Page - 7 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Introduction | 7 also very popular among the poor of Vienna on account of his charitable do- nations.36 His magical talents left a strong impression on the population, and through various media he has remained in the collective memory of the Viennese population. A portrait of him currently hangs in the Austrian Museum in the Belvedere, and one of his friends, Johann Strauss, dedicated a polka to him in 1851, which he fi rst introduced at a performance in the dance hall Sperl.37 Th is short overview allows us to see that Katz’s job as escamoteur was not un- usual for Jews. Th e widespread idea that they were particularly suited to being magicians on account of their knowledge of Kab balah increased their popular attraction and proved to be an advantage over non-Jewish colleagues. One of the reasons for this stereotype is that non-Jewish magicians were an unknown quan- tity to a larger audience prior to 1790.38 Overview of the Chapters A review of the available scholarly literature on the history of the Jews of Vienna makes it clear that Jewish magicians and toad swallowers have thus far received scant scholarly attention. Th ey have been largely ignored and continue to be ignored. Th ese omissions have not led to a fundamentally incorrect portrayal of Viennese Jewry, but rather to an incomplete one—which has ultimately fueled a distorted idea about them and their history. Th at is why the Jewish population in the Danube metropolis is still almost exclusively associated with the bourgeoisie or the process of becoming “bourgeois” (Verbürgerlichung).39 Th e fact that Jews were also generally active in popular culture and sometimes paid little attention to the standards of the much-lauded bourgeoisie has been overlooked. In chap- ter 1, I demonstrate with a series of concrete examples a diff erent path that some Jews chose to take. In this study, I pose a number of questions and endeavor to answer them. My primary thesis is that Jews played a substantial role in the shaping of Viennese popular culture. Th ough my argument has until recently been to some degree contentious, I am able to substantiate it using a wide variety of sources. In chapter 1 in particular, I pose a central question, namely why so few schol- ars have researched and written about Jews in Viennese popular culture around 1900. What has prevented historical scholarship from intensive explorations of the subject? Why have historians tended to engage with the topic of Jews and “high” culture instead of also considering popular culture? One possible reason for this scholarly neglect may be linked to the so-called invisibility of Jewish artists. Th ey often performed using a nom de plume and demonstrated no other (obvious) Jewish characteristics. In instances when their contemporaries, and sometimes even their fellow performers, did not recognize them as Jews, it can be even more diffi cult for historians in retrospect to identify certain Volkssänger This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.