Dracula, a hybrid Jewish-Turkish vampire, is pallid, a condition based on his endless need for more human blood, an affliction situated in part in mythologies of Jewish male menstruation. He is sexually ambiguous and opportunistic. Possessing a harem but still unsatisfied, he victimizes men and young children as well as European women. As the book begins, the Englishman Jonathon Harker departs the civilized world of Vienna and Munich, "leaving the West and entering the East," and enters the wasteland of Transylvania, passing through a town that still bears the marks of a seventeenth-century war (it is arrested in time, like all of the East), with roadside shrines and "peasants meeting him with warnings or charms and gifts to ward off evil." This landscape is "primitive, sublime, and horrifying." The wasteland of Transylvania functions as a character in Stoker's text, a malevolent monster that entraps and terrorizes (and often kills) all those who enter it.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 427