Page - 36 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

36 | Entangled Entertainers had originally applied for a position at the Otta kring Temple in the sixteenth district of Vienna and had been invited to deliver a trial presentation. He amazed the audience with his vocal virtuosity and was also invited to demonstrate his skills in the second municipal district. Th e sole deciding factor here was the cantor’s artistic ability, which is precisely how synagogue visitors perceived the performance. During the service, the audience members loudly expressed their approval and applauded the Hungarian guest.116 At times, the organizers contributed to worship services featuring an illustrious cantor being misunderstood as a special cultural event. Th is misunderstanding arose when they asked visitors for an entrance fee. Th e atmosphere during some cantor presentations was sometimes so exuberant that critics drew comparisons between these performances and ancient Roman spectacles.117 Announcements that well-known cantors were to sing attracted the masses, hence the comparsion with Rome. In response to this phenomenon, Die Wahrheit reported in 1900 that “one [sees how] every Friday evening hundreds and thousands, not only from the lower classes, but also from the middle and upper classes, rush to the Leopoldstadt Temple . . . just in time to score a seat to enjoy the anticipated treat for the ears.”118 Jewish newspapers objected to how these special cantor appearances ostensibly neglected the religious dimension. Commentators criticized the tendency among audience members to understand these events merely as entertainment, com- parable to theatrical and similar performances. By contrast, non-Jewish media viewed the cantor appearances as mere cultural events. We see this for example in an announcement in the entertainment section of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt from July 1901 advertising the Galician cantor Baru ch Schorr.119 In the opinion of Die Wahrheit, Schorr’s performance was thereby reduced to a mere leisure activity, one of many opportunities for amusement. In the case of the cantor presentations, varying narratives collided. We can understand the diff erent approaches to reporting the same event as a Jewi sh/ non-Jewish struggle for the interpretation of cultural events. At the same time, we may also see it as further evidence of the coex istence between Jews and non- Jews. Th e advertisement in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt may have addressed both Jewish and non-Jewish readers as potential audience members for cantor perfor- mances. We know that non-Jews sometimes attended Jewish services in order to be edifi ed by the cantors’ singing, as was the case when Salo mon Sulzer appeared in the Vien nese City Temple.120 Th roughout this study, I analyze archival evidence related to numerous in- terpretations of the same event or, as in the instance just discussed, I investigate how various newspaper articles portrayed the same occurrence. In particular, I investigate the question of whether we can or must interpret certain acts and occurrences as antisemitic or, on the other hand, as a characteristic of intimate Jewish and non-Jewish contact. In doing so, I demonstrate to what degree a par- This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.