The Schnorrer and the Parvenu Jews, Tailoring and the Performance of Respectability

This lecture examines Yiddish-speaking Jews beyond the general stereotype of the ‘Schnorrer’ in tattered clothing—the sartorial reflection of a character who was perceived to be both unsophisticated and morally defective. At the turn of the twentieth century, Yiddish-speaking men, in east-central European as well as the countries of migration, were often characterised as slovenly, dishevelled beggars in the contemporary antisemitic literature. Elsewhere in popular literature they were depicted as otherworldly Hasidim, whose dress patterns harken back to an earlier period of male sartorial splendour and effeminate display. These men, however, did not simply reproduce the conventions of bourgeois sartorial respectability. Even when well off and ‘well dressed’, they cannot simply be situated within generalised contemporary European ideals of masculine sartorial sobriety. With reference to photography and Yiddish-language press and advice literature, and scholarship on the tailored suit, this paper will explore questions of dress, Jewishness and the performance of respectability. In examining to patterns of Jewish male clothing consumption and performance of masculinity, this paper seeks a new understanding of the function of clothing in the context of modern male Jewish subjectivities during a period of political and social change, both within Jewish communities and their wider societies. Speaker Jonathan C. Kaplan-Wajselbaum is a senior educator and research manager at the Sydney Jewish Museum and adjunct fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, where he was awarded his doctorate in 2019. His research examines the function of clothing as a tool for self-fashioning and performance of modern, male Jewish subjectivities in central Europe at the fin de siècle . His recent monograph, Jews in Suits: Men’s Dress in Vienna, 1890–1938 was published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2023). Jonathan is the Parkes Institute Visiting Fellow for 2025-2026