While the array of demons mentioned in talmudic literature does not include vampires, occasional reference to such creatures does appear in medieval rabbinic texts. Elon Gilad notes some examples, most prominently a passage from the 13th-century ethical-pietistic work Sefer Ḥasidim which describes a flying, blood-sucking, female human-like creature called a striya. (Free registration required):

Belief in striyas was probably borrowed from [Jews’] Gentile neighbors, who believed in living-dead beings called strigoi in Romanian, shtriga in Albanian, and strzygi in Polish. So it seems some Jews believed in vampires after all, but this belief never caught on and became widespread.

Today nobody believes in vampires anymore. But when the vampire fiction making the rounds in the West began to be translated into Hebrew, revivalists needed to find a word for the imaginary being of the night. They did: the modern Hebrew word for “vampire” is arpad—taken from an obscure Aramaic word in the Talmud for “bat” (Bava Kama 16a).

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.