Seite - 31 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 31 Presse, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung, and the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung had Jewish owners or publishers. Even the tabloid Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt was one of these publications. We must also not forget that a considerable number of journalists and editors were Jewish.91 Th e feature pages (Feuilleton), an indispensable component of quality newspapers, owed its high standard to Jewish engagement.92 And fi nally, there is considerable evidence, including diary entries and literary references, that suggest or indicate that Jews read general newspapers.93 Th e participation of Jews in the press was a well-known and sometimes exaggerated fact, as antisemitic slander regarding Jewish manipulation of public opinion demonstrates.94 In this sense, it is by no means a stretch to argue that Jews resorted to the general (non-Jewish) press to keep up to date with events that took place in their immediate environment. In a concrete sense, however, my thesis focuses not on Jewish intellectuals and “high” culture mavens, but rather on ordinary, poorer, and sometimes very religious Jews in Vienna—that is, the portion of the Jewish population that made up the majority of those who attended popular cultural events and who had a particular stake in consuming news about them. And the topic of how these Jews consumed various media remains an under-researched area. Despite this scholarly lacuna, we may reasonably assume that they read gen- eral (non-Jewish) newspapers. We may draw this conclusion at least in part from the establishment of Jewish newspapers throughout the nineteenth century in the German-speaking world that were aimed at traditionally minded Jews. Th ese initiatives in new media outlets sought to prevent religious Jews from reading not only the liberal Jewish but also the non-Jewish press.95 Th ey therefore must have exhibited a certain willingness to resort to non-Jewish media. Th is may have been the case among the poorer and religious Jews of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century and may have ultimately been one of the reasons why Jewish newspapers generally omitted news about popular culture. We might therefore conclude that Jewish newspapers to a large extent would have reproduced only news items that were already familiar to readers. In light of this discussion, how do we substantiate the thesis that ordinary— and even Orthodox—Jews read general newspapers? Th e main explanation for the specifi cally Jewish focus of the Jewish press hinges on this larger pattern of the Jewish consumption of non-Jewish media. Th ese Jews did not typically leave behind memoirs or journals that might indicate how and what media they consumed during their lifetime. Due to a lack of data from this realm, I must substantiate my thesis further by investigating other avenues. In the following, I discuss four types of evidence that support my claim that this portion of the Jewish population read general, non-Jewish newspapers. For the fi rst example, let us refer back to the Kessler case. Jewish newspapers essentially provided no coverage of the case. We fi nd an exception to this omis- sion in the Jewish newspaper Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, which briefl y dealt This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.