Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalance in Weimar Germany

Longing, Belonging, and the

Making of Jewish Consumer Culture

IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA

Conference Proceedings

of the Institute of Jewish Studies,

University College London

Series Editors

Markham J. GellerFrançois Guesnet

Ada Rapoport-Albert

VOLUME 11

Longing, Belonging, and the

Making of Jewish Consumer Culture

Edited by

Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer

LEIDEN • BOSTON

2010

ISSN 1570-1581ISBN 978 90 04 18603 3

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

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printed in the netherlands

These volumes are based on the international conference series of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London. Issues are thematic, 250–450 pages in length, in English, plus at most two papers in one other language per volume.

Volumes focus on signi� cant themes relating to Jewish civilisation, and bring together from different countries, often for the � rst time, eminent scholars working in the same or allied � elds of research.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Longing, belonging, and the making of Jewish consumer culture / edited by Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer.—[1st ed.]. p. cm. — (IJS studies in Judaica ; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18603-3 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish consumers. 2. Consumer behavior. 3. Judaism and culture. 4. Consumers—Attitudes. 5. Jews—Identity. 6. Jews—Social life and customs. 7. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects. 8. Consumption (Economics)—Religious aspects—Judaism. I. Reuveni, Gideon. II. Roemer, Nils H. III. Title. IV. Series.

HF5415.332.J49L66 2010 306.3089’924–dc22

2010012345

Dedicated to the memory of Helen Lee z”l

By her loving husband, children and grandchildren

Committed to instilling her own values into future generations, may her integrity, devotion to communal service and exemplary life be a

source of lasting inspiration to all who knew her

CONTENTS

Notes on the Contributors ......................................................... ix

Introduction: Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture .................................................................. 1Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni

Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective .............................................................................. 23David Biale

German-Jewish Spatial Cultures: Consuming and Refashioning Jewish Belonging in Berlin, 1890–1910 .......... 39Sarah E. Wobick-Segev

Jewish Identity, Mass Consumption, and Modern Design ....... 61Elana Shapira

Longing and Belonging: French Impressionism and Jewish Patronage ................................................................................ 91Veronica Grodzinski

Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalence in Weimar Germany .......................................... 113Gideon Reuveni

Jews as Consumers and Providers in Provincial Towns: The Example of Linz and Salzburg, 1900–1938 .......................... 139Michael John

How to Cook in Palestine: Kurfürstendamm Meets Rehov Ben Jehuda .............................................................................. 163Joachim Schlör

Di toyre fun skhoyre, or, I Shop, Therefore I Am: The Consumer Cultures of American Jews ..................................................... 183Jeffrey Shandler

Consuming Identities: German-Jewish Performativity after the “Schoah” ................................................................................. 201David Brenner

Index ........................................................................................... 227

viii contents

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Califor-nia at Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Blood and Belief: The

Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007), and Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of Cultures of the

Jews: A New History (Schocken Books, 2002) and, together with Robert Westman, Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein (University of Toronto Press, 2008). [email protected]

David Brenner is Director of the Houston Teachers Institute at the University of Houston, where he also serves as an Assistant Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the author of two books, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und

West (1998) and German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s

Kitsch (2008). His translation of Niklas Luhmann’s Religion der Gesellschaft will appear in 2011 with Stanford University Press. In addition, he has published numerous articles and chapters on topics in European and Jewish literary and cultural history. Presently he is working on a book about Holocaust and genocide education. [email protected]

Veronica Grodzinski is a historian, an independent scholar and writer living in London. In the 60s she studied sociology at the Frankfurt School of the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. She obtained her M.A. and Ph.D. in modern Jewish history at University College London. As an independent scholar, she has lectured and published in Jewish History and Culture over the last 20 years. Her articles have appeared in the academic and non-academic press and in art and cultural magazines, in the United Kingdom and abroad. Her main interests are Jewish culture and Jewish comparative culture across European countries, with a particular focus on social history, the arts, patronage and philanthropy, modern and contemporary museums and exhibitions. [email protected]

x notes on the contributors

Michael John studied history and political science at the University of Vienna, then he worked as historian in Vienna. Since 2001 he has been professor of social and economic history at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His main subjects are: migration and eth-nicity in Austria, biographical research, oral history/video history, his-tory of minorities, Jewish history. He is the author of several book contributions and articles concerning Jewish entrepreneurs in Central European economies, especially focusing on the topic “Aryanization” and restitution of Jewish property in Austria. [email protected]

Gideon Reuveni is a Lecturer in modern European and Jewish history at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Reading Germany:

Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (2006) and the co-editor of several other books on different aspects of Jewish history. His current area of research is the intersection of Jewish history and eco-nomics. Presently he is working on a book on consumer culture and the making of Jewish identity in Europe. [email protected]

Nils Roemer is Full Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Jewish Scholarship and Culture in

Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005) and numer-ous articles on modern Jewish history; he is also co-editor of German

History from the Margins (2006); Jüdische Geschichte lesen: Texte der jüdischen

Geschichts schreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2003). His forthcoming publications include German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (2010) and several co-edited volumes. His special � elds of interest are Jewish cultural and intellectual history, addressing questions of popu-lar culture and cultural memory. [email protected]

Joachim Schlör is Professor for Modern Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and Director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southamp-ton. He has published widely in the � elds of Urban History, German-Jewish history, and German-Jewish migration to Palestine; his latest book is Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822–1938 (Göttingen, 2005). He is currently working on a biographical study of the writer and translator Robert Gilbert (1899–1978). [email protected]

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His books include Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular

notes on the contributors xi

Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), While America

Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999), and (with J. Hoberman) Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003), among other titles. Shandler is cur-rently studying inventory as a practice of modern Jewish life. He lives in New York City. [email protected]

Elana Shapira is a freelance art historian living in Vienna. She lectures in the art history department of Vienna University and in the Design History and Design Theory Institute of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Most recently she published “Tailored Authorship: Adolf Loos and the Ethos of Men’s Fashion,” in: Leben-Mit-Loos (2008); and “Gaze and Spectacle in the Calibration of Class and Gender: Visual Culture in Vienna 1900,” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from

the 18th to the 21st Century (2009). She is currently working on a book on Jewish Culture and the Visual Arts in Vienna and Berlin around 1910. [email protected]

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a George L. Mosse fellow in Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently � nishing her doctoral dissertation, a comparative study on Jewish sites of sociability in Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg/Leningrad from the 1890s to the 1950s. She has several articles currently in press and has most recently published “Interdit de café. L’in� uence de la révolution de Juillet sur la condition des Juifs de Hambourg” in Les Cahiers du Judaïsme.

[email protected]

ADVERTISING, JEWISH ETHNIC MARKETING, AND CONSUMER AMBIVALENCE IN WEIMAR GERMANY

Gideon Reuveni

Modern shopping spaces have become receptacles of various goods and services associated with different cultures, making shopping per-haps the most profound and tangible experience of present-day mul-ticulturalism. This marketplace cultural diversity is best represented in the food industry. By introducing so-called ethnic or multicultural products to a wider, unde� ned consumer market, food manufactures and wholesales suppliers implemented a new marketing regime aimed at making commodities available to consumers beyond the speci� c group or cultural circle with whom these products were normally asso-ciated. It is no surprise, then, that present-day shoppers “act as skilled navigators who frequently engage in cultural swapping to sample the many tastes, themes and sounds of different cultures.”1

The rapid growth of certi� ed kosher products is a profound illustra-tion of this multicultural marketing development. According to some estimations, what was a $35 billion industry in 1994 has grown to $165 billion in less than ten years, offering in 2005 more than 90,000 certi� ed kosher products in the United States. In light of these � gures, it is becoming dif� cult not to buy kosher products these days. To be sure, not only observant Jews buy kosher. According to one consumer survey from 2003, twenty-eight percent of Americans said they have knowingly bought a kosher product and only eight percent of those did so for religious reasons.2 Shilling for his new namesake brand of kosher lactose-free cheesecake, comedian Jackie Mason suggested that the

1 Ahmad Jamal, “Marketing in a Multicultural World: The Interplay of Market-ing, Ethnicity and Consumption,” European Journal of Marketing, 37 no. 11/12 (2003), 1599. Cf. also on this: Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J. Bamossy eds., Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

2 Vicky Hallett, “Bring Home the Kosher Bacon,” (11.2.2003) US News & World Report, available online: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/ 031110/ 10kosher.div.htm.

114 gideon reuveni

success story of kosher marketing is connected to the growing aware-ness regarding the food we eat. “Gentiles,” he drolly claimed, “have � nally learned that Jews make food with no junk, dirt, or garbage.”3

Although there is no guarantee that kosher supervision makes prod-ucts any more hygienic or wholesome, the word has become another marketing term that appears on labels along with “organic,” “all natural,” “no preservatives,” and “gluten-free”.4 Indeed, the assumed connection between health and kosher may be a myth, but as many marketing experts now proclaim—it is a myth that endorses sales.5

The emergence of a marketing regime that advances cultural dif-ferences by simulating the diverse needs of different consumer groups, while at the same time making this allegedly distinct demand available to a wider consumer market, conforms to Jean Baudrillard’s obser-vations regarding the changing relationship between production and consumption. Today, Baudrillard observes, capital does not only have to produce goods assuming that consumption will run by itself, “it is [also] necessary to produce consumers . . . [and] demand.”6 According to Baudrillard, the breakdown of the seemingly logical relationship between production and consumption is an upshot of the overpro-duction of meaning, creating a new order “which is no longer that of either production, or consumption, but that of the simulation of both.”7 For Baudrillard, this shift towards the production of demand represents the beginning of a new “postmodern” era in which “the principle of simulation, and not of reality . . . regulates social life.”8

It is, however, questionable as to whether such a strict categorical distinction between production and consumption ever existed. Indeed, as Daniel Miller noted, cultural critics like Baudrillard are inclined

3 Ibid. On this see also Seth Wolitz, The Renaissance in Kosher Cuisine: From Ethnicity to Universality ( Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1999).

4 Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000), 111–117, as well as Frederick Kaufman, “The Secret Ingredient: Keep-ing the World Kosher,” Harper’s Magazine ( January 2005), 75–81.

5 On this see: Mintel Kosher Foods Market report from 2003, available online at http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=862026&xs=r#pagetop; and the page ‘Kosherization of the World’ of the Molokane website http://www.molokane.org/molokan/Dogma/Kosherization_World.html#1.

6 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotex(e), 1983), 27.7 Ibid. 89, as well as in his “Simulacra and Simulations,” in: Selected Writings, trans.

by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. 8 Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” in Selected Writings, trans.

by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 120. On this see also: Michael Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sega, 1991).

advertising, jewish ethnic marketing 115

to “write about consumption as though contemporary society were a decline from some earlier state in which our main relationship to objects was constructed through some form of utility or need” rather than merely as an activity to communicate meaning.9 From a histori-cal point of view, the relationship between production and consump-tion, or between economy and culture for that matter, is much more complex and manifold than suggested by critics of consumption.10

The complexity of this relationship is best represented when exam-ining the interplay between producers and consumers in term of power relations.11 The question of how and who determines supply is perhaps the key issue in this relationship. While producers typi-cally display themselves as subordinated to the � oating demand of consumers, they also sought ways, whenever possible, to stimulate consumption by enhancing the symbolic value of their products. A salient expression of this development is the introduction of special marketing campaigns designed to promote different products and ser-vices for Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this paper I will explore what is perhaps the most profound expression of this marketing campaign—the advertisement. This examination will sug-gest that consumer culture not only provided new venues to imagine cultural belonging beyond existing domination of political and cultural differences, but also insinuated ways in which Jews were expected to practice their Jewishness.

The discussion will be broken into three sections. First, I will address the question of Jews as consumers, suggesting that the so-called renais-sance of Jewish life after the Great War was, among other things, a product of the unfolding consumer culture at that time. The following section will turn to the advertisement sections of the Jewish press and examine how targeting Jews as consumers facilitated a sense of belong-ing to a wider consumer public. This discussion will further suggest that while approaching Jews as consumers promoted a Jewish self-understanding based on heterogeneous elements taken from a diversity of cultural representations and practices, it also facilitated a feeling of

9 Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995), 26.10 In the last few years we have witnessed a wave of new work trying to conceptual-

ize the relations between culture and economy. A prominent example is Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds., Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2006).

11 For more on this notion, see: Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).

116 gideon reuveni

confusion and ambivalence among Jewish consumers that now had to consolidate these different notions of belonging. The concluding section of this discussion will address so-called Jewish advertisements explor-ing the process by which advertisers rendered their products “Jewish” in order to appeal to the allegedly special needs and demands of Jew-ish consumers. By focusing on advertisements for kosher food as well as on the special promotion campaigns prior to Jewish holidays, this section will further the discussion on the notion of consumer ambiva-lence.12 It will propose that the introduction of “Jewish” products to the marketplace cannot be conceptualized merely as an upshot of the emergence of new regimes of consumer culture that acknowledged and facilitated Jewish distinctiveness.13 In the period before 1933, con-solidating a Jewish culture of origin was a highly charged matter as Jews were continuingly confronted with questions regarding belonging. Thus it seems that ethnic-niche marketing fostered feelings of ambiva-lence among Jewish consumers—rendering them, as Hannah Arendt once noted, with “an empty sense of being different.”14

Jews as Consumers

The accepted explanations for the rapid process of embourgeoisement and “assimilation” of Germany’s Jews during the nineteenth century include the aspirations to integrate into German society and the claims for equating Jewish tradition with bourgeois values. This process, as some historians maintain, resulting in more than the loss of Jewish identity, led in fact to the reconsolidation of the Jewish minority as a discrete sociocultural group that, while admittedly modern and non-traditional, was essentially Jewish.15 In this context, consumption was conceptualized mainly in the framework of the bourgeoisie society. The Jews’ conspicuous interest in the consumption of high culture, especially, suggested that they should be considered as a bourgeois

12 On the notion of consumer ambivalence see: Cele Otnes, Tina M. Lowrey, L. J. Shrum, “Toward an Understanding of Consumer Ambivalence,” The Journal of Con-sumer Research, 24 (1997), 80–93.

13 Alon Con� no and Rudi Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History,” German History, 19, no. 2 (2001), 135–61.

14 Hannah Arendt, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946), 30. 15 Shulamit Volkov, The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites [in Hebrew] (Tel

Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 189.


group that was simultaneously modern and Jewish.16 According to this approach, the embracing of the bourgeois lifestyle should no longer be considered as a group of processes that led to the dissolution of a Jewish sphere, but as a way in which mutually nurturing components created a distinctive Jewish identity that de� ned itself in societal and cultural terms, not only in religious or ethnic terms. Much more atten-tion should be given, then, to Jews as ordinary consumers or to the way consumer culture related to Jews as Jews.

Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, an example of this culturally directed examination, investigates a proc-ess of structuring Jewish identity that is based more on culture than on religion. He argues that the “Jewish renaissance in literature, art, music, and scholarship was no return to traditional Judaism but an attempt to integrate selected aspects of this tradition into the frame-work of a modern secular culture.”17 The rediscovery of Jewish life and the search for Jewish community, or Gemeinschaft, after the First World War is displayed here as an answer to the dilemmas of mod-ern Judaism that was torn between the cultural ideals of the majority society and the determination to express cultural distinctiveness. Bren-ner’s study of Weimar Jewry is a profound manifestation of a prevail-ing approach that treats Jews not as objects, but as subjects of their history. In his account, Jews are active and conscious participants in the refashioning of Jewish life. A process that he eloquently describes as a shift from the so-called non-Jewish German Jew that strove to integrate into the majority society to the ‘authentic’ Jewish-Jew that struggled to secure Jewish survival in the modern world.

Without undermining the issue of Jewish agency, however, we must be aware that in order to grasp the advance of a distinctive sense of Jewishness we should also consider social processes that go beyond the process of emancipation, the in� uence of antisemitism, or the search for Jewish authenticity. Thus, I propose to consider more carefully developments that could have facilitated cultural diversity, speci� cally the evolvement of a new consumer culture in Europe.

16 Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Cass: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a general discussion of civil society and German Jews see: Till van Rahden, “Jews and the Ambivalence of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessments and Reassessments,” Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 1024–47.

17 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 21.

118 gideon reuveni

Consumer culture, as a social arrangement in which structures of meaning and feeling are organized primarily around the act of pur-chase, contributed immensely to the process of standardizing and homogenizing society.18 At the same time, it allowed individuals and groups to distinguish themselves through the act of buying. Studying the changing nature and dynamic of consumer cultures in the context of Jewish history reveals this multifaceted process in which minorities are able, through consumption, to maintain a separate identity while, as consumers, still feeling as part of their host societies.

Examining advertisements, a central pillar of the emerging con-sumer culture, in the Jewish press of the Weimar period illustrates this development.19 As we shall see, both Jewish and non-Jewish advertis-ers apparently saw Jews as a de� ned target group for which products and services were advertised. Consumption, in this way, encouraged and maintained a distinctive Jewish sphere. As the following discus-sion will also show, Jews were considered to be a bourgeois group and an af� uent section of the consumer public. In these terms, they were an integral part of the bourgeoisie. Thus, the primary element that differentiated them from other consumer groups was their religious af� liation, not their life-style, class attribution, or even any sense of a conspicuous consumption. In other words, from the viewpoint of the consumer culture, ethnic origin and religion constituted central ele-ments in shaping Jewish distinctiveness in the modern era.

Advertisements and Consumer Ambivalence

A scrutiny of the advertising sections of the press during the Weimar period gives the present-day observer the impression that these years were full of economic vibrancy and prosperity, not of scarcity and adversity. This divide between reality as re� ected in the virtual world of advertisements and everyday life in Weimar is an integral part of the period and does not diminish the importance of advertising as a historical source. In other words, even if the prosperity presented

18 For this notion of consumption, see Victoria de Grazia’s introduction in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

19 For a similar examination of the American setting, see for example Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).


in the advertising section was out of many people’s reach, advertis-ing should not be construed as a sort of deception, or as re� ecting attempts at escapism and denial of the period’s reality. Advertising’s importance as a historical source lies in its virtual accuracy as a source of what some scholars consider as a practice of displacing meaning.20 It is through advertisements that we can learn about the values, images, and expectations of contemporaries. In this context, the advertising sections of the Jewish press were no different. There, too, a plethora of products and services were offered, though it is doubtful whether their Jewish target population, considered af� uent, could actually have afforded them. The image of the Jews as an af� uent group is central here because it obviously in� uenced the nature of the products and services advertised in the Jewish press. Indeed, the advertising pages in Jewish newspapers contain numerous advertisements for products considered luxurious—cars, pianos, life-insurance, holiday resorts, etc.—and part of a bourgeois lifestyle. However, that lifestyle was not designed especially for the Jewish consumer public and is re� ected in most commercial advertisements of the period. Many advertisements did not appear in the Jewish press only, and the majority did not target the Jewish public speci� cally. Advertisements placed in the Jewish press were generally aimed at an anonymous target group and, in principle, could have been published in almost any newspaper. “For those with re� ned taste” (Für Feinschmecker) or “Those who know buy . . .” (Kenner

kaufen) were neutral phrases of this type, intended to evoke a sense of high quality among the consumer public and to generate a feeling of belonging to a group that de� ned itself by re� ned taste and lifestyle, not necessarily by gender, social status, ethnic origin, or religion. Thus the ambition to access as large a consumer public as possible was the backdrop to the development of a system of images and a special lan-guage that could appeal to as many people as possible, drawn from different social groups. Most of the advertisements published in the Jewish press drew on that general array of concepts and also showed a tendency to adapt to the needs of the majority society by using the prevailing language and images.

Yet the fact that these advertisements were placed in Jewish news-papers is not insigni� cant. The editorial sections of the Jewish press,

20 On the notion of displacing meaning see: Grant McCracken, Culture and Consump-tion: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 104–17.

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especially during the Weimar years, were preoccupied with discussion of Jewish exclusion.21 Thus the use of these surfaces for commercial advertisements could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of a dis-tinct Jewish space suggesting a regime of identities in which Jews were introduced to a variety of lifestyles and cultural af� liations that seemed to complement each other rather than contest existing notions of Jew-ishness. Looking at one advertisement page from 1927 will hopefully illustrate this point (see Image 1). Here we see an advertisement for Mercedes-Benz, showing the company’s logo while the Mercedes cars are driven across Germany, which is presented in its pre-WWI bor-ders. This advertisement displays the car as modern and dynamic. It also seems to address nationalistic sentiments suggesting that driv-ing a Mercedes-Benz will retrieve Germany’s sense of unity and lost pride. This automobile advertisement appeared in a Jewish newspa-per beside an ad for kosher margarine and lessons in New Hebrew. This advertisement page composition, referring simultaneously to Jew-ish religious requirements, new notions of Jewish culture of origins as represented by New Hebrew, and to German nationalistic sentiments as well as general notions of modernity, seem to allude to how Jews were embraced as consumers, and conversely how they could develop a sense of belonging to a wider consumer community as Jews.

That said, the question of the contrast between the editorial section’s emphasis on exclusion, and the acceptance and integration revealed on the advertisement page, becomes even more puzzling. Indeed, this tension is best represented in the research of German-Jewish history that tends to oscillate between approaches stressing inclusion and those highlighting exclusion, re� ecting to a large degree debates of contem-poraries on these issues.22

Notwithstanding the signi� cance of the question as to whether Jews were more included or excluded, it appears to me that the very presence of this binary opposition, and the fact that contemporaries conceptualized their realities in such terms, points to what is perhaps

21 On the growing Antisemitism during that time period, see: Dirk Walter, Antisemi-tische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999); Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 2003); Nicola Wenge, Integration und Ausgrenzung in der städtischen Gesellschaft. Eine jüdisch-nichtjüdische Beziehungsgeschichte Kölns 1918–1933 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2005).

22 Gideon Reuveni, “Productivist and Consumerist Narratives Regarding Jews in German History,” in: Mark Roseman, Neil Gregor and Nils Roemer, eds., German History from the Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 165–85.


the most determining experience of Jews in the modern society. Jews felt that they were held in a state of suspension between acceptance and exclusion.

Giving the signi� cance of this experience of ambivalence, we should not be tempted to consider the tension between the editorial pages and the advertisement surfaces merely as a re� ection of the contrast between integration and discrimination. As the historian Till van Rah-den demonstrated in a recent review essay, “the interplay between inclusion and exclusion is thus central for any examination of the Jewish middle class [experience].”23 The advertisement sections as well should be read in these terms, suggesting that the experience of ambivalence informed how Jews felt and presumably even behaved as

23 Van Rahden, Jews and the Ambivalence, 1033.

Image 1. Mercedes-Benz Advertisement alongside advertisements for Kosher margarine and New Hebrew.

122 gideon reuveni

consumers. Thus, the advertisement page we discussed above appears to suggest that, as consumers, Jews experienced a kind of multiple emotional state since they were confronted with seemingly contrasting and different cultural af� liations promoted by these advertisements. This experience of consumer ambivalence becomes even more evident when examining advertisements that were speci� cally designed to tar-get Jews as a discrete consumer group.

Jewish Advertisements

The products and services themselves and the way they were marketed to the Jewish people reveal the standardizing tendency of the con-sumer culture and the inclusion of the Jews into the majority society as consumers. This process, as Leora Auslander has recently suggested, might explain the absence of a distinctive Jewish taste.24 Nonetheless, numerous advertisements consciously targeted a Jewish consumer public, nurturing a distinct Jewish identity. Advertisements of that kind may be grouped into two categories: (1) advertisements for products and services that a priori were aimed solely at the Jewish consumer public and (2) advertisements for products and services that were pro-moted to accord with the speci� c needs of the Jewish public, or at least attract their attention. Among the � rst type were uniquely Jewish products, such as religious articles, Haggadoth, matzoth, Hanukkah candles, and so forth. But the second type of advertising presented a broader and far more diverse range of products and services.

First and foremost, the second category was the kosher products sector. A study of the advertising sections in Jewish newspapers shows that the words “kosher” or “kosher for Passover,” generally written in Hebrew, were one of the distinguishing trademarks of advertise-ment pages in the Jewish press that differentiated them graphically from those in the general newspapers. Every Jewish newspaper of the period featured advertisements for kosher bakeries, for butchers using kosher slaughter methods, and for chain stores, like the famed

24 Leora Auslander, “ ‘Jewish Taste?’ Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1920–1942,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 299–318.


Herman Tietz department stores, which contained special sections for kosher products (Image 2).

The name of the rabbi who had granted the hechsher often appeared beside the word “kosher,” although this vital information for obser-vant Jews was not featured prominently in the advertisements. In this context, it is worth devoting some time to the role of advertisements for industrially manufactured foods intended for mass consumption. More than any other product, these were instrumental in nurturing an essentialist approach to Jewish identity that considered the Jews, despite being dispersed in different places, as a uni� ed group with a coherent identity based on a clear set of parameters constituting being Jewish.

Margarine is the most famous of the industrially manufactured foods. The � rst kosher vegetarian margarine, named “Tomor,” appeared in 1904. It was produced by Van den Bergh’s, a Dutch corporation with a German branch in Kleve. Van den Bergh’s founder was a Dutch industrialist, Simon van den Bergh (1819–1907), who was an observant Jew.

The origin of the name Tomor is unclear, but it may reasonably be assumed that, like many other brands of vegetarian margarine introduced prior to WWI, such as Palmin and Palmona, the name

Image 2. Ad for Kosher products at the Tietz department store in Berlin.

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Image 3. The Tomor Kashrot certi� cation mark.

“Tomor” hinted at margarine’s derivation from the palm tree, that is Tamar in Hebrew, and Tomor if we use the Ashkenazy pronunciation of Hebrew. Choosing the name “Tomor” awarded a hint of exoticism to margarine and attested to the product’s target population—the Jew-ish consumer population. The van den Bergh brothers, who managed the corporation in the early twentieth century, were well aware of the special problems of the Jewish kitchen and of kosher margarine’s eco-nomic potential among Jewish consumers in Central Europe. Accord-ingly, the Jewish way of life was highlighted in Tomor margarine’s marketing campaign. Paintings by the famous German-Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1799–1892) were reproduced in advertise-ments in the Jewish press, calendars, postcards and the promotional stamps enclosed with the margarine (Image 5).25

Marketing margarine as a part of traditional Jewish family life was intended to promote the sense of Jewishness among its consumers.

25 On Moritz Daniel Oppenheim see: Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002).

Image 4. Tomor Margarine.


Other methods used to encourage sales of Tomor margarine were a book of recipes from the Jewish kitchen and publications that clari� ed various issues from Jewish religious law. Since margarine was manu-factured from vegetable oil, it could be used in cooking both meat and dairy dishes. It was also presented as allowing the Jewish kitchen to broaden the range of tastes by using new recipes previously prohib-ited by the laws of kashrut. Thus, Tomor’s marketing strategy not only presented margarine as enriching and improving Jewish kitchens, but also as no less than protecting the traditional Jewish way of life from the assimilation process.26

When butter became a luxury during the 1920s, competition between margarine manufacturers for the growing consumer mar-ket intensi� ed, which bene� ted the relatively small segment of Jewish consumers. Local producers of kosher margarine were found in almost every major German city.27 One of Van den Bergh’s main rivals in the area of kosher margarine was the Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke

mbH corporation, founded in 1907 in Duisburg. A kosher margarine

26 Wolfgang Krebs, Tomor. Eine Koschere Margarine vom Niederrhein und ihre religiöse Wer-bung (Kleve: Verlag für Kultur und Technik, 2002).

27 For Instance “Ruth” and “Debora” were manufactured in the city of Frankfurt or ‘Makabi’, while “Chinom” and “Schomen” were labels marketed in Hamburg.

Image 5. Two advertisement stamps with painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim.

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called “Hadassah” was one of the � rst brands produced by the cor-poration before World War I.28 In the 1920s, it began marketing other kosher brands under the supervision of Dr. Josef Carlebach, an orthodox rabbi from Altona near Hamburg. Some of the company’s brand names were Hebrew or Yiddish derivations, such as “Matana,” “Temimo,” and “Azuma” (Image 6). Unlike van den Bergh, the own-ers of Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke were not Jews, and their interest in kosher margarine was purely commercial.

Margarine was not the only product that revealed the economic potential of the Jewish consumption market. Other products that were marketed speci� cally to the Jewish public by awarding them kashrut certi� cation were coffee and chocolate, such as “Feodora” chocolate, which is still sold in German stores. HAG coffee is an even more fascinating example of a product that received kashrut certi� cation to comply with the Jewish public’s needs—it, too, is still marketed as a brand of decaffeinated coffee.

HAG coffee’s sales promotion system was renowned for its innova-tions and originality. It was � rst marketed prior to WWI as a modern, healthy brand aimed at the broadest consumer group possible. Inevita-bly, the company’s sophisticated marketing staff discovered the Jewish consumer market and targeted it with kosher coffee. One can safely assume that this recognition of the importance of Jewish customers occurred at the period when HAG Coffee was planning to penetrate the American market, before WWI. In a letter sent in 1914 by HAG Coffee’s charismatic founder Ludwig Roselius (1874–1943) to the com-pany’s sales manager, Roselius asks him not to overlook the fact that New York is “the world’s largest Jewish city.” “The German experi-ence,” he writes, “has taught us that the Jews recognize the bene� ts of decaffeinated coffee long before others, and just as they set the tone in matters like going to the theatre and travelling to leisure resorts or spas, they will be the � rst to try decaffeinated coffee in America.”29 In Germany, a special advertising campaign for HAG coffee was aimed at the Jewish public ahead of the Passover holiday, and it apparently derived from the company’s competition with “Korinthen,” a rival decaffeinated coffee that, unlike HAG, was produced from grains and

28 On this corporation see: Stadtarchiv Duisburg, Bestand 63–28.29 A letter from Ludwig Roselius to Otto Haupt, 18.3.1914, in: HAG Archiv Bött-

cherstrasse Bremen, Kleine Archiv-Mappen.


was thus not kosher for Passover (Image 7). According to the com-pany’s in-house newspaper, HAG-Post, HAG advertised its “Coffee for Passover” in special advertisements placed in a range of Jewish news-papers every year.30

The attention devoted to the Jewish public by HAG Coffee’s mar-keting array is particularly interesting in view of the much debated � gure of Ludwig Roselius, the dynamic founder and manager of HAG Coffee. Roselius was renowned both as a smart businessman who trans-formed HAG into a worldwide brand and as an art-collector and phi-lanthropist who was involved in promoting art and culture, particularly in Bremen. Recent research has discovered Roselius’s close ties with the German right-wing of the time.31 Two people in particular in� u-enced Roselius and his endeavours—the composer Richard Wagner, whom Roselius greatly admired, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the founding fathers of racial antisemitism in Germany, with whom Roselius corresponded regularly. With the Nazi rise to power, Roselius became an ardent supporter of the new regime and, on his death in 1943, was laid to rest in a state ceremony in his hometown of

30 These papers are: CV Zeitung, Berlin; Der Israelit, Hamburg; Israelitische Wochen-schrift, Hamburg; Das jüdische Familienblatt¸ Frankfurt a.M. [assumengly the Israelitisches Familienblatt]. This list is taken from: HAG-POST, no. 3, 1. April 1927, 7, and HAG-POST, no. 4, 1. March 1927, 8.

31 Dieter P� iegensdörfer, Ludwig Roselius . . . wie ihn keiner kennt (Bremen: Universität Bremen, 1987); Arn Strohmeyer, Parsifal in Bremen. Richard Wagner, Ludwig Roselius und die Böttcherstrasse (Weimar: VDG, 2002); Nicola Vetter, Ludwig Roselius. Ein Pionier der deutschen Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2002).

Image 6. Advertisements for the kosher margarines of the Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke mbH corporation.

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Bremen.32 How could a man so close to anti-Semitic right-wing circles in Germany market his company’s � agship product with Hebrew let-tering attesting to its kosher status? It is dif� cult to propose a conclusive answer with the few sources available. Perhaps Roselius is an example of a non-anti-Semitic, right-wing, German. A more reasonable expla-nation is that, as a businessman, Roselius did his utmost to achieve the highest pro� ts for his company, in whatever situation, applying any methods. At any rate, the fact that HAG marketed coffee designated for Jewish consumers demonstrates the advertisers’ awareness to the varied needs of different target populations and the way in which they cultivated those differences in order to generate pro� ts.

But why at a time when, according to contemporary observers, the number of observant Jews in Germany as well as the signi� cance of religion in Jewish life seemed to be declining,33 do we � nd more evi-dence for the targeting of Jews as a discrete consumer group de� ned by religious needs? A key element to explain this development lies in the dynamics of the consumer culture of the Weimar period. As I showed elsewhere, the economic hardship and political instability in the years following the Great War did not undermine consumer

32 In an open letter to the HAG companies’ workers from 28 of October 1933, entitled Kaffee Hag: Ein Herz schlägt für die Reichskanzlei, Roselius expressed his ardent support for the new regime shortly after the Nazi takeover. The letter is available on: http://www.salmoxisbote.de/Bote18/Roselius.htm.

33 On this see: Alfred Marcus, Die wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden, eine soziologi-sche Untersuchung (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1931); Jacob Lestschinsky, Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums: Aufstieg, Wandlung, Krise, Ausblick (Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1932).

Image 7. The HAG ad for the Jewish press.


culture, but enhanced it.34 Advertisers were now compelled more than ever to develop new ways to stimulate consumption. One result of this innovation was the corroboration of ongoing attempts to identify and simulate potential markets. The targeting of Jews is thus based on general developments on the market place. The fact that Jews were a small, and according to some observations even a declining minority, did not undermine this marketing strategy. There are good reasons to assume that images regarding Jewish af� uence were also at play here facilitating the targeting of Jews as consumers.

Yet it would be an exaggeration to regard Jews in this context merely as a passive object subjected to external market driving forces. Although still awaiting a more systematic examination, there is ample evidence for the active involvement of Jewish advertisers in the process of generating Jewish consumption. Moreover, as distinctiveness theory today suggests “minority group consumers are more likely to spon-taneously evoke their ethnic identities when they are in a numerical minority rather than a majority in their cities.”35 The Jews were well aware of their minority status in German society, and so this assess-ment seems as much to apply to the German Jewish experience of the pre-1933 period as to present-day minority groups. Thus the claim for the right to be different is in this sense informed by the interplay between a minority and what well may be a subjective perception of a majority culture.36

In this context, another issue of particular interest arises: how the Zionist movement used consumer culture. The Zionist message underwent a visualization process that was re� ected in the image of Herzl and other Zionist leaders displayed on a variety of objects: cig-arette packets, plates and cups, carpets, embroidery, postcards and calendars.37 The Jewish National Fund distributed children’s games.

34 I elaborate on this notion of the relation between economic adversity and con-sumer culture in my Reading Germany, see especially in chapters three and four.

35 Rohit Deshpande, Douglas M. Stayman, “A Tale of Two Cities: Distinctiveness Theory and Advertising Effectiveness,” Journal of Marketing Research, 31 (1994), 57–64, here page 62.

36 Contrary to Till van Rahden, suggesting that we should “eliminate the still prev-alent distinction between majority and minority cultures,” (1042) it seems to me that only by acknowledging the minority/majority distinction, even as a subjective one, can we start appreciating the complexity of the interplay between different notions of belonging.

37 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 119–43; Kobi Cohen-

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A Biblical dolls game costing 2.5 marks, paper cut-out sheets called “Merhavim” that were sold for 0.75 pfennig each, and “Domino Pales-

tina” at 75 pfennig, are just a few examples of children’s games that were usually marketed around Hanukkah. A Jewish National Fund advertisement urged: “Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday! Give them Keren Kayemet games!” (Zionisten! Macht euren Kindern zu Chanukkah eine Freude! Schenkt Ihnen die Spiele des Keren Kajemet!) (Image 8).

In this case, we see how the Zionist movement exploited the custom of German Jewry, which was considered assimilated, of giving gifts at Hanukkah.38

The custom of gift-giving originated in the nineteenth century. At that period, high Holidays were becoming more and more family-ori-ented and were celebrated by festive meals and gift-giving. The Christ-mas holiday arguably epitomizes the “domestication” of religion and its commercialization. Historians locate that development within the framework of the accelerated modernization and embourgeoisement processes that occurred in the nineteenth century, which was marked by the separation of the public sphere from the private, of the “home” from the “outside world”.39 As a consequence, the family became not only the cornerstone of bourgeois life, but also the principal arena of events in religious life and practice. Perhaps the most de� nitive expres-sion of the “domestication of religion” was the process in which the religious context was commercialized. Two main issues were the focus of that process—the holiday meal and gift-giving.

The domestication of religion and commercialization also impacted Jewish society, which traditionally attributed a pivotal role to the family

Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Prop-aganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9 No. 1 (2004), 63–85; David Tartakover, Herzl in Pro� le: Herzl’s Image in the Applied Arts (Tel Aviv: Museum of Tel Aviv, 1979).

38 These presents were even called Chanuka-Geschenk (Hanukkah present) by the same token as Weihnachts-Geschenk (Christmas present).

39 On this process in the Jewish context and especially how it affected Jewish women see: Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebrating the Family. Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). On the process of commercialization within Christianity, see: Rodney Clapp, ed., The Consuming Passion: Christianity & the Consumer Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); Robert Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).


Image 8. Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday!

in maintaining the Jewish way of life.40 Indeed, Jewish holidays also won a central place in the well-oiled marketing array that presented the family and home as a locus that shaped and conserved the feeling of Jewishness.41

The principal focuses of that advertising campaign were the holidays of Rosh Hashana, Purim, and particularly Passover and Hanukkah.

40 Sharon Gillerman, “The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany. Social Conditions and Cultural Representations,” in: Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar, eds., In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 176–99.

41 Alain Finkielkraut even went so far as to suggest that “in Christian society, the Jewish family and Jewish nation are two indistinguishable structures: leaving one in any way means deserting the other.” In: Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 105.

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Most of the advertisements ahead of the holidays were for food prod-ucts that would be served at the festive meal. Fish, goose meat, wine, and especially baked goods and confectionery were the main items that were intended to endow each holiday with its distinctive char-acter. Flowers were another product marketed as contributing to a special holiday atmosphere. For example, using the slogan “a beautiful holiday brings pleasure and relaxation” (Ein schönes Fest bringt Ihnen Genuß und Erholung), a Leipzig � ower shop promoted the idea that � owers could transform the home into a scented, colourful place and imbued the holiday with its special atmosphere (Image 9).

A comparative study of pre-holiday advertisements shows that the menu of the Jewish holiday meal and the special means that were sup-posed to endow the home with a celebratory atmosphere and make the holiday “a sentimental event”, did not differ signi� cantly from the way holidays were celebrated in most Christian homes in the family framework, a trend that Marion Kaplan addresses in her research on the Jewish family in the Wilhelmine period.42 The language used in the advertisements attests to that similarity, particularly in the case of holidays celebrated by both faiths at the same time. We � nd phras-ing that, in principle, could appeal equally to those celebrating Jewish holidays and those celebrating the Christian ones. Passover, which the advertisements addressed simultaneously with the Hebrew term “Pes-sach” and “Ostern,” is a clear example of that � exibility, which appar-ently did not affect the holiday’s Jewishness. Paradoxically, it appears that non-Jewish enterprises made signi� cant use of the Hebrew words, as in the cases of HAG coffee (see image 7) and of the Müller optical chain in Frankfurt, whose advertisements featured the word “Pessach” (see Image 10).

The second issue on which holiday advertisements focused was the gift.43 Here we � nd advertisements phrased in general terms, such as “A camera is an appropriate gift for the holiday” (Für Festtage als pas-sende Gabe ein Photoapparat), or advertisements relating to a speci� c holiday, such as the one inserted by the famous book-shop “Kedem”

42 Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. 43 For a general survey on the different interpretations of the gift see: Aafke E.

Komter, ed., The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).


Image 9. “A beautiful holiday brings pleasure and relaxation.” An advertisement for the � ower shop Hanisch in Leipzig from the late 1920’s.

Image 10. Ad for Passover for the optician store Müller in Frankfurt a.M. This store still exists today in the very same place and has never been owned by Jews.

in Berlin—“Give books as a Purim present!” (Schenkt Bücher zu Purim!). In particular, before the Hanukkah holiday, when gift-giving became a custom, numerous advertisements for holiday presents were featured. Interestingly, the advertisements do not reveal to the reader the identity of the gift’s giver or recipient. The focus of this advertis-ing campaign was the gift itself, which was promoted as a holiday gift because of its sentimental, educational value or, alternatively, its

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practical bene� t. Records and musical instruments, toys, household appliances, books and even life insurance (see Image 11) were just a few of the products proposed as holiday gifts in the Jewish press.

Similar products and services, which re� ected the world of bourgeois values to a substantial degree, were customary gifts in the Christian majority society. The gift itself did not necessarily have any links with Judaism. Nevertheless, the fact that certain products were promoted as gifts in the speci� c context of the Jewish holiday made them objects capable of creating and reinforcing a special sense of Jewishness that was very much based on religious sentiments and a feeling of common culture origins more than on any other parameter.

Image 11. An ad of the Vienna insurance company Phönix presents their life insurance as an timely present for Chanukah.


Conclusion

Consumer culture, then, played a much greater role in forming and promoting notions of Jewishness than once thought. Exploring adver-tisements for different products and services in the Jewish press revealed this multifaceted development in which advertisers recognized Jews as a distinct group of consumers, thus creating a space that is both mod-ern and Jewish.By simulating Jewish consumption, consumer culture seemed to facili-tate a new regime of identities in which multiple co-existing culture af� liations are supposed to inform consumer behaviour. Conversely, this target marketing was no doubt instrumental in institutionalisation a Jewish culture of origin. In the period before the Nazi takeover, in particular, this development seemed to facilitate a strong sense of consumer ambivalence in which Jews were confronted with different notions regarding their belonging. To what extent this version of eth-nic-niche marketing was limited to the Jews and how, if at all, non-Jewish consumers partook in it or even were aware of its existence are important questions that we will have to address in future research.

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Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalance in Weimar Germany

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