UCLA

From the 1830s through the end of the 1850s, with a brief respite in 1848, the press of Vienna was censored by the Habsburg state. Despite censorial restrictions, Viennese journalists expanded the press industry during these years such that by the end of the 1850s the Habsburg capital was home to a major, flourishing commercial press. In the midst of these developments, the majority of Viennese journalists labored to define journalism as a wholly masculine profession—one in which women might participate as readers but would rarely work as contributors. Thanks to this effort, most people came to believe that the “ideal” journalist ought to be male and ought to behave according to specific norms that were viewed as masculine.

Simultaneous to the rise of the masculine press, a growing group of young Jewish men arrived in Vienna from other Habsburg provinces in search of new professional and social opportunities. For social and economic reasons, many of these Jewish men became involved in the local press. Despite ongoing discrimination by the state, many of these Jewish men quickly became well-known journalists and newspaper editors. By the 1840s the association between “Jew” and “journalism” had been adopted at a colloquial and professional level: people connected the profession of journalism with Jewish men.

With the association between Jewish men and journalism in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna in mind, this dissertation explores two intertwined questions. First, what forms of masculinity came to be associated with the image of the journalist between 1837 and 1859, and how did the norms change? Second, what role did Jewish men, as leading Viennese journalists and newspaper editors, play in shaping forms of masculinity in journalism during this period? In asking these questions, I am able to explore the possibility that Jewish men of the mid-nineteenth century were not only participants but in fact forerunners who defined and shaped the attitudes and behaviors associated with journalists in Vienna. Broadly, this allows me to investigate how minorities or discriminated populations could become leading representatives of specific modes of behavior among a majority population in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire.

The argument presented in this study is twofold. First, Jewish male journalists in Vienna sought to gain entry in Viennese professional and social circles by adopting masculine practices that were considered desirable for members of the Viennese professional middle class of the mid-nineteenth-century. During this period, when anti-Jewish sentiment among the professional middle class was relatively low, those Jewish men who successfully negotiated and deployed these practices were often able to find acceptance and respect in non-Jewish professional circles. Second, as Jewish journalists became leaders in the press industry, they used journalism as a venue to publicly broadcast their masculine behaviors. In so doing, they increasingly came to define the forms of masculinity that dominated the image of the journalist. Jewish journalists were, therefore, crucial participants in the effort to define journalism as a male pursuit and the effort to determine how manliness, or masculinity, was articulated through the press in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna. In the 1830s through the 1850s, many Jews were viewed by their professional, non-Jewish peers as positive examples of appropriate masculinity in journalism. This was the case even as Jews increasingly had to counter anti-Jewish, hostile claims about their masculinity after the 1848 uprisings. This study explores four modes of masculinity—the “literary man,” the “popular man,” the “political man,” and the “business-man”—that dominated perceptions of the figure of the journalist between 1837 and 1859 and the involvement of Jewish men in developing these modes.