallel between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and blood libels. Dracula tries to hide his gruesome secret, but goes ballistic at the first sight of blood, his primary source of sustenance. However, upon touching the sign of the crucifix, he is transformed, or converted, back into a normal human being. Because of this, I believe that this scene shows some latent anti-Semitism. Dracula was published in 1897, when anti-Semitism was still fairly prevalent in Europe, and Bram Stoker has already showed some racism by this point in the novel. Therefore, I think that this scene, in addition to revealing Count Dracula’s monstrous nature, shows an undertone of anti-Semitism in the novel.