Abstract/Summary

This article examines antisemitic narratives in 1890s Europe through the lens of Bram Stoker’s obscure gothic novel The Watter’s Mou’ (1895). It will argue that racist conceptions of ‘the Jew’, in both the popular literature of the time and the political discourse of contemporary European societies had shifted to present Jews as a transformative element in the societies they lived in. In this analysis Jews would not just exploit these non-Jewish populations but ultimately irrevocably change their character, corrupt the non-Jewish ‘indigenous’ inhabitants and render them ‘Hebraic’. Drawing on Stoker’s fiction, primarily the portrayal of the moneylender Solomon Mendoza, various elements of this emerging characterization will be considered. Firstly, the development of the medieval antisemitic archetype of the Jewish usurer will be discussed; how this was expanded to incorporate contemporary anxieties surrounding capitalism and colonialism, and how ‘the Jew’ was viewed as financially exploiting ‘native’ peoples (including the British proletariat) and thus meriting retributive violence. Secondly, the nature of interactions between ‘the Jew’ as exogenous force and the ‘indigenous’ non-Jewish society (in this case the fishing communities of Cruden Bay where the novel is set) are considered in more detail, that this not solely positioned as a process of economic exploitation, but also of moral debasement, the complicity of elements of the local society with ‘the Jew’s’ schemes and the blurring of identities. Finally, Stoker’s preoccupations in his fiction with ‘race’ and religion will be placed in wider antisemitic narratives of the ‘place’ of Jews in fin de siècle European societies. The fate that the villain meets at the end of the story, will be located as part of an epochal struggle, as posited by racist populism, between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ elites for control at the end of the nineteenth century.