Dracula channeled British anxiety over Jewish immigration from eastern Europe.

Evidence

Like the stories of Jews killing Christian children to consume their blood, Dracula also tells the story of a Jewish monster who consumes the blood of Christians. Dracula’s Jewish nature is also implicated through the themes of disease, infection, and disintegration. According to Andrew Smith, the text “articulates a contemporary anti-Semitic view in the association between the Count, eastern Europe and disease, which tapped into a popular anxiety of an ‘alien invasion’ of Jews.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels exactly the reader’s guiding question: the image preceding real contact, with the alien-invasion anxiety projected onto a monster figure.
• SEED: An essay comparing how British vampire fiction and medieval crusade epics each projected an alien-invasion fear onto a racialized monster.