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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
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Entangled Entertainers
Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Titel
- Entangled Entertainers
- Untertitel
- Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Autor
- Klaus Hödl
- Verlag
- Berghahn Books
- Datum
- 2019
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-78920-031-7
- Abmessungen
- 14.86 x 23.2 cm
- Seiten
- 196
- Kategorien
- Geschichte Vor 1918
- International
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Introduction 1
- 1. Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic 13
- 2. Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 44
- 3. Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger 78
- 4. Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 121
- 5. From Difference to Similarity 148
- Conclusion 163
- Bibliography 166
- Index 179