‘A fine fellow … although rather Semitic’: Jews and antisemitism in Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

ABSTRACT This article examines the dynamics of fin-de-siècle European antisemitism through the lens of two gothic novels, Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The complexities of Verne’s depictions of Jews are placed in the wider context of persecution, integration and exclusion, and economic characterisations of ‘the Jew’ in Western and Eastern Europe. This is compared with the visceral fear of the ‘other’ as expressed in Dracula. The differences between implicit and explicit prejudice in the two texts are considered as components of the wider antisemitic discourse present in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.


Introduction
Late nineteenth-century European culture defined itself through a number of societal oppositions, and through the creation of a series of 'othered' communities, positioned outside the mainstream national, ethnic, or religious entity. The oldest and most potent of these oppositions was that between Jewry and the Christian populations amongst whom Jews formed a minority. 1 This tension permeated the printed material of the time, including the bourgeoning field of horror fiction. 2 A significant part of the scholarly discussion on the relationship between the literary gothic and the 'outsider' has thus focused on the depiction of Jews, and much of this body of work looks at the confluence between antisemitic expression and the figure of the vampire. 3 The reasons for this connection are immediately evident. Long before Bram Stoker, vampires were to located in the genre primarily in those parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe that also had large Jewish minorities living there. 4 The vampire, like the figure of 'the Jew', was an affront to the Christian Church, outside the closed circle of the faithful. Most viscerally and disturbingly, through the on-going propagation of the blood libel, Jews were already accused of gaining sustenance from Christian blood; into the twentieth century such ideas would act as the catalyst for pogroms in the Russian Empire. 5 Stoker's Dracula (1897) added another component to all of this. Count Dracula is an immigrant, leaving his homeland to batten on to a western society which he hopes to first exploit, and then ultimately to take over. As Judith Halberstam noted in the first extended examination of the confluences of vampire a rather neglected novel today. In Nick Groom's recent examination of the role of the vampire in popular culture, which draws together many obscure texts existing on the boundaries of the genre, Verne's work is not mentioned. Even in general discussion on the international gothic, any extended analysis of the book is rare. It has been viewed (tenuously) as a precursor to Dracula, although the book as rumination on the nature of celebrity, on the relentless progress of western technology, on tensions between conceptions of the 'occidental' and 'oriental', or as a reflection of Verne's complicated private life, have also been considered. 12 However, other than a Transylvanian locale, an aristocratic villain, and the backdrop of peasant superstition, there is little on the surface to link the two novels. The Castle of the Carpathians is not a straightforward vampire story, although the fear of the undead and more generally the Devil's works in all of their manifestations drive the plot forward. This obscurity means some elucidation of the structure of the tale, and the broader similarities and differences with Bram Stoker's work, is merited, before the different constructions of 'Jewishness' in the two texts are considered.
The Castle of the Carpathians is set contemporaneously in Transylvania, at this point an outlying province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It concerns a series of seemingly ghostly occurrences in the titular fortress, as well as a long digression taking place in Italy. The first half of the novel concludes with the seeming confirmation that demonic forces are at work, the second part concerns the manner in which the final, practical, explanation of the events described is arrived at. The villains of The Castle of the Carpathians are not, as it transpires, vampires, but a local aristocrat, the Baron Rodolphe de Gortz, who has secluded himself in his ancestral home, along with an eccentric scientific practitioner in his service, Orfanik, who uses various electrical devices to achieve the illusion of the seeming presence of nosferatu and other monsters, with the purpose of deterring close investigation from the neighbouring village of Werst. 13 Still, there are some points of comparison to be drawn with the upfront supernatural terror of Dracula. Firstly, there is the castle as a physical space itself. In both novels, the hero is imprisoned there, and the exact nature of the inhabitants within is initially unclear -in Dracula Jonathan Harker gradually discovers firstly that the Count, despite an elaborate attempt at deception, keeps no servants, and then that instead three bloodthirsty vampire women lurk within. In The Castle of the Carpathians, the protagonist Franz de Télek is unsure who occupies the castle; like Harker he is confined there against his will, and (drugged) food and drink are brought to him whilst he is unconscious. 14 Both texts are concerned with the interplay between sex and death, a relationship so apparent in Dracula that it needs no further elaboration, but that also operates in a more muted manner in The Castle of the Carpathians. The fulcrum of the second half of the latter novel is the obsession that Franz de Télek and Rodolphe de Gortz share for an Italian opera singer, La Stilla. This continues after her apparent death, from internal bleeding following the rupture of an artery in her throat at the end of her last performance. Both men desire to possess the woman, the one aesthetically, the other corporally, even once she is deceased. De Gortz and Count Dracula share some characteristics, although Dracula is a far more formidable antagonist (and wishes to escape the confines of a Transylvania that de Gortz takes refuge in). 15 There is another, more subtle point of comparison between The Castle of the Carpathians and Dracula, which has some bearing on the current examination of attitudes towards the Jewish 'other'. This is the relationship between rational and irrational belief.
At various points in the two narratives, the protagonists (and the readers) are asked to accept the occurrence of events which they know, rationally, to be impossible. In both stories, this is tied in with the folk myths and prejudices expressed by the Transylvanian peasantry. Yet the dynamic in the texts differs. In Dracula, Jonathan Harker begins the novel with a grounded faith in the rule of law and the primacy of rational scientifically based belief, with a patina of Anglican religion. This is undermined when he actually has contact with the local inhabitants of the land to which he travels, and is shattered by his experiences in Castle Dracula. Ultimately, the heroes and heroine of Dracula have to abandon a belief in rationality, and to an extent modernity, and place their trust in prescientific and implicitly Catholic remedies. 16 In Dracula the irrational and the supernatural are proved to be correct and real. The arc of rationality in The Castle of the Carpathians is different. Here Verne begins with a general discussion of South-Eastern European superstition, confirmed by the local peasantry. This is challenged by a younger member of the community, Nic Deck, who travels to the castle to disprove the belief that the Devil has taken up residence in the donjon of the fortress. Nic Deck is then attacked, and apparently sees vampires emanating from the castle. At the halfway point of the novel, it appears that the supernatural does indeed exist. However, the story ends with a rational world-view confirmed, with all explanations for what has been seen and heard provided by pioneering science. In Dracula the Transylvanian peasantry are ultimately proved right -in The Castle of the Carpathians the opposite is the case, superstition is revealed to be just that, primitive beliefs from an earlier age.
Similarly, anti-Jewish prejudice, as it evolved in the late nineteenth century, involved a relationship between an older folk-antipathy, the essentially medieval hatred and violence of the village and the pogrom, and a newer biological racism, described from the late 1870s onwards as antisemitism, grounded in the theories that had emerged in Western Europe at the mid-point of the century, urban rather than rural, and that was, by the time Verne and Stoker were writing, gaining both popularity and a certain amount of academic endorsement. 17 This new antisemitism has been described by Raul Cârstocea as 'different from previous anti-Jewish formulations in its adoption of a pseudo-scientific approach, incorporating along a partisan line certain aspects of socio-economic or racial theories.' 18 The question of modernity also fed into expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice in the west, and cut both ways. The Jewish immigrant settling in the urban areas of Britain, France, and the United States, was positioned as representative of a pre-modern, preindustrial rural mode of existence. Simultaneously, the discursive figure of 'the Jew', in the particular role of rapacious capitalist, became a shorthand for unwelcome modernisation and socio-economic change. 19 As Bryan Cheyette has written when describing the fluid and sometimes contradictory characterisations of 'the Jew' in modern European culture, 'Jews are represented as both the embodiment of liberal progress and as the vestiges of an outdated medievalism.' 20 The uneasy relationship between the present and the past, modernity and archaic custom, that informed the ambiguous depictions of Jews in nineteenth-century Europe, is also at the heart of Verne's gothic treatise.

Antisemitism and 'Jewishness' in The Castle of the Carpathians
What sets The Castle of the Carpathians apart from other works in the turn-of-the-century horror canon is its discussion of prosaic (if negatively portrayed) 'Jewishness' in Transylvania and Romania, and some interest in how Jews were perceived in these countries, as well as the insights it gives into Verne's own prejudices as regarded Jews. 21 As Anca Mitroi notes, Verne, despite penning a gothic tale, was also aiming for realism in this particular work, presenting what he viewed as an accurate, if romanticised, picture of Transylvania for French readers, and this includes the Jewish presence in the country. 22 Verne, ultimately, presents 'the Jew' in Transylvania as both 'everyday' and 'monstrous' at the same time.
The first character encountered in the text is the shepherd Frik, whom Verne uses as a means of communicating local superstition to the reader, including a belief in the existence of vampires. However, the second is a pedlar or hawker of goods, and in the following description of this man the author outlines the ethnic makeup of the province, and the place of 'the Jew' within it. Here, the French and English translations differ. In the original French, it is made clear that the transient merchant is a Polish Jew ('mais il était juif, juif polonais') whilst in the English version exact nationality is left unclear: 'Was this one an Italian, a Saxon, or a Wallachian? No one could say, but he was unmistakably a Jew -tall, thin, hook-nosed, with a pointed beard, a prominent forehead, and keen, glittering eyes.' 23 Three points are established by Verne here, and in the next few pages of the story, which consist of a dialogue between the two men. Firstly, in racist discourse Jews were presented as being easily discerned and distinguished by certain physical characteristics from the gentile populations with which they interacted. This was a recurrent antisemitic trope in gothic literature. Indeed, the portrayal of this Jewish character in this passage is strikingly similar to Bram Stoker's depiction of Dracula halfway through that novel, once the Count is resident in London. Here is a description of the vampire in Piccadilly, as he chooses a potential victim: '. . . a tall, thin man with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard . . . His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual . . . ' 24 Count Dracula might not be Jewish, but his features, as outlined by Stoker, certainly agree with the fin-de-siècle antisemitic conceptions of what 'the Jew' looked like. 25 When Verne and Stoker were writing, Lombrosian theories that moral character and criminal tendencies could be identified by certain facial attributes were enjoying a particular vogue in the circles in which these authors moved. 26 In Dracula, Stoker acknowledges that the sole explicitly Jewish character present in his work, Immanuel Hildesheim, is (in physical terms) a stock caricature, and already a somewhat tired one: 'a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi type [referring to the well-known theatre], with a nose like a sheep, and a fez.' 27 Here too is Stoker's description of the moneylender Solomon Mendoza from The Watter's Mou' (1895): 'an elderly man with a bald head, keen eyes, a ragged grey beard, a hooked nose, and an evil smile.' 28 To return to The Castle of the Carpathians, although Jews in Verne's narrative, because of certain imputed facial characteristics, could be distinguished from their non-Jewish neighbours, they were also chameleonic, this particular pedlar possibly conversant in a number of the spoken languages of the province. They were not a bona fide nationality, a settled people, but instead could pass (and 'pass') amongst the other ethnic groups of Transylvania, the better to profit. Verne described the occupation of his anonymous Jew as 'one of those pedlars who travel from market to market in the district. They are to be met with in the towns and all the villages. In making themselves understood they have no difficulty, for they speak all languages.' 29 Jews in this narrative do not have a fixed place, they are permanently on the move (literally 'wandering Jews'), and they can switch identities as it benefits them. Nevertheless, this particular Jew in Verne's narrative speaks Romanian 'with a foreign accent. ' Thirdly, Verne's Jew in this opening exchange is a harbinger of modernity, as discussed above. Indeed, it is the technology he provides Frik with (a telescope), that allows the shepherd to discern that smoke is emanating from the tower of the (supposedly unoccupied) castle. In this sense, this minor figure acts as the catalyst for everything that subsequently transpires in the story. Verne draws a certain amount of humour from this; the Jewish pedlar offers various modern items, to which Frik responds by detailing the traditional folk methods of the country (for ascertaining the weather, telling the time, etc.). This Jewish figure is also urban, from Hermanstadt; Jews in Transylvania, Romania, and the Pale of Settlement were associated in antisemitic polemic with 'the city', and accused of profiteering from unwelcome economic change. 30 He is interested in making a profit, although Verne to an extent subverts this familiar anti-Jewish trope by emphasising the gentile shepherd's financial acuity, and the latter's intention to cheat his own master (by telling him that the telescope cost more than it did when he claims the money back). The first chapter of The Castle of the Carpathians concludes with the Jewish pedlar continuing on his way to the town of Karlsburg.
Verne, like Bram Stoker, would have been aware of Emily Gerard's recently published work on Transylvanian custom and society. 31 Gerard only makes a handful of references to Jews in these essays and monograph, but they hinted at an antisemitic animus in the wider society that, as we shall explore, Verne himself does not address. A paragraph by Gerard on 'Polish Jews' in Transylvania, suggests that these men, much like the trader introduced by the French author, 'hover about the place . . . a colony of the children of Israel would have been formed long ago had not the wary Saxons [Transylvanian ethnic Germans] strenuously opposed such encroachments.' 32 Later, she mentions a Transylvanian proverb that claims 'A real Jew will never pause to eat until he has cheated you.' 33 This dynamic is apparent in the opening exchange described above, with the Jewish trader and the gentile peasant both trying to gain an advantage over each other (albeit in a quite good-humoured manner).
The third chapter of The Castle of the Carpathians provides a number of potted biographies of the communal leaders of the village of Werst, and the ethnic make-up of the area. Austrians and Hungarians, however, are conspicuous by their absence, although 'gypsies' are mentioned, the 'other' in Verne's Transylvania is definitely 'Hebraic' in nature. 34 Here is a description by Verne of what he perceived as the economic dynamic in the province: '. . . most of the peasants of the country were ground down by the usury of the Israelitish money-lenders, who were the real proprietors of the soil . . .' 35 No further context or elaboration is given here, and the subject is not pursued in any more depth at this point in the narrative, but, almost incidentally, the author is making use of one of the most enduring antisemitic characterisations present in both Eastern and Western Europe, 'the Jew' as exploitative money-lender, demanding interest at extortionate rates. 'The Jew', and specifically 'the Jew' as economic threat, like the vampire, in this analysis, was parasitic. 36 In Britain and France, the association of Jewish communities with usury dated back to the Middle Ages, and survived the mass expulsions of Jews from both countries. In London and Paris, it was resurrected as a racist crutch in the eighteenth century, and by the Victorian fin-de-siècle the medieval figure of the money-lender was conflated with modernised characterisations of Jews as corrupt businessmen, economic 'sweaters', and slum landlords. 37 In Bram Stoker's Ireland there was the 'gombeen man', who preyed on the local agrarian poor, and was sometimes presented as Jewish. Such a (although in this case Catholic) character, 'Black Murdock', featured in Stoker's Irish romance The Snake's Pass (1890), a man who would 'take the blood out of yer body if he could sell it . . . '. 38 The Watter's Mou', set in Scotland, focuses on the cruelty inflicted on an innocent family who cannot repay their debts to a German Jewish moneylender.
In Eastern Europe too, the conception of the Jewish usurer continued into the 1890s, and fed into one of the most powerful folk-narratives that fuelled the recurring pogroms in both Russia and Romania; Jews as oppressors of the 'Christian' peasant populations whom they shared space with. 39 There is a contradiction apparent here: inter-ethnic violence was often co-ordinated by the indigenous elites, and with the acquiescence and sometimes active involvement of the police or army, and yet was viewed, certainly by those carrying it out (as in Moldavia in 1907), as aimed against authority, serving as a siphon of potentially dangerous if unfocused anger and frustration against an autocratic society. 40 In Transylvania, another level of resentment was added to this: Jews were associated with Austrian and Hungarian rule, and were often German or Magyarspeakers. 41 In this easternmost province, Jews were viewed in some quarters as foreign agents. If in the 'West' Jewish refugees were orientalised (just as Verne 'orientalises' Transylvania in this text), so in the 'East' they were portrayed as 'Western', i.e., German or Hungarian. 42 Matthew Gibson has examined The Castle of the Carpathians as a lens on contemporary French attitudes towards the political and economic oppression of the Vlach (Romanian) peasantry and proletariat by an exogenous ruling class that was gathering pace as Verne was completing the novel; these passages make apparent an additional antisemitic element to this dynamic. 43 For Verne, this goes beyond money-lending and financial interactions. Usury here is merely a tool; its ultimate purpose is to give Jews control. Jews in this narrative are not only collecting interest, because those whom they have lent money to cannot repay their debts, they are taking possession of the land, 'the soil'. Much has been written about Dracula and 'reverse-colonisation', in the context of the vampire's plan to conquer England, but Verne, in The Castle of the Carpathians, is suggesting that another form of supplantation is taking place in Eastern Europe itself -Jews replacing gentiles as owners of the territory. The future, in this analysis, does not belong to the Transylvanian boyars, to Baron Rodolphe de Gortz, or indeed to Count Dracula, but to the 'Israelitish moneylenders'. 44 In Stephen D. Arata's classic essay on the subject of 'reverse-colonisation', he describes this process as that where 'a terrifying reversal has occurred: the coloniser finds himself in the position of the colonised, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimiser victimized.' 45 Romanian and Transylvanian Jews were in this discourse simultaneously the eternal and unchanging victims both of the native society and of every invading army over the last thousand years, but also the future masters of the terrain, who would seek revenge on gentiles once in a position of authority. 46  'Those who know how pitiless the Jews are when they have the too-confiding peasantry in their clutches can understand the dreadful outbursts of anti-Semitic fury . . . ' 48 An incongruity is apparent; Jews, as represented by the pedlar, are transient, they have no roots in the communities through which they pass. Yet at the same time they have inherited the physical infrastructure of the country through their nefarious dealings. This is presented as unnatural; Jews, as a nomadic people, involved in trade rather than warfare, do not have that primal connection with the ground that they occupy, a land that was, according to Count Dracula, 'fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.' 49 This reminds us that Transylvania was contested territory, a border area claimed at various times by a number of great powers, but, for the antisemite, a land that had been ultimately subdued by 'Jewish finance' rather than sword or gunpowder, by monetary interest rather than blood. 50 The German academic Max Müller, on whom it was suggested Bram Stoker partly based the character of Abraham Van Helsing, identified this relationship, or lack of the same, with land, as the key difference between 'Jews' and 'Aryans'. 51 Verne returns to the theme of usury later in the novel. But for now, in his presentation of the dramatis personae of the inhabitants of Werst, the author merely comments that this village is the exception. The magistrate of the settlement, Master Koltz, 'had managed to escape [being in debt to Jews]. His goods were free from hypothecations . . . and he owed nothing. He would rather have lent than borrowed, and would certainly have done so without fleecing the poor people.' 52 Verne then introduces a (named) Jewish protagonist, who is presented relatively sympathetically, although not unencumbered by the usual anti-Jewish characterisations. In the fourth chapter, with most of the villagers of any importance to the plot having been introduced to the reader, the tavern of Werst is described. This location is important in The Castle of the Carpathians; it is a public forum, in which the villagers discuss the seemingly supernatural events taking place and make their plans, indeed, it is where some of these ghostly occurrences actually take place. The owner of the 'King Mathias', as the inn is known, is described thus: 'A Jew of the name of Jonas, a fine fellow of about sixty, of pleasing physiognomy, although rather Semitic, with black eyes, hook nose, smooth hair, and the traditional beard.' 53 Verne then goes on to elaborate upon the position of Jewry generally in Transylvania, which will be returned to, but, for now, it is worth spending some time on Jonas, and the role he plays in the narrative as a 'good Jew'. In physical terms, Jonas's description is almost a word-for-word repetition of how Verne details the anonymous pedlar at the beginning of the book -dark eyes, dark hair, hirsute, prominent nose, etc. Once again, it is suggested that Jews can be easily physically identified as such. Jonas is handsome, but it is stressed that this is very much despite his 'Semitic' features.
His moral qualities are somewhat more ambiguous. Verne calls him 'obsequious and obliging' which again chimes with familiar stereotypes from the literature of the time; Jews as outwardly self-effacing and even cringing towards the gentiles with whom they interacted, the better to cheat or exploit them in due course. Jonas, like 'His fellows in religion, his brethren by profession -for they are all innkeepers, selling drinks and groceries . . .' is the representative of modern capitalism in the village. 54 He is the nearest that Werst has to a bourgeoisie; in neighbouring Romania from the 1860s to the 1900s Jewish communities constituted a sort of middle strata between boyars and rural poor, a status that attracted opprobrium both from above and from below. 55 His concern over the possibly demonic presence in the tower, and, more immediately, the eerie voices heard in the tavern itself threatening doom to whosoever should try and breach the castle, is that he will lose profit, both from tourists no longer visiting the village, and the superstitious local peasantry boycotting the 'King Mathias'. Jonas is instrumental in successfully agitating for a deputation to visit the castle to determine what is going on.
Yet Jonas is not portrayed in a wholly negative manner. Although maintaining a viable business might be his overriding concern, he is shown to be capable of a certain amount of heroism. When the explorers do not return from their expedition, the majority of the villagers refuse to take part in a rescue attempt. Jonas is one of the few who volunteers to travel through the mountains, and assists in getting the paralysed Nic Deck back to safety. Jonas certainly does not lack courage and determination, thus confounding another frequently asserted anti-Jewish trope of the late nineteenth century, that Jews were weak and lacked the crucial quality of 'vigour. Lionel Dupuy notes the biblical provenance of Jonas's name, taken from the Book of Jonah in the Tanakh -Jonah is commanded by God to travel through difficult terrain to carry out his commands. 56 Jonas also expresses a degree of patriotic sentiment and support for Romanian nationalism when Franz de Télek takes lodgings in the tavern, although Verne frames this as part of Jonas's overwhelmingly mercantile agenda (the inn has been deserted since the disembodied voice appeared to emanate from the cellar of the building). 57 In Jonas's initial exchange with the Romanian aristocrat, it is made clear that he fully shares the popular belief in Werst in vampires and spectres. This is a crucial point about the Jewish innkeeper in this novel; he is integrated into the community. He is not transient, like the pedlar, and he enjoys excellent relations with the other (relatively) educated inhabitants of the village. Jonas is not 'othered', at least in the perception of his fellows; there is no hint of antisemitic animus from his neighbours. He is fully included in the discussions on the crisis facing the people of Werst, indeed he plays host to them. Jonas is also the only Jew, or at least the only settled Jew, who lives there. There is no wider Jewish population in the area. He is not even married. This can be interpreted in two, divergent, ways. Firstly, Jonas, as the only Jew present in the text, could be taken to be representative of wider Jewry as a whole. Alternatively, Jonas could be viewed as an atypical Jew. That Verne conceives Jonas as the latter is made clear in his opening description of the man, which once again touches upon the supposed propensity of Jews to lend money, this time in detail: . . . he willingly lent little sums to one or the other without being too particular as to security or too usurious as regards interest, although he expected to be paid on the dates fixed by the borrower. Would to heaven that the Jews in Transylvania were always as accommodating as the innkeeper of Werst! Unfortunately this excellent Jonas was an exception . . . . [Jews] carry on the trade of money-lenders with a bitterness that is not promising for the future of the Roumanian peasant. Gradually the land is passing from the native to the foreigner. In default of being repaid their advances, the Jews are becoming the proprietors of the finest farms mortgaged to their advantage; and if the promised land is not to be that of Israel ['Judea' in the original French], it may one day make its appearance on the maps of Transylvanian geography. 58 In other words, as Eric David notes in his analysis of anti-Jewish sentiment in Verne's overall corpus of work, Jonas is a philosemitic characterisation ('un «brave homme» et même doté d'une certaine excellence') who proves a general antisemitic rule. 59 The inn-keeper's portrayal serves as an example of what Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman describe as '[where] "anti-semitism" and "philo-semitism' become indistinguishable and there is instead an interplay between these supposed irreconcilable states.' 60 Jonas is certainly presented in a much more attractive (and nuanced) manner than Verne's other notable named Jewish protagonist, Isaac Hakkabut, in the science fiction fantasy Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet in English) (1877), a character who is straight out of contemporary racist polemic: . . . [Hakkabut] presented all the typical characteristics of the German Jew, the heartless, wily usurer, the hardened miser and skinflint. As iron is attracted by the magnet, so was this Shylock attracted by the sight of gold, nor would he have hesitated to draw the life-blood of his creditors, if by such means he could secure his claims. 61 It is a notable feature of The Castle of the Carpathians that anti-Jewish sentiment in the novel is the preserve of the detached narrator, rather than expressed by any of the characters. 62 There is no hostility displayed towards Jonas by his gentile neighbours; Franz de Télek, a Romanian, has no qualms about spending a night in an establishment owned by a Jew. There is no indication that this area was witnessing anti-Jewish violence, or that in neighbouring Romania enforced second-class status was institutionalised and an exodus of Jewish refugees was taking place at this time. 63 Although Transylvania is 'othered' as a backwards and primitive land in Verne's work, antisemitism does not constitute part of that backwardness, indeed in the analysis presented in this book anti-Jewish prejudice is fundamentally rational, and is articulated by the (implicitly French) narrator, rather than the Eastern European protagonists.
It is apparent that Verne is rather sympathetic towards the Jewish individual who features in this particular narrative, whilst invariably reaching for explicit antisemitic characterisations when describing Jewry collectively in Eastern Europe. In the paragraph introducing Jonas, the most extended discussion in the novel of what Verne viewed as a pernicious Jewish influence in Transylvania, he elaborates on earlier themes. What is clear is that Verne does not see supposed Jewish 'usury' as an end to itself, a desire for profit, but, as noted above, a planned effort to dominate and supplant the Romanian peasantry. 64 In the original French it is also stressed that this is not solely an economic process, not merely the acquisition of materials such as goods and property, but is taking place on a more intangible level: 'Faute d'être remboursés de leurs avances, les juifs deviendront propriétaires des belles cultures hypothéquées à leur profit' ('If their loans are not paid back, the Jews will become owners of the beautiful culture mortgaged for their benefit.'). 65 Beyond this, he implies that this is motivated by a desire for revenge ('bitterness'). Again, this grew from a generalised antisemitic trope that 'international Jewry' was conspiring against certain governments. This discourse continued up to the First World War, and reached its apogee during the Russian revolutions of 1917. 66 There is also an oblique reference in this paragraph to the search for a Jewish national home, and the movement for a return to Palestine. As Verne was writing, Theodore Herzl was beginning to theorise on what such a migration would involve in practical terms, the kernel of what would become known as Zionism. 67 The suitability of a Jewish national home was also propounded by anti-migrant campaigners in Britain and France -it was suggested that this would be preferable to the mass settlement of Jewish refugees in the cities of the west. Transylvania was in reality never mooted as a potential 'Israel', but Verne is again stressing the political nature of these economic transactions, that they were part of a pre-planned conspiracy, ultimately involving the transfer of land. This process was frequently asserted in the Romanian press. Raul Cârstocea describes the following discourse articulated in response to foreign attempts to secure the enfranchisement of Romanian Jews in 1879 (bound up with the guarantee of Romania's national status): 'International pressures were viewed from the point of view of interference in the internal affairs of an independent state, and the idea of "international conspiracy" appeared for the first time in the country's press. Both liberal and conservative newspapers brought up the country's "colonization", its' becoming a 'slave nation' and turning into a 'black Palestine'. 68 In The Castle of the Carpathians this supplantation is occasioned by economic exploitation and the appropriation of property. Jonas's admirable qualities do not negate the general avaricious and hostile intentions of Jewry as posited by Verne, indeed they accentuate Verne's broader antisemitic characterisations; Jonas, after all, is an 'exception'.
Given the lack of explicitly Jewish characters in Dracula, aside from the peripheral (and negatively portrayed) Immanuel Hildesheim, a local representative of the Count in Romania, are there any examples of the ambiguous 'good Jew' in the text who fulfils a role similar to that of Jonas? 69 There is evidence that at some point in the genesis of Dracula Stoker was planning to include an explicitly Jewish character of some importance for the development of the story. Jonathan Harker's employer, Peter Hawkins, was initially called in Stoker's preparatory notes 'Abraham Aaronson'. 70 The question remains, and is ultimately impossible to resolve, whether in his original conception Stoker intended to portray Aaronson in a positive light. Hawkins in the final version of the novel is a sympathetic, surrogate-father figure to Harker and Mina Murray. Yet he is also, in certain respects, an agent of the vampire, like Hildesheim, complicit in Dracula's settlement in Britain. In his original, 'Jewish' incarnation, would this connection with Dracula have been emphasised to a greater degree? In any case, the change in name from 'Aaronson' to 'Hawkins' means that any 'Jewish' role in Dracula remains implicit rather than explicit.

The Castle of the Carpathians, Dracula and wider antisemitic discourse in the fin-de-siècle
How do these two texts reflect wider political-cultural antisemitic discourse at the end of the nineteenth century? The imagery that both Verne and Stoker employed in their gothic texts set in Transylvania was by this time embedded enough in the societal psyches of both France and Britain to be prevalent in contemporary political racist polemic. The most prominent advocate of enmity towards Jews in France in the period under consideration was the journalist Édouard Drumont. In his incendiary monograph La France juive (1886), and in his newspaper La Libre Parole, Drumont maintained a steady flow of antisemitic propaganda and accusations of Jewish malevolence and treachery in the years before the First World War. Drumont claimed that the ultimate ambition of 'the Jew' was to 'reduce the Aryan to servitude', just as Verne wrote of the 'Israelitish moneylenders' oppressing the Vlach peasantry. 71 Drumont also occasionally ventured in his polemic into something approaching gothic prose, and frequently referred to the physical repulsiveness of 'the Jew' using the language of horror publications. 72 Drumont, utilising the tropes of sensationalist fiction, would have been familiar with Verne's work, as well as Guy de Charnacé's Le Baron Vampire (1885), an antisemitic diatribe about 'Jewish influence' in French financial and social circles. Like Verne, Charnacé also wrote about the pernicious effects of Jewish moneylenders on Romanian peasant society, but made explicit the similarity in this respect between France and Eastern Europe. 73 Drumont also frequently referred to the blood libel, something that English antisemites, such as Arnold White and W.H. Wilkins refrained from doing, although it did have its champions in Britain, including Richard Burton, an acquaintance of Bram Stoker's. 74 Indeed, William Evans-Gordon, the Conservative MP who was instrumental in founding the anti-migrant group the British Brothers League in 1901, explicitly drew a contrast in his writing between the 'rational' and 'practical' anti-Jewish platform which he propounded and the archaic antisemitism of the Pale of Settlement and Romania, which included charges of Jews drinking gentile blood. 75 British antisemitic discourse did accuse Jews of 'feeding' on the host society's life fluid, although generally as a metaphor for economic exploitation and the 'sweating' system, rather than as an accusation of actual physical vampirism. 76 By the 1890s antisemitic narratives in France and Britain had become indelibly linked with the mass movement of Jewish refugees westwards. 77 One key difference in Verne and Stoker's work is the role, or lack of the same, of the Jewish 'other' as immigrant. This is predicated on the use of location in the two novels. Dracula has multiple settings, essentially following Dracula in his journey across the European continent, beginning with his 'migration' to Britain, and then his retreat to the Carpathians. Verne, on the other hand, does not employ any shifts in setting; all of the important events in the book, with the exception of the Italian digression (which is retrospective), take place in Werst or the nearby fortress. Because of this, the nature of the threat posed by the 'other' in the two works differs. Dracula is an 'alien', he is fundamentally exogenous to the English society through which he moves, a fact which initially protects him; his opponents have no idea, at least until the second half of the novel, about what they are dealing with. 78 Dracula's transgression is not solely his vampirism, but that he exports it from an orientalised Transylvania (where it is to an extent 'natural') to the British capital. Dracula expresses his wish to 'integrate', to 'go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.' 79 His motivations for doing so, of course, are malign, but he articulates a sentiment here closely associated with the migrant experience.
At the same time, Dracula reveals the apparent limitations of liberal tolerance and inclusionary discourse and the desire to 'anglicise' Jewish migrant populations into a wider 'English' culture (including on the part of the Anglo-Jewish political and religious establishment). 80 Dracula's wealth allows him access to resources, the use of local legal and business institutions, and to establish a physical base in London, thus resembling the antisemitic characterisation of the Jewish 'arriviste' that became a component of racist discourse at about this time, but he cannot become 'British', and indeed, despite his comments to Jonathan Harker, does not truly want this in any case. 81 In this respect, he is similar to Svengali in George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894), who arrives in France as a refugee. 82 That Jews could be located in a western society without ever being wholly a part of it has been suggested by Paul E. Nahme who wrote that 'the Jew haunts European constructions of race by approximating to an uncanny degree those postures and sensibilities expected of a "civilization", while simultaneously terrifying the European psyche with its foreignness.' 83 All of the Jews presented in The Castle of the Carpathians, by contrast, are Eastern Europeans in an Eastern European setting. The pedlar encountered at the beginning of the story might be transitory, but he is also familiar. Jonas is settled, tied to the local community by the commercial property that he owns and the relationships he has formed with his neighbours. Dracula represents 'the Jew', or at least 'the foreigner', as an unknown threat; the Jewish moneylenders that Verne refers to are part of an understood social and economic dynamic in the Transylvania he presents. Despite their mobility, the Jews in this narrative have their defined 'place' in the wider society as the practitioners of small-scale capitalism, they do not disrupt roles or threaten societal boundaries in the way that Dracula does. 84 Verne drew upon antisemitic characterisations of Eastern European Jews as presented by Western European travel writers in the second half of the nineteenth century, but these characterisations invariably positioned Jews as part of the fabric of these countries, albeit a pernicious and harmful stratum that functioned in a parasitical manner. The Jewish appropriation of gentile-owned land that Verne claimed was taking place in Transylvania was presented as 'unnatural' on one level, but the process by which it was accomplished, through usury and the accruing of interest, was understood, unlike Dracula's opaque schemes for conquest of another country through seduction and infection.
It is apparent that Jules Verne had a more immediate location in mind than Transylvania when he wrote of locals being usurped, economically and culturally, in their own country by Jewish aliens. Verne was writing his gothic novel as the Dreyfus Affair assumed a European prominence, and was becoming representative of a wider struggle between the Catholic Church and the secular French state in the Belle Époque. Verne was a partisan for those supporting the persecution of Dreyfus, a stance which led to a rift within his family. 85 Where then does Verne's antisemitism and ambiguous semiphilosemitism sit within the cultural milieu of the era in which it was written? Comparisons with Dracula are revealing. If measured by space given to the subject within the books, then Verne's writing is certainly more straightforwardly racist than Stoker's. Indeed, the case could be made that Jewry, collectively, are the true 'villain' of The Castle of the Carpathians. Rodolphe de Gortz, as it transpires, is not a threat to the people of Werst, not a blood-sucking exploitative predator like Dracula, but simply a man who desires privacy. The vampires themselves in the story are not real, but rather are an illusion created by modern science. Verne suggests that ultimately it will not be the (redundant) gothic aristocrat who subjugates the local populace, but the Jewish capitalist moneylender.
Stoker by contrast makes no attempt to document the presence of Jews in his Eastern European setting, and, with the exception of a brief description of a minor character, there is no explicit comment on Jews, either positive or negative, made within the text. On the surface, Dracula is neither philosemitic nor antisemitic. However, in terms of a semisubliminal evocation of the anti-Jewish currents of the past, Dracula surpasses Verne's gothic story. The Castle of the Carpathians wears its antisemitism fairly openly, but this racism does not form the underlying basis of the work. By contrast, although Count Dracula is not Jewish, a visceral dread of the ethnic 'other' is at the core of the book; Dracula as a text cannot be understood without acknowledging this element. The Castle of the Carpathians illustrates current fears of economic and social displacement by Jews, as indeed does Stoker's own The Watter's Mou', whilst Dracula taps into the primal anxieties of blood-letting and blasphemy that grew from medieval conceptions of Jewish monstrosity. 86 The first book states quite clearly for all to see a strand of the anti-Jewish sentiment of contemporary Europe; the second evokes the deep currents of suspicion and loathing that flowed underneath and fed into that discourse across that society. The first is every-day and prosaic, based on mundane if fraught human interactions, the second is primal and to a degree suppressed. In Dracula, this was not directed specifically at Jews, the novel evokes a general suspicion of 'foreigners' and 'outsiders' of all kinds, those 'without a place', whether promiscuous women or the mentally ill or 'gypsies' or immigrants. However, identifying Dracula as on one level a response to socio-cultural change that, during the years that Stoker was writing his vampire novel became conflated in the national psyche with the arrival of Jewish refugees in British cities, it can be posited that although individual Jews are not present in the novel, the contemporary antisemitic conception of 'the Jew' is. Both Verne's depictions of 'the Jew' as a localised economic parasite motivated primarily by a day-to-day desire for profit, and Stoker's complex presentation of an unsettling, transnational, fundamentally transgressive (in myriad forms), partially undefined supernatural force attempting world conquest, fed into a discourse that presented Jews in Europe as both individually 'monstrous' and collectively harmful to the societies around them.