The study sets out (a) to give an in-depth account of the discursive implications of the complex terms 'Judaism', 'modern' and feuilleton (arts pages) against the background of present-day theories of modernity, alterity and the history of aesthetics, and (b) to demonstrate the interdependency of discourses on politics and literary aesthetics with reference to concrete texts. The analysis of selected Viennese feuilletons (the corpus comprises texts by Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Ferdinand Kürnberger, Sigmund Schlesinger, Friedrich Schlögl, Karl Landsteiner, Betty Paoli, Daniel Spitzer, Ludwig Speidel and Theodor Herzl) concentrates on the strategies of literarization employed by bourgeois-liberal journalism in its persistently conservative phase to bolster the concepts of identity informing it.