Seite - 113 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 113 that he did not participate much in the way of a religious lifestyle. At any rate, I have not found any evidence that would suggest otherwise. Even in his farces he does not portray the Jewishness of his protagonists by way of religious plotlines. However, Hirsch organized Purim celebrations with his ensemble.144 Th ese cel- ebrations, I argue, indicate a connection to Jewish tradition. We may therefore make the logical conclusion that Hirsch was a part of not only a “community of Jewish solidarity” and a “Jewish performance community,” but also a “Jewish cultural community.” In this context, it is worth noting that Hirsch produced the play Wrestlers at the Kosher Restaurant in the autumn of 1900 on the occasion of a Simchat T orah celebration that took place in the fi fteenth district of Vienna.145 Hirsch’s Jewish self-understanding was fragmented. Th is sense of Jewishness manifested itself in his participation in various Jewish communities. It is there- fore not possible to speak of Hirsch’s Jewish self-understanding in general terms, as he does not seem to have personally possessed a unifi ed or holistic concept of Jewishness. Instead, he displayed various facets of it. And he expressed these facets performatively, as they manifested themselves in his actions. Conclusion In recent years, some scholars have begun to recognize the topic “Jews in popular culture” as a lacuna in historical research and have as a result been determined to engage with the theme more intensively and thoroughly. Although they have often employed a vague defi nition of popular culture and have refl ected in part only on the Jewish rather than on the general aspects of popular culture, they have nonetheless acknowledged its importance for Jewish–non-Jewish interac- tions.146 Hirsch was already aware in the late nineteenth century of what some historians have just now begun to discern, namely the advantageous role of pop- ular culture in the formation of community between Jews and non-Jews. Within the framework of popular culture, he provides a keen example of the subject we analyze today. In many respects, the Volkssänger war, which I have described in detail in this chapter, provides an eye-opening look into the history of Viennese Jews. Th e confl ict not only supports the claim that close ties existed between Jewish and non-Jewish performing artists and that there was no binary categorization separating them, but it also demonstrates that the terms of Jewish adaptation or integration frequently employed in historiography represent problematic ana- lytical instruments that cannot adequately describe the close social ties between Jews and non-Jews and their joint formation of cultural processes. My analysis of the Volkssänger dispute thus substantiates my thesis, formulated in the fi rst chapter, that the prominence of the acculturation narrative in historiographical accounts of Jews makes a scholarly treatment of popular culture diffi cult. Albert This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.