Page - 157 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

From Diff erence to Similarity | 157 dish language culture. In Yiddish, a mentsh (not just a human, but a good person) is distinguished by generosity and integrity. A mentsh thus serves as a role model in his particular social environment.24 According to this understanding, both Jews and non-Jews can be a mentsh. Mentsh likhkeyt (Yiddish for the quality of being a good, decent person) is there- fore an inclusive characteristic. Rather than being innate, this quality is refl ected in a certain commitment to fellow human beings. It is made tangible through performance. Mentshlikhkeyt does not characterize a collective whole, but distin- guishes individuals based on generous activities. Mentshlikhkeyt therefore varies on an individual basis. In Hirsch’s plays, mentshlikhkeyt manifests itself specifi - cally in charity, interactively in exchanges between Jews and non-Jews. We fi nd all four features—inclusivity, individuality, interactionality, perfor- mance—in Th e Apostle of Schottenfeld as well as A Tale from Yesteryear. Both the Jewish Isak and the non-Jewish baron demonstrate inclusivity in their willingness to help others. Isak does not, however, represent all Jews. Many of them want to cheat the baron by pretending to have lent him money and demanding repay- ment. In this sense, compassion is not a general Jewish characteristic, but an in- dividual trait associated specifi cally with Isak. Isak actively performs this trait. We thus see Jewish–non-Jewish interaction performed mutually, in Isak’s supporting the baron and the baron’s supporting his erstwhile savior. Th ese four features of Jewishness, though they do not always appear in concert with one another, distinguish most of the other Volkssänger plays that I discussed in chapters 2 and 3. I have thus founded my thesis—that we should understand Jewishness as largely fl uid, unrelated to religious Judaism, as the result of a close Jewish–non-Jewish togetherness, and as inclusive—on a wide range of evidence. Instead of formulating a specifi c defi nition of Jewish self-understanding (except to say that religion plays no defi nitive role), these plays, I have demonstrated, determine Jewishness contextually. Given my discussion thus far, we must ask whether a concept of Jewishness as diff erence based on inclusive qualities that can infl uence the self-understanding of both Jews and non-Jews is at fi rst glance merely a contradiction. Doesn’t in- clusivity mean that Jewishness loses its distinctiveness when non-Jews also adopt and demonstrate its features? Th e Concept of Similarity My argument that Jewishness constitutes a form of diff erence based on inclu- sive qualities, which can also shape the identity of non-Jews, may seem at fi rst glance paradoxical. But let us consider two points that disentangle this ostensible contradiction. My fi rst point refers to the semantic fi eld of the term “Jewish- ness.” One could assert that, unlike what we have seen in the Volkssänger farces, This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.