Dracula encodes anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim fears of racial contamination

Evidence

Dracula is a product of racial hybridity, a Jew and an Ottoman Turk with a measure of Hun and vampire thrown in. Dracula’s supernatural powers include the ability to shape-shift into animals, turn into mist, control his victims through hypnosis, cast no shadow, and slide along the floor. Dracula symbolizes the degeneration of racial purity, reflecting the popularity of degeneration theory at the time Stoker was writing. “Vampires are represented as sexually predatory immigrants who infect and enslave the weak and the unwary. Vampires contaminate flesh and blood; they disrupt national and racial certainty.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 523

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project on manufactured Western monsters and to late-Victorian degeneration theory as a racial-science frame.
• ADDENDUM: The racial-hybridity contamination frame parallels how the comfort article’s moral-panic chapter uses mutable villains who embody multiple threats.