The Rise of Popular Culture: From Folk Traditions to Mass Media

Wide Markets for Jewish Culture

A wide variety of cultural phenomena—objects, products, rites, and experiences—may be subsumed under the broad term popular culture, a term that gestures variously toward culture produced and consumed for enjoyment above all, cultural tastes and experiences sought and shared widely across class divides and even universally (as with food-related culture), cultural objects created with a guiding intent to seek a wide market, and cultural forms shared widely across a particular community. Readers will find here phenomena as various as banquet menus, cookbooks, popular songs, courtship advice, political anthems, newspaper cartoons, fresh kinds of entertainment products created by a new and increasingly global entertainment industry, and numerous other modes through which Jews of quite various sorts spent and enjoyed their free time. Common to all these cultural phenomena, whether they were created in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, is that they were products of or profoundly shaped and reshaped by the profound social upheavals, extensive urbanization, enormous economic changes, destructive wars, and mass migration experienced by millions of Jews. Both folk culture deeply rooted in long-standing practice and the rapidly expanding galaxy of new popular cultural forms born within global consumer capitalism reflected and absorbed these upheavals.

Folk culture developed gradually over the course of many generations and prevailed in all spheres of life among Jewish communities—in both religious and social collectives, many of which survived until the twentieth century as sorts of ethnic islands in a sea of divergent collectives. In contrast, mass culture was distinctly a product of modernity. Its creators—whether they were integrated into the capitalist production and marketing systems and driven by ideas of creating new kinds of products, or alternatively, they hoped to preserve what they considered “traditional” Jewish culture—fashioned for the Jewish masses unprecedented substitutes for the slowly vanishing premodern popular culture.

Users will be able to experience the acculturation of various Jewish communities that brought with them a wealth of customs, habits, tastes, and memories from their family homes but found themselves flooded with technological innovations, unfamiliar media, aggressive advertising, ideological preaching, and political propaganda. Commercially, ideologically, and politically motivated popularization did lead to the distribution of cultural products that had been virtually unknown to most of the world’s Jews before the last quarter of the nineteenth century; these included, for example, modern theater in Jewish vernacular languages (Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish) or humoristic pieces in the state-language press.

However, at the same time, agents of popular culture turned their attention to the widespread longing for a taste of traditional life and made use of the Jewish cultural consumer’s desire to belong to the collective by harnessing—to the new capitalist production line—the yearning for traces of the old cultural baggage that consumers still carried with them. This enabled them to strengthen their Jewish ethnic identity, albeit with distinctly modern tools. Words, melodies, foods, and even sacred objects that had previously been anchored to a religious context were recognized as distinct markers of a new kind of Jewish identity. They achieved symbolic status and were incorporated into the cultural industry as consumer products that preserved awareness of the past and maintained continuity. The “folk traditions” constantly cited by the producers of Jewish popular culture—sermonizers and preachers, journalists, composers, playwrights, manufacturers of Judaica, advertisers, and owners of factories for the production of Jewish food and kosher wines—thus served as a kind of packaging for the marketing of modern, urbanized versions of Judaism.

Mass Media and Popular Culture

The development of new forms of Jewish popular culture did arguably do as much to strengthen Jewish ethnic identity in the face of assimilatory social forces as it did to undermine it. However, this came at a heavy cultural cost: the heterogeneity of traditional folk culture was depleted by market forces and by the growing influence of mass media and efforts to implement ideals of national renewal and social recovery, all of which contributed to the shaping of popular culture during this period. These factors blurred differences between historical variants of customs as they amalgamated diverse elements selected from local traditions, blending them into “uniform versions.” The transition from premodern folk culture to popular mass culture affected more conservative groups in Jewish society as well. Here, however, they bore a markedly defensive character and were modified by the need to adapt new cultural products to halakhic requirements and to fit into the strict behavioral norms adopted by Orthodox communities.

At the other extreme, the emergent Jewish popular culture engaged in an intense dialogue with parallel cultures that were developing on similar lines in various countries. Jewish versions of popular culture influenced broader realms of mass culture addressed to non-Jewish audiences, even as these Jewish cultural expressions were also integrated into them. Jews took on an increasingly central role in shaping the mass culture of the entertainment industry, the press, and publishing, as they installed within the general consumer culture a fragment of the Jewish cultural world from which they had begun their journey.