Page - 21 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 21 attitudes the same as these other groups must be viewed as counterproductive.43 As a result of this scholarly innovation, some Jewish studies researchers have abandoned the acculturation narrative altogether.44 Working with the concept of Jewish acculturation requires two things: fi rst, knowledge of the culture or cultures in which adaptation takes place, that is, what constitutes these cultural systems; and second, an understanding of the agglomerate of (in this case Jewish) cultural signifi cance, aspects of which must be abandoned in the process of acculturation. Only under these conditions is it possible to determine how Jewish acculturation takes place. But since culture cannot be fi xed, but rather must be understood as something emergent and thus constantly in shift, such defi nitions are hardly useful.45 In addition, a culture can- not be split into discrete parts. In concrete terms, this means that the attempt to diff erentiate the culture or cultural processes of a society into clearly transferable Jewish and non-Jewish components is essentially an impossible task.46 Against the background of these theoretical considerations, scholars once again called into question the concept of acculturation. A change of perspective in the theorization of Jewish–non-Jewish relationships has also contributed to this reconsideration. According to this shift in perspective, Jews did not follow established cultural standards, but infl uenced and shaped them alongside non- Jews. Within this revised framework, Jews are not considered a foreign, non-na- tive element, but rather are seen as belonging to the society in which they lived and worked. In particular, Israeli historian Steven E. Aschheim represented this viewpoint in the late 1990s.47 Around the same time, German historian Till van Rahden confi rmed this conception of Jewishness in his dissertation Juden und andere Breslauer (later published in English as Jews and Other Germans) by way of concrete examples, and he introduced the concept of situational ethnicity into Jewish studies.48 Jewishness was thus radically contextualized and released from the burden of previous interpretations. A prime example often given for the adaptation of Jews to the standards of the majority society is their ostensible adoption of prevailing clothing trends.49 But we can see how misleading this example can be, however, when we take a look at a l ate nineteenth-century photographic collection from Galician Krakow, which American historian Nathaniel D. Wood analyzes in his study Becoming Metropol- itan. Th e photographs from the 1880s show people who are clearly identifi able in their appearance as Jews, workers, Roma, aristocrats, and members of other groups. But in the photographs taken about thirty years later, it is not possible to make such diff erentiations. In the later set of images, the individuals all look strikingly similar to one another.50 During the time period between the two sets of images, the individuals depicted were not trying to adopt the same fashion standards, but rather were all undergoing the process of modernization. We can neither explain nor trace this development using the concept of acculturation. In addition, the garment industry, with its large percentage of Jewish produc- This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.