Seite - 35 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 35 As it stands, the coverge in Jewish and general news outlets overlapped and com- plemented each other to some extent. And this overlap was probably the reason why there were hardly any reports related to popular cultural performances in Jewish print media. Variations in the Interpretation of Events In summary, a review of Jewish newspapers indicates that religious issues, their associations and organizations, and the need to defend against antisemitism were of considerable signifi cance to the Jews of the Habsburg metropolis. Th is seems to imply that Viennese everyday life was not relevant to the city’s Jewish population. However, we must juxtapose this claim with evidence that they read and received general media. It suggests that Jews, at least a majority of them, exhibited con- siderable interest in their social environment. Th ey did not live secluded in their own world, nor did they display indiff erence to events outside their immediate everyday milieu. And because Jews consumed general media, I argue that Jewish newspapers were able to concentrate their news coverage on those areas that the general press did not cover. At any rate, Viennese popular culture was not one of these areas. For this reason, historians who only analyze Jewish media in their research on the history of Viennese Jews fi nd little evidence of their involvement in popular cultural activities. Th is circumstance is likely to be one of the reasons why scholars have tended to neglect this topic in their studies. Th e media consumption habits of Viennese Jews allow us to see that they were informed about current events and were familiar with social trends, standards of value, and intellectual ideas. Like non-Jews, they took interest in contemporary discourses and also helped shape them. And their everyday expectations may have been similar to those of non-Jews in many ways. Nevertheless, diff erences remained between them. Th ese diff erences manifested themselves in many ways and were not necessarily based on religion. We see one of these diff erences at the beginning of the twentieth century in the interpretation of cantor performances in Viennese synagogues, about which both Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers wrote. A comparison of respective reports reveals clear distinctions in the inter- pretation of these performances. Th e singing skills and performances of cantors have often inspired worshippers. But what traditional Jews perceived as a novelty in nineteenth-century Vienna, however, was the spectacular character associated with many such performances and the reactions of some worshippers who saw them only as entertainment, di- vorced from any religious content. Some Jewish newspapers strongly condemned this development. Th ey warned that the synagogue would become a theater or concert hall and that many people would only attend to be entertained.115 Th is criticism was formulated, for example, on the occasion of the perfor- mance of a Hungarian cantor in the Leop oldstadt Temple. Th e cantor in question This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.