Page - 24 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

24 | Entangled Entertainers family. His novel, an example of formula fi ction (Trivialliteratur), takes place during the Napoleonic wars. Isaac, a Jewish peddler, takes advantage of the mo- bility inherent to his profession to spy on the movements of French troops. His “German patriotism” is even surpassed by that of his daughter Rebekka. A rabbi introduces her to the masterpieces of German literature, which arouses in her a love of German culture.57 We could categorize Der lange Isaak as a work of Jewish literature. Th e Jew- ish self-understanding of the protagonists and the treatment of Jewish questions would speak to this inclusion, even if the author of the novel was not Jewish. But we could also consider the text a product of German culture, and there would be convincing reasons for such a decision. But neither of the two categorizations would do the work justice; the notion of both of these two ostensibly discrete categories is predicated on the possibility of precisely defi ning and thus also dis- tinguishing between what is Jewish and what is German.58 Such dichotomous indicators are fundamentally problematic and, above all, do not apply to this specifi c case. Rather, Der lange Isaak is another example of the diffi culty, if not the impossibility, of clearly separating Jewish and non-Jewish cultural areas, which, however, is a precondition for the acculturation narrative. Th us, von Wickede’s novel also calls into question the overall utility of the concept of Jewish cultural adaptation. Lacunae in the Jewish Press Another important reason that explains why scholars in Jewish studies and re- lated disciplines have thus far scarcely investigated the topic of Jews in Viennese popular culture may have something to do with the coverage of Jewish newspa- pers and journals of the la te nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Th e Jewish press reported on popular cultural events only sporadically and superfi cially—if at all. Because scholars often analyze only Jewish (rather than general) print me- dia as part of their work on Jewish life in Vienna, they gain only a one-sided picture of Jewish cultural activities.59 Even if they employ general newspapers as sources in their research, they tend to focus mostly on high-profi le newspapers primarily devoted to high culture.60 Such publications contain hardly any news or reporting related to Jews in popular culture. Th e central question that I wish to raise in this section is: why did the Jewish press in Austria neglect Jewish en- gagement in popular cultural activities? As I mentioned earlier, the sometimes subversive nature of popular cultural entertainment provides a possible explanation for the neglect in the Jewish press to report on such cultural activities and events. I now turn my attention to addi- tional aspects that may have been decisive factors in why the Jewish press chose to report on some events and ignored others. I contextualize the news coverage This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.