blood is not kosher
assuming vampires breathe, and are therefore alive, what do they do
If they’re alive and they need it to survive, it’s permitted (provided they don’t kill people in so doing).
If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.
Either way, there is no reasonable halachic restriction on a vampire drinking blood.
but would it need to be from a kosher animal
can they drink, like, dolphin bloodOkay now that gets interesting and I would want to actually ask a rabbi whether that would be a thing. like, if one must consume the blood of living things to survive, does it make a difference whether one limits it to the blood of kosher animals or not. I could see it being ruled either way. (I would think if there is only one type of blood one can metabolize or if only one type of blood is available, one can consume it regardless.)
I remember learning that human blood (not sure about animal blood) is permissible to consume if it has not been “poresh” (”separated”) from the body (in the context of “if you cut your lip or your finger and immediately and instinctively put it in your mouth, you don’t have to spit out the blood”).
So
Drinking blood out of a goblet or vacuum-sealed bag would be assur, but sinking your teeth into someone and drinking directly (so that the blood never touches the air or is in a vessel) would be okay.
I know that applies to one’s own blood, but I don’t know if the principle applies to someone else’s. But it may count as a possible precedent!
Okay, so I asked my rabbi about this (… yes, my actual rabbi). Short answer, @fenrisesque, is that the ideal situation is for the vampire to intravenously ingest blood that was donated by a human in order to stay alive, assuming that donation doesn’t kill the person. If
homemadeintravenously doesn’t work, thenstoreboughtoral ingestion is fine too. This applies whether or not the vampire can drink animal blood. Long answer, which I find fascinating but is long so under a cut:Just a question what if the vampire has to turn someone to save their life? like you know the person in a car accident where they are wounded but incapable of consent of being turned?
preservation of life overrides everything in Judaism.
Not quite everything; there are a very few points of law that override even preservation of life, but I don’t think any of them are relevant here. Except possibly one, which is that it is prohibited to murder an innocent person (i.e., a person who in no way constitutes the threat) to save the life of another.
So again it comes back to the question of whether vampires are considered alive or not. If a vampire does not breathe and has no heartbeat (which is a thing that varies depending on who’s writing the vampire), there are grounds for saying that it is not halachically alive.
If a vampire is not considered alive, then by turning someone into a vampire, you have not saved their life but rather killed them; this counts as murder even if they were dying anyway (provided that they were halachically alive at the moment of turning). If a vampire is considered alive but not the same person as the human who was turned, then you have effectively murdered one person in order to save another – moreover, another who didn’t actually exist prior to the death of the first and thus could not be considered a “life” to be saved.
Turning someone to save their life could thus only potentially be valid if the resulting vampire is considered both alive and still the same person as before turning. These questions thus call for further inquiry before any proper ruling can be made.
[Obligatory disclaimers: (a) I am not a rabbi, and (b) while there are probably rabbis who would agree to some extent with every point I have raised, there are almost definitely other rabbis who would disagree to some extent with same.]
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