Lettres Juives ou correspondance philosophique, historique, et critique or in English, The Jewish Letters; or Philosophical, Historical and Critical correspondence Between a Jew Traveler in Paris and His Correspondents in Various Places by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer. Jean-Baptiste de Boyer also went under the pseudonym “The Jewish Spy.”

The Jewish Letters consist of around two hundred letters between (fictional) Jewish travelers and Rabbis, most of the letters in this are sent by Aaron Monceca to Isaac Onis. This book was “most likely believed to contain true accounts” by the public about Augustin Calmet. (a French Benedictine monk and part of the Holy Roman Empire) They were critical of his investigation into magic and vampirism. Calmet analyzed the Jewish letters, and in the one hundred and thirty-first letter he found that it recorded vampireism and the judicial process in the vanquishing of the vampire. The Jewish Letters provide one of the first documented literary mentionings of vampires and vampirism.

In Thalaba the Destroyer, One-hundred-fourty-one of Southey’s notes, he mentions the Lettres Juives. It states “We have had in this country a new scene of Vampirism, where they decide that an old man who had previously “died” is a vampire. They decide this after digging up his grave, where they find his eyes open, color fresh, respiration quick and strong, and yet he is stiff and insensible. They also talk about how physicians and surgeons began to examine vampires. They then found that the deceased Hayduke Arnold Paul had sucked and may have transformed four people, along with several beasts. Surgeons and Physicians found forty bodies and seventeen vampires. This all apparently happened in the Holy Roman Empire, but in the Jewish letters, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer talks about it happening in Greece, France, and other places around the globe.

While this isn’t the very first mention of Vampires or vampires throughout history, letter One hundred and thirty-one is considered important to the impact of vampire lore and what we know about vampires now due to how it interacted with the public. This letter brought the topic of vampires into more mainstream literary discussions of the time (the Enlightenment era)

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