Frankenstein’s Creature Is Jewish. Dracula Is Goyish.

The title of this piece isn’t just an aside to amuse the incurably nerdy among us, the sort who, like me, think about monsters every day of the year, not just on Halloween. It’s a truth universally acknowledged, and one we urgently need right now, because very real monsters are everywhere afoot in the very real world and because telling them apart is essential if we’re ever to defeat them. Dracula is not one of us. By contrast, Frankenstein’s creature is as Jewish as monsters get.

Both horrifiers have strong Hebrew bona fides. Bram Stoker likely fashioned his Van Helsing after Armin Vambery, a Jewish polyglot and world traveler he met in London who regaled him with tales of the creeps crawling around in the dark Carpathian mountains. Meanwhile, Judaism has always had its share of vampires, from Adam’s starter wife Lilith—according to the midrash, a blood-thirsty succubus—to Shtriga, the sinister shape-shifter who, some Hasidim believed, could only be defeated with a stake to the heart.

Frankenstein’s creation comes with an even stronger attachment to Yiddishkeit. As Ed Simon wrote in Tablet a few years back, research by the classicist Stephen Bertman shows that tales of the golem—the famous clay creature ostensibly brought to life by the Maharal of Prague—appeared in print, in German, as early as 1808. Based on Jewish folk tales attributed to Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm, the golem stories were collected by philologist and fairytale enthusiast Jacob Grimm, whose work became one of the foundations of the romantic movement.

It is therefore quite possible that the young Mary Shelley, tasked one chilly night on the shores of Lake Geneva with telling the spookiest story she could think of, had the golem in mind when she conjured her doctor and his creation. When Shelley’s story finally appeared in print, her husband, Percy Shelley, noted in the introduction that it was inspired by “some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands.” It’s not injudicious to assume that young Mary, who spoke German and whose family home was often visited by writers from the continent who shared the latest literary fads, turned to Grimm’s version of the animated avenger of the Jewish people as her inspiration for the creature who would awaken on Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory slab.

Yet possible Jewish origins aside, both creatures reveal a deep and telling difference when freed from the scholar’s stifling gaze.

Dracula is form personified. Forever young, eternally handsome, a vessel of unending life, he is, in some delightfully macabre way, Matthew Arnold’s idea of Hellenism taken to its logical extreme. “Human life,” Arnold wrote, “in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what we call sweetness and light.” And who is aerier, clearer, or more radiant than the count? But pursue sweetness and light to the fullest, and you’ll end up with blood and darkness, because perfection, alas, was never given to us mortals. Crave it too much, and you’ll discover that it is too fragile to survive in this imperfect world, that it must remain unobserved, and that it may only be transported, like Dracula, in boxes of dirt from one place to another or risk being forever lost.

Dirt is an especially apt metaphor here, because no one in Bram Stoker’s masterwork has much patience for the breath of life. Dracula is packed with men and women of action: Its doctors diagnose swiftly, decisively, and correctly; its ladies leap to the rescue and stand up for the fight; even the lunatic, Renfield, qualifies: He’s described as “morbidly excitable” and is always on the move, eating small creatures in order to digest their life force. Whatever inner monologue we get is more likely than not to be delivered in a clinical voice, observing the goings-on like someone who watching a train station’s timetable. Which, no coincidence there, is precisely how the novel begins: “Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning,” Jonathan Harker reports. “Should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.” He’s hardly more insightful a few chapters later, when he discovers the dreadful truth about his fanged host: “How can I escape from this dreadful thing of night and gloom and fear?” he asks, and then, immediately, answers: “Let me not think of it. Action!”

And act Harker does, like a Victorian Odysseus. He recovers, travels, aggresses, and slays, and his travails, in the best Hellenic tradition, are pure perpetual motion, all foreground. Ironically for a book about a vampire, Dracula hides nothing in the shadows.

Which, alas, explains why the novel has become such a favorite of the morbidly excitable, mutually accrediting mediocrities who dwell in academia and search, like Renfield, for something small to consume in the hope of possessing something like a life. Amble into your local gender studies department, and you’ll be able to sink your teeth into a cauldron of dissertations picking apart the novel’s representations of sex, gender, queerness, and everything in between. Across the quad, over at the anthropology department, they’re probably citing it as a bold meditation on xenophobia, which leaves more than enough for the disability studies crew to pick apart. Would it surprise you to know that there’s a peer-reviewed academic publication called the Journal of Dracula Studies, and that it runs essays with titles like “Dracula’s Harem: Feminine Otherness and Reverse Colonization of the Male Body”? It shouldn’t. In Dracula, like in the narrow minds of today’s identitarians, everything is skin-deep, flat, fast, facile.

And then, there’s the Creature.

Forget its maker’s vaguely Jewish name—it’s definitely not pronounced Frankensteen—and listen to the Thing itself.

“Cursed, cursed creator!” he howls in one of the novel’s breathtaking moments. “Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants, and have glutten myself with their shrieks and misery … But this was a luxury of sensation that could not endure; I became fatigued with excess of bodily exertion, and sank on the damp grass in the sick impotence of despair.” The heartbreaking soliloquy ends with the Creature confessing that he was determined “to devote the ensuing hours to reflection on my situation,” a thought that would never have occurred to Van Helsing, let alone Dracula.

Because Frankenstein isn’t a Hellenic novel of action. It is, to borrow another phrase from Matthew Arnold, a Hebraic work through and through, interested in “the difficulties of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede man’s passage to perfection,” difficulties which, in the Jewish imagination, spin furiously enough to generate a positive energy that propels mankind upward, to higher moral ground.

If that sounds like some observation straight outta the Talmud, that’s because it is.

“For two and a half years,” we learn in Tractate Eruvin, “Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. These say: It would have been preferable had man not been created than to have been created. And those said: It is preferable for man to have been created than had he not been created. Ultimately, they were counted and concluded: It would have been preferable had man not been created than to have been created. However, now that he has been created, he should examine his actions that he has performed and seek to correct them.”

The Creature would’ve concurred. So would Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook: The founding father of modern religious Zionism spent much time pondering this maddening observation. How, if God himself praised his creation as very good, could anyone, let alone our wise ancestors, opine that we would’ve been better off had we not come into being?

“Before I was born,” Rav Kook explained, “during all that infinite stretch of time before my creation, there was surely nothing in the world for which I was needed. Because had I been required in order for some task to be fulfilled, I would’ve been created. And the fact that I wasn’t created at any other time tells me it wasn’t time for me yet to materialize. And, now that I exist, if I had the wherewithal to focus all my actions on serving that one purpose for which I was created, I would’ve been able to justify my existence. But because my actions are far from focused on that transcendent purpose, it means I haven’t yet fulfilled it.”

This insight came to the Creature naturally. Creation, he realized, was not a word but a sentence, condemning all who were now alive to discover what it was that they were living for—what, in other words, was their calling. Which, as Rav Kook realized right away, was not a cross to bear but a gift, a tremendous source of renewable spiritual energy.

To go through life asking these questions is to make sure we obsess not with what the world owes us or how others have wronged us or the rights and privileges we believe are inalienably ours, but with our responsibilities and our duties and the ways in which we ought to overcome our lowliest urges and instead ascend, proving ourselves worthy of our Creator’s great gift of life. All this makes Frankenstein not only the better book but also the more morally resonant—and urgently needed—one.

Dracula is a manual for victimhood: If you find yourself walking about and devouring children—like Lucy Westenra, pretty and passive before the count nibbled on her neck—it’s not your fault. You were probably just oppressed by some greater, otherworldly force. You must resist, violently of course, for only white-hot action will rid you of your tormentors. This is the fantasy that arouses our sexless coeds on campuses these days, with Jews standing in for vampires and no introspection or soul-searching required.

Mary Shelley had better ideas. The fault, she knew, was not in our scars but in our selves. The real monster isn’t the hulk who lumbers through the pages howling in rage; it’s the physician who was so committed to proving he could create life ex nihilo that he neglected to wonder whether he should. And he, alas, is the monster that roams our villages still, splicing genes and teaching computers the secrets of thoughts and performing other thrilling experiments that may just as well end life as save it.

None of this crushing complexity was lost on the book’s author, which is why its subtitle is The Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein delivered something illuminating, immensely useful, and entirely forbidden, a sin for which he and everyone around him had to pay. To repent, we must reflect. To redeem ourselves, we must take the Creature’s questions seriously: Why do we live? And what for?

The answers to these questions are, by necessity, what we would call “religious.” They invite not some scientific survey of our surrounding, but a glance heavenward, toward the force to which we owe everything and yet could never fully understand. And they demand that we make a choice: rampage or reconciliation, vengeance or virtue, rage or love. Once we’ve answered these questions, and only then, can we truly act as human beings

Frankenstein’s Creature, c’est nous: Hideous, petty, not above terrible crimes, profoundly lonely, but also yearning for some connection with other creatures just like us and with our maker, mad at Him as we may sometimes be. The Creature, too, is Prometheus, suffering so that we may benefit, forever drifting away alone on the ice, so that we may chart a different course and choose life over death. Anything else would be monstrous.