Page - 40 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Image of the Page - 40 -
Text of the Page - 40 -
40 | Entangled Entertainers
39. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 102; Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 7. Th
e diff erence between
assimilation and acculturation is usually considered a diff
erent degree of adaptation. As-
similation leads to a total absorption of the assimilating part of the population in society,
while acculturation usually indicates only cultural adaptation that preserves structural
diff
erences, in particular group consciousness (see Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 3–5).
40. An example of a recent (also excellent) study that employs the concept of assimilation
without critical distance, without considering the critical engagement with the notion
in the past twenty years, is Elana Shapira and Moses und Herkules, “Ein Beitrag des
jüdischen Bürgertums zur Gestaltung der Ringstraße und des Praters,” in Ringstrasse: Ein
jüdischer Boulevard, ed. Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz (Vienna: Amalthea, 2015), 161–88.
41. An early example and perhaps the most important study on this topic is Till van Rahden,
“Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in Wilhelminian Breslau and
Its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany,” in Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik / Jews
in the Weimar Republic, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker, and Peter Pulzer (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck 1998). See also Klaus Hödl, “Jewish Culture in Historical Studies,” in
Th e Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Laurence Roth and Nadia
Valman (London: Routledge, 2014), 83–94.
42. Wolfgang Schmale, ed., “Kulturtransfer,” in Wiener Schriften zur Geschichte der Neuzeit,
vol. 2 (Vienna, 2003).
43. Klaus Hödl, “Zum Wandel des Selbstverständnisses zentraleuropäischer Juden durch
Kulturtransfer,” in Kulturtransfer in der jüdischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Schmale and
Martina Steer (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), 57–82.
44. A pathbreaking publication that integrates these new approaches is the collected volume
Cultures of the Jews. See David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York:
Schocken, 2002).
45. For more on the concept of “emergence,” see Paul E. Meehl and Wilfried Sellars, “Th e
Concept of Emergence,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1 (1956): 239–52;
Steven C. Pepper, “Emergence,” Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926): 241–45.
46. Th
is does not mean that there are no diff erences between Jewish and non-Jewish cultural
spheres. Such an assertion would be a contradictio in adjecto. However, these diff
erences
are not predetermined, but are to a large extent bound by context and are the result
of concrete processes of negotiation or have been, as one sees for example in the case
of religion, deliberately normalized. On this point, the American historian Sharon
Gillerman asserts, “One of the intellectual problems one sometimes encounters within
Jewish Studies generally, and in German Jewish Studies in particular, is that it too often
presumes to know what Jews and Jewishness are.” She argues that there are instead “cul-
turally negotiated, shifting, and contingent meanings of Jewishness.” Sharon Gillerman,
“Muscles by Mail: Jewishness and the Self-Made Man in Post–World War I America”
(paper presented at the workshop “Jews and the Study of Popular Culture” at the Ger-
man Studies Association Conference, Arlington, VA, October 2015).
47. Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions and
Interdependence,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 318–19. In addition see
Scott Spector, “Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish His-
tory,” Jewish History 20, no. 3/4 (2006): 349–361; Andreas Gotzmann, “Reconsidering
Judaism as a Religion – Th
e Religious Emancipation Period,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 7,
no.4 (2000): 352–366.
48. Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestan-
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.
Entangled Entertainers
Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Title
- Entangled Entertainers
- Subtitle
- Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Author
- Klaus Hödl
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Date
- 2019
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-78920-031-7
- Size
- 14.86 x 23.2 cm
- Pages
- 196
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
- International
Table of contents
- Introduction 1
- 1. Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic 13
- 2. Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 44
- 3. Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger 78
- 4. Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 121
- 5. From Difference to Similarity 148
- Conclusion 163
- Bibliography 166
- Index 179