Blood and Soil: Vampires in Israeli Pop Culture

• In Event: Food, Theater, and Vampires: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Relationships with Israel

Abstract

Jewish culture is no stranger to monster tales and folklore, and there have always been Jewish monsters, from the demon Lilith to the golem. Often these creatures, and their literary representations, are not just the stuff of horror stories, but have fulfilled a political or social purpose. The dybbuk seeks justice for a dead soul wronged during its lifetime; the golem protects the community from outside threats. However, it is only recently that Jewish culture has engaged with non-Jewish monsters, placing them in Jewish social, cultural, and historical contexts. The recent Israeli television show Judaה is a Jewish vampire tale, adopting a figure from European folkore and literature that has at times been considered an anti-semitic caricature. In creating a Jewish Israeli vampire, the series explores the overtly Christian and sometimes anti-semitic origins of the vampire. It uses this hybrid, even forbidden, combination to comment on larger questions about the Israeli relationship to Europe and to Jewish diaspora history. Judaה is not just a pop culture horror series, but wrestles with the implications of the history of European anti-semitism as well as the Zionist image of and attitude toward Europe as the site of diaspora, all through the repurposing of vampire folklore in an Israeli context. This paper will explore the way that the adoption of a traditionally non-Jewish, even anti-Jewish, monster into a specifically Jewish, and Israeli, context engages with the postcolonial notion of the hybrid as a site for the exploration of new, alternative identities and political spaces. By inverting many of the anti-semitic tropes of the vampire tale, including invocations of blood libel and depictions of the vampire as a parasitic other, specifically through the creation of an Israeli vampire figure, Judaה suggests that national identity or Israeliness offers a rejoinder to European conceptions of the Jew. However, Judaה does not just reprise Zionist negations of the diaspora, but offers a more multivalent conception of Israeli, and Jewish, identity as partially dependent on those very historical connections and ideas.

Author

• Melissa Sarah Weininger, Rice University