Rethinking the Jewish Public Sphere: The Case of the Imperial German Trade Journal Der Confectionair

Abstract This essay makes the case for re-evaluating the concept of the Jewish public sphere by using the German trade journal Der Confectionair (1886–1936) as its point of departure. Der Confectionair—renamed Der Konfektionär during the First World War—was the most widely circulated German-language publication for the textile industry during the Imperial period and the pre-eminent journal for the trade on the European continent in the interwar period. While functioning first and foremost as a mouthpiece and communal forum for German commercial clothiers, the paper also addressed issues specific to Jewish business owners and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and issues that were thought to be of interest to women readers, and perhaps Jewish women readers in particular, on the other. This essay draws on public sphere theory alongside intersectionality and uses ‘Jewishness’ as an analytic lens to understand how German-Jewish public and communal discourse operated outside of the designated Jewish public sphere of the Jewish press and explicitly Jewish organizations. In line with recent studies in central and eastern European Jewish history, it seeks to move beyond the binary of ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ for understanding the development of Jewish public culture and political communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, the essay forms an empirical contribution to the theoretical debate surrounding public spheres by homing in on their co-constructed nature.