Page - 15 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 15 their own understanding of popular music. If we disregard, for a moment, the newspaper quotation’s antisemitic exaggeration and anti-Jewish edge, the asser- tion made by the anonymous author clearly contains a grain of truth. Indeed, scholarly investigation into the topic “Jews in popular culture” demonstrates that Jews did not adapt to any popular cultural standards. But unlike the quotation suggests, neither did they manipulate them. Rather, Jews were involved in the music-cultural scene and helped steer its course. In other words, at least in this branch of Jewish cultural activity, the concept of acculturation, which still char- acterizes historiography about Jews, especially in Austria (see below), cannot ac- curately account for Jewish participation in popular culture. A second theme that arises in connection with research on Jews in popular culture concerns the notion that their everyday life in Vienna was heavily infl u- enced by antisemitism and that they lived largely separate from non-Jews. We see this assumption in the frequently cited idea that although Jews and non-Jews had professional interactions with each other, they rarely maintained private con- tacts.10 While this observation may have been true for particular segments of the Jewish and non-Jewish population, it can explain only to a limited extent the complexities of the relationships among participants in popular culture. In the realm of entertainment and popular culture, there was no dichotomous relation- ship between Jews and non-Jews. A study on Jews in Viennese popular culture thus questions the validity of two basic assumptions in historiographical writing about them. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, as I mentioned in the introduction, this aspect of the Jewish past remains underrepresented in historical scholarship. In the following, I introduce four additional reasons that explain the widespread historiographical neglect of the subject of Jews in Viennese popular culture. I discuss in detail the last of these reasons, the selective coverage of Jewish newspapers, as it provides additional insight into relations between Viennese Jews and non-Jews at the turn of the twentieth century. Identifying Jewish Artists in Popular Culture At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a fruit vendor known as “Jew- ish Lisi” (Judenlisi) who sold her wares at the Viennese Nas chmarkt. Her name alone might indicate that she was a Jewish businesswoman. Along similar lines, there was a woman named “Jewish-Liesel” (Juden-Liesel), a harpist from the early nineteenth century.11 She sang, was a prostitute, and drew audiences with her ribald, suggestive songs.12 Unlike the fruit vendor at the Naschmarkt, whose real name was Elisabeth Schrattenholzer and who was called Judenlisi only on account of her predominantly Jewish clientele, the true identity of Jewish-Liesel (Juden-Liesel) remains unknown.13 We cannot deduce whether artists who took This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.