Page - 34 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

34 | Entangled Entertainers this case of fraud had nothing to do with Judaism. Even Jellinek’s Jewishness could not evoke a mention from the Jewish media. Only an antisemitic response to the case would have put the Jellinek aff air on their radar.109 A few months after the Jellinek aff air, the Budapest Orpheum Society brought the farce Der kleine Kohn (Little Kohn) to the stage (for details on the content of the play, see chapter 4). In the play, Leopold Kohn, treasurer of the Spitzer bank, is accused of embezzling money. At one point in the performance, Marcus Spitzer speaks to a police offi cer about Kohn, saying, “Th ere has never been such a Jellinek before.”110 Caprice, the author of the play, uses the name Jellinek as a synonym for a crook. Such a reference only makes sense if the ostensibly majority Jewish audience of the Budapest Orpheum Society was aware of the Jellinek case. But this also means that their audience must have followed the reports that ap- peared in the non-Jewish press. Th e Jellinek aff air was part of the everyday Jewish perspective, even if the Jewish media did not write about it. A fourth and fi nal piece of evidence elucidating my thesis that ordinary—even Orthodox—Jews read general newspapers includes newspaper reports containing clearly religious references and even advertisements referring to Jewish cultural life. For example, an article from March 1904 announced the restoration of the Wäh ring Jewish cemetery and informed relatives of the deceased that they should communicate any changes they wish to make to the graves to the religious com- munity.111 In this case, the announcement targeted a Jewish audience, as it was unequivocally a religious matter. Because Jewish newspapers made it their goal to address Jewish concerns, one might assume that this piece of news would have been within their purview. However, the Jewish newspapers omitted reporting on it. As such, Jewish readers only learned about the cemetery restorations if they consumed general media. We see a similar pattern in announcements advertising the Lemb erg Singspiel Society, a theater company from Galicia. Th e group performed in Leopoldstadt, where a considerable number of eastern European Jewish immigrants resided. Lemberg Singspiel Society performances sometimes had a clearly religious con- text.112 Th e “Polish,” as they were called, at times performed plays by well-known Yiddish authors, such as Abra ham Goldfaden (1840–1908) or Jose ph Lateiner (1853–1935).113 Announcements for the programs of these performances some- times emphasized that theatergoers could expect “strictly ritual food” as part of the entertainment. Such advertising thus also addressed religious Jews as poten- tial audience members.114 Although Lemberg Singspiel Society performances thematized Jewish cultural life, the Jewish press did not make any mention of these cultural activities. Th is lacuna corroborates my thesis that Jewish newspapers sometimes failed to report on issues with clear references to Judaism if the general press already allocated suffi cient print space to them. Maybe Jewish newspapers did not wish to be re- dundant and instead focused on reporting that readers could fi nd nowhere else. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.