A Zionist Viewing of Nosferatu
“If We are to Tame Darkness, We Must First Face that It Exists”
(Or don’t succumb to darkness… you could spread love and light instead…)
At the foot of the Carpathian Mountains is a small gypsy village.
The young and erudite German protagonist, Thomas Hutter, arrives here just before ascending to Count Orlock’s castle.
The gypsies, rank with ancient fears and superstitions, beg him not to go. They spread garlic all around their homes and recite prayers and incantations in an ancient and foreign language.
But the young and modern German has no time for their superstitions – he has business to attend to.
The next morning, he awakes to find the whole town is deserted.
That evening, in the Count’s mysterious castle, he asks the count about their practices, to which the count replies something like:
“These are poor and backward people. Surely a modern man of your great learning pays no heed to such ancient and childish superstitions.” (Apologies, I could not remember the quote verbatim.)
Of course, Herr Hutter, accepts the count’s backhanded flattery – he is too learned to believe in the old wive’s tales of poor Gypsies living in the dark backwaters of Europe.
And herein lies one of the major themes of Nosferatu: superstition vs. erudition, folklore vs. science, faith vs. fact.
And herein lies the Zionist lessons from the film.
It is the hubris of the highly educated that causes their blindness.
Men who have spent decades learning the most advanced ideas and theories in the world often scoff at the wisdom and the knowledge of the ancients.
They look at folktales and superstition as trivialities, vestiges from our ignorant past.
In my time at Princeton, there was certainly no discussion about vampires – no one would have believed in such foolishness.
There was, however, one person who was notorious for talking about ancient superstitions and folktales and was universally considered strange – me.
You see, I am actually a descendant of those superstitious Carpathian Gypsies.
My grandmother, the smartest and most educated person I have ever met, was Romanian, and the little village we come from was just as superstitious and backwards as the one in the film.
Only, the ancient superstition that we feared was not Nosferatu – it was pogrom.
There is a scene in the film where the evil shadow of Nosferatu’s hand extends all the way across the modern European city, just as the black shadow of antisemitism is spreading today.
The Pogrom, which has long been the ultimate fear of the Jewish people, was an old wives’ tale.
At least, that is what the extremely wealthy and educated men of Princeton told me.
They scoffed when I said that antizionist rhetoric was eliminationist and clearly intended to promote violence against Jews.
They told me I was imagining things when I told them that antisemitic violence was growing 200% every year since 2015.
But, my personal favorite was in 2022, during the World Cup.
Qatar had promised to provide kosher meals to fans, but they didn’t.
I took to the internet to explain how antisemitic that was and how antisemitic Qatar was as a country.
Luckily, a very-wealthy Princeton man, from a very old and respected WASP family, pointed out to me that, in fact, there were kosher meals at the games – because a Jew in Brooklyn ran an emergency operation to air lift hundreds of bagels to Qatar (literally).
Qatar was not antisemitic, he explained, they just did not provide kosher food because there were no kosher restaurants in Qatar at the time.
I, the Jew raving about the dangers of antisemitism, was just overreacting.
Of course, since then, Qatar has funded the murder of 1200 Jews, the kidnapping of 250, the rape of countless others, and, perhaps worst of all, invested billions of dollars into corrupting the academy itself.
Qatar is so antisemitic that they are actually taking a shot at Iran’s crown.
Like all well-educated westerners, this young man scoffs at superstition and tradition.
The darkness of antisemitism should be buried in an ancient grave alongside the other European fairy tales like Dracula and Nosferatu.
But it isn’t.
Antisemitism is as real and as dark today as it ever was.
As the superstitious vampire hunter says:
“If We are to Tame Darkness,
We Must First Face that It Exists.”
For decades, our ancestral fears of antisemitism were in remission.
But now, they have come back with a vengeance.
There is no modern or academic answer or understanding that will explain away the roots of antisemitism or provide us with some kind of intellectual solution to it.
Antisemitism is a vampire – we must drive a stake through its heart.
Sucking on the lifeblood of the Jewish people, antisemitism has plagued our people like a macabre ulcer, returning to us year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation.
There may be those who say that we can live with the beast as long as it is dormant, but I disagree.
We have lived beneath the shadow of the dread castle for too long.
It is time for us to destroy it, once and for all.
If we are to tame the darkness of this violent antisemitism, we must first face that it exists.
And this evil does exist,
But I intend to drive a stake through its heart.
~
Spread love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
This holiday season, spread the light of The Zionist Voice and give the gift of proud Zionism.