Abstract
Jewish entrepreneurs have been remarkably present in all branches of the international film industry since the early 1910s, in the US as well as in Europe. This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the Jewish community and the film industry by focussing on the entrepreneurship of Jewish
... read more
cinema owners and film distributors in the Netherlands during the interwar period. Between 1918 and 1940 Jews were both quantitatively and qualitatively overrepresented in the Dutch film business compared to their 2% share in the working population.How can we explain the concentration of this minority group in the Dutch film business during this era, and did it matter at all that these entrepreneurs were Jewish and to whom? The central aim of this dissertation is to point out in what ways and to what extent Jewish identity, or the ethno-cultural minority position attached to it, affected the economic opportunities, activities and strategies of the Jewish entrepreneurs, and indirectly the film business. To get this insight, concrete economic activities of these entrepreneurs are analyzed in a group portrait. The focus is on so-called ‘external entrepreneurial strategies’. The study shows that the number of Jewish entrepreneurs in the Dutch film industry grew explosively between 1910 and 1918, due to a combination of political, economic and social circumstances that coincided in this specific development stage of the film business. A small Jewish minority became extremely visible for outsiders and within the industry itself. This led to a public image of the film sector as a predominantly Jewish business, even though the majority of film entrepreneurs in the Netherlands was still Catholic, and even though Jewish entrepreneurs hardly ever stressed their Jewish descent explicitly in public. Presumably in reaction to latent anti-Semitism that occasionally came to the surface on the one hand, and the perceived inferiority of the film sector on the other, Jewish film entrepreneurs put in fact an extraordinary amount of effort in demonstrating that they were above all decent, respectable, truly Dutch and ‘neutral’ entrepreneurs. Indirectly, Jewish identity influenced the way these entrepreneurs presented themselves in pillarized society. Jewish identity influenced entrepreneurship more directly in the formation of different Jewish entrepreneurial networks in the film sector based on common Jewish social backgrounds. And although the impact of Jewish traditions on daily economic activities proved to be very limited in general, a group of Jewish film entrepreneurs did integrate specific Jewish causes, such as Jewish Holidays, in their entrepreneurial activities, especially Eastern-European Jews. Within the Jewish community itself they presented themselves explicitly as Jewish entrepreneurs. The balance between expressing and not expressing Jewish identity in daily entrepreneurship was very much determined by the highly differentiated personal and social Jewish backgrounds of the film entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and the composition of the local environments in which they operated. It was also influenced by broader developments in the perception of the Jewish minority in society as a whole, such as the increasing stigmatisation of the Jewish minority in the 1930s
show less
