During the Black Death that killed more than half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, rioters burned Jews alive under the auspices of public health. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed in response to accounts of an imagined conspiracy against Christians. These accounts were extracted from Jews who confessed under torture to spreading the plague by poisoning wells. Bram Stoker’s rendering of Count Dracula, with a prominent nose and piles of gold and vague origins in Eastern Europe, suggests that he is intended to be read as a Jew. To make that explicit, Bela Lugosi’s
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