Page - 121 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Chapter 4 JEWISH SPACES OF RETREAT AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY d In the second and third chapters, I discussed the conception of Jewishness that appears in Jewish Volkssänger plays, as well Albert Hirsch’s life and theatrical work. My analysis highlights how the representation of Jewishness takes prec- edent over its content, that is, what defi nes it. I have demonstrated how one cannot tie Jewishness to concrete, universal attributes. Rather, Jewishness reveals itself in a diff erentiation that comes to the fore in a performative way. I have shown how diff erence is inclusive, meaning that, in principle, non-Jews could also potentially adopt the related attributes (see chapter 5). In the following section of the study, I explore a form of Jewish diff erentiation that is grounded in content matter, which I illustrate on the basis of concrete conceptions of space and time. Th is form of diff erentiation abrogates the notion of the fl uidity of diff erence, without essentializing it. Th at is to say, these notions of time and place are determined by context. To outline them, we must expand our study beyond popular Jewish stage entertainment and take into account lit- erary and artistic works by Jews as well. I thereby situate my thesis that (at least some) Viennese Jews at the turn of the twentieth century shared a specifi c Jewish understanding of time and space within a wider framework. Retreating into the Past When Claude Monet and his fellow painters, who would later become known as Impressionists, turned to plein-air painting, they were still seen as eccentric. However, they were certainly not the fi rst to set up their canvases outside to This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.