Page - 32 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

32 | Entangled Entertainers with the case, calling it an antisemitic act. In a follow-up, the paper published a note about the diffi culties that Kessler’s wife was having with the insurance com- pany with which her husband had arranged a life insurance policy prior to his death.96 Th ese two references to the Kessler murder case in this paper did not give the reader any information regarding what had happened. Th at is, this example of reporting in the Jewish press only makes sense if readers were already aware of the crime. Th is means that Jewish readers must have also read non-Jewish news- papers and must have therefore also been consumers of general media targeted at larger audience. Th e report on the widow Kessler’s problems with the insurance company appeared exclusively in the Jewish Oesterreichische Wochenschrift. In this sense, the newspaper fi lled in blanks, supplying information not covered by the general press, which wrote nothing about this particular aspect of the case. Th e second piece of evidence concerns advertisements in general newspapers that specifi cally targeted Jewish readers. We can identify this specifi city in ad- vertisments that refer to Jewish religious customs or attitudes. For example, some non-Jewish newspapers advertised where customers could buy matzah, or un- leavened bread. Th e product was advertised in Hebrew letters, which would habe been illegible for most non-Jewish readers.97 We fi nd another example in the weekly newspaper Wiener Caricaturen (Vienna caricatures), which praises the products from “Berg’s Selchwaren-Produktion” (Berg’s salted and smoked meats), a company based in the Vienna-Meidling neighborhood, indicating that their products were kosher.98 Clearly, these products were marketed specifi cally to Jews. Th e same applies to an announcement for a kosher restaurant in the O ttakringerstrasse that appeared in the Vienna Vorort newspaper.99 Th is does not mean that general newspapers were riddled with a variety of advertisements specifi cally addressing Jews. At times, businesses tried to garner Jewish consumers through advertisements designed specifi cally for Jewish news- papers. Th is was the case, for example, with Kunerol, a type of margarine.100 An advertisement in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung described it as a cost- eff ective and worthwhile substitute for butter and lard. Jews who wanted to ad- here (at least partially) to religious dietary laws might have felt that such ad- vertisements addressed them personally—but we can only speculate as to how individual readers responded to such eff orts. At the same time, the Jewish maga- zine Oesterreichische Wochenschrift also advertised Kunerol. Th is ad states that the product was manufactured under the supervision of the rabbis of Mattersdorf and Huszt and was therefore kosher.101 Th e Cologne-based company Stollwerck pursued a similar sales strategy, advertising in the Jewish press that their choc- olate and cocoa were “produced under supervision and with the certifi cate of the Orthodox rabbinate of Bratislava.”102 Both companies attempted to address potential Jewish buyers through Jewish-specifi c media. Precisely because diff erent versions of the same advertising campaigns ap- peared in both Jewish and general newspapers, it is striking that advertisements This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.