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Discusses the significance to Dracula, Svengali and other literary characters of the way in which they embodied and alluded to a number of popular apprehensions which clustered around the appearance in England of great numbers of Eastern European Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. Success of English actor and producer Herbert Beerbohm Tree's play in which his starring role was Svengali, a weird, spectral Satanic figure; Reaction of Victorian audience on Tree's Satanic interpretation of the role; Comments from Nina Auerbach, in "Woman and the Demon," about the revelation of a dominant myth of the last decade of the nineteenth century; Relationship and parallelism between Svengali and Dracula and the women they dominate.