Page - 128 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

128 | Entangled Entertainers title, he searched the entire country for his former benefactor. Since the baron did not know his name, he distributed fl iers throughout the country to announce that he wanted to repay the sum. As a result, approximately one thousand Jews came to him claiming to be the creditor, but he saw through their lies. Th e story has a conciliatory ending. Th e baron allows both women to keep living in the house. Th e manager is punished for his selfi sh behavior, while the baron takes Isak back to his castle and cares for the man until his dying day. A deep friendship develops between the Jew Isak and the non-Jewish baron, which alludes to their mutual sense of care. Th e performance ends with the sentence “No matter a Jew or Christian / As long as he is a good person.” A Tale from Yesteryear takes place in a generalized past, in which Jews were part of society. While we discern a harmonious coexistence between Jews and non- Jews illustrated in the relationship between Burgai’s father and Isak, there is also anti-Jewish hostility. Th e latter stems in large part from misunderstandings. By resolving these, a path is cleared for friendships and close relationships between Jews and non-Jews. According to the conclusion of A Tale from Yesteryear, diff er- ent ethnic or religious affi liations need not cloud Jewish–non-Jewish relation- ships. Isak, the altruistic Jew, seems to have more in common with the baron, who had initially revealed himself to be an antisemite, than he does with other Jews, who are portrayed as deceitful and dishonest. Th e theatrical representation of close relationships and varied interactions be- tween Jews and non-Jews in the Old Vienna period tends to mask tensions and frictions between them. Open anti-Judaism largely recedes in favor of harmonious relationships. Occasionally, possible references to it are placed in new contexts and thereby reinterpreted. We see this exemplifi ed in a Purim ball organized by the Brigittenauer Israelite Support Society (Brigittenauer Israelitischer Unterstützu- ngsverein) in 1903. Its board members attended this event in the “old Viennese fashion.”29 Among other things, their attire included a “colorful tailcoat, gaudy doublet, and pointed hat.” One of the attendees even appeared as a “‘knight in shining armor’ with a silk cloak and sword.”30 Th e Jews thus used the ball to pres- ent themselves as part of the distant past, by way of the concrete example of the Middle Ages.31 In this respect, it is worth noting that Jews were required to wear pointed hats during that period to distinguish them from non-Jews.32 However, in the context of the ball, it no longer contained an anti-Jewish meaning. Instead, it served as an indicator that Jews had participated in Old Viennese society. Th e Transition from Past to Present We must situate the idealization of the periphery or outskirts, which maintained a reference to the past in its association with Old Vienna, as well as the glorifi - cation of the Habsburg capital of earlier decades and centuries, within the pan- This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.