From Dracula to the Motmindam: The Evolution of the Jewish Vampire Melissa Weininger Contents Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Vampire as Other, Vampire as Jew ............................................................... 3 Rewriting the Vampire ............................................................................ 5 Embracing the Vampire ........................................................................... 8 Motmindam: The First Jewish Vampire .......................................................... 10 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 14 References ........................................................................................ 15 Abstract While Jewish tradition has its own roster of monstrous creatures, including vampiric beings, the vampire of European folklore has been largely absent from Jewish representations of the monstrous. This lacuna exists at least partially because of the origins of vampire lore in thinly veiled antisemitic caricature. The vampire – peripatetic, stateless, hook-nosed, and bloodthirsty – recapitulated many antisemitic myths and stereotypes in a modern Europe anxious about Jewish migration and influence. However, modern American and Israeli popular culture engage with both the figure of the vampire and its antisemitic history through indifference, comedy, and reappropriation. One of the earliest Jewish representations of a vampire-like being, S.Y. Agnon’ s “The Lady and the Ped- dler,” challenges the antisemitic associations of the vampire by reversing the roles of vampire and victim. American comedic films by Roman Polanski and Mel Brooks defuse the danger of antisemitic myths by poking fun at them. And contemporary Israeli representations of explicitly Jewish vampires work to reappropriate vampire lore in a way that integrates it into Jewish history and culture. These various modes of reconstructing a historically problematic monster M. Weininger (*) California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA, USA e-mail: melissa.weininger@csun.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Bacon (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82301-6_45-1 1