Page - 68 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

68 | Entangled Entertainers options. It was known that Karl Lueger often attended performances at Venice in Vienna.123 We can only speculate as to whether Lueger would have avoided the venue if Steiner had remained Jewish. In any case, Steiner’s decision to leave the Jewish community likely did not hurt his professional ambitions. Ben Tieber converted from Judaism and was baptized a Protestant in January 1899. A sense of conviction may have been more of a motivation for Tieber than for Steiner. Th ere is historical evidence indicating that Tieber more or less felt a personal connection to and identifi ed with Protestantism. His charitable donations to Protestant schools seem to suggest this sense of commitment.124 We should note that both Ben Tieber and Gabor Steiner made a conscious decision to convert to Protestantism, which was a minority religion in Austria. Only a lit- tle more than 5 percent of the Austrian population was Protestant. Nevertheless, a fourth of Jews who decided to convert chose to be Protestant. Approximately half of Jewish converts decided to become Catholic, while the fi nal fourth chose to be unaffi liated with any religious faith.125 It is entirely possible that the deci- sion to become Protestant had something to do with particular cultural similar- ities between Protestantism and the worldview of the bourgeoisie, to which a signifi cant number of Jews belonged.126 Th is choice of conversion may have also been the result of an unwillingness to join the religion chiefl y responsible for the intellectual climate in Austria in which Jews who lived visibly as Jews had to con- tend with considerable disadvantages.127 Seen in this light, conversion to Protes- tantism points to a particular form of Jewish self-understanding and underscores a distinction between Jews and non-Jews in Vienna around 1900. Th e second aspect of “Jewish diff erence” that I identify in my analysis of Ga- bor Steiner and Ben Tieber concerns their mutual focus on the international. Because of this focus, they clearly stood out from a large part of the popular en- tertainment sector in Vienna around 1900. Th e Viennese entertainment industry was strongly infl uenced by Volkssänger, even if the various singspiel halls created a tangible sense of competition among them. Th e Volkssänger were closely associ- ated with the trope of Old Vienna and highlighted in their songs a culture based on the local. An open atmosphere of xenophobia was one result of this emphasis (see chapter 3). Even thou gh Jews participated in this tradition, it is possible that this sense of xenophobia was for some of them a source of discomfort. Th ey may have been aware that the construction of a culture that was closely tied to a concept of Vienna and based on the delineation between itself and “foreign” infl uences could quickly lead to an attempt to deny Jews the possibility of par- ticipating in it. I have already shown an example of this attempt at exclusivity in chapter 1. And this sense of anguish may have been a reason that the city’s large variety theaters, whose international performances provided a cultural counter- point to the local cult around Old Vienna, were at least partially run or fi nanced by Jews.128 A look at Viennese institutions illustrates this point. Among the most important establishments that made up the city’s entertainment industry at the This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.