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WORK TITLE: The Many Deaths of Jew Suss
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https://history.princeton.edu/people/yair-mintzker * http://blog.historians.org/2014/04/aha-member-spotlight-yair-mintzker/ * https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/05/30/many-deaths-jew-suss-mintzker-grapples-truth-history * https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-the-many-deaths-of-jew-suss-yair-mintzker-princeton-university-press
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LC control no.: n 2012000108
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012000108
HEADING: Mintzker, Yair
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PERSONAL
Born in Jerusalem, Israel.
EDUCATION:Tel-Aviv University, M.A., 2003; Stanford University, Ph.D., 2009.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic and historian. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor of history. DAAD fellow; Whiting Foundation fellow; Stanford Humanities Center fellow; Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton fellow; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellow.
AWARDS:Best book prize, Urban History Association, 2010, for The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Yair Mintzker is an academic and historian. Born and raised in Jerusalem, he completed a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009. Mintzker eventually became a professor of history at Princeton University, where his academic research interests cover the history of early modern Europe, cultural history, and urban history. In a blog post on the American Historical Association Website, Mintzker offered a defense of teaching in academia. He claimed: “Teaching is not a chore that distracts us from what is ‘really important.’ It is our social responsibility to share with others our research, thinking, and writing about the past.”
The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866
In 2012 Mintzker published The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866. The book aims to answer what had happened to the city walls that had once encircled German cities. Mintzker examines the lore connected to the walls and approaches the study by proposing and also challenging various answers to the disappearance of the walls.
Reviewing the book in the German Studies Review, Benjamin Marschke commented that “in an exemplary cultural study, he presents a plethora of evidence from across Germany to show how much urban dwellers identified themselves and their communities with the architecture of the walls, towers, and gates that surrounded them. The city was anthropomorphized.” Marschke appended that “in this cultural context, as Mintzker shows, the ‘disappearance’ of cities’ walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very intriguing.”
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss
Mintzker published The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew in 2017. The account looks into the 1737 trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who had served as financial adviser and master of the mint for Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg. After the duke’s death, Oppenheimer was put on trial for embezzlement, debasement of the coinage, adultery, and treason and subsequently executed in 1738 after being found guilty. Mintzker presents the case from four different perspectives: that of the judge-inquisitor who was responsible for bringing the charges against Oppenheimer; a Jewish university lecturer who met and talked with Oppenheimer the day before his execution; a Jewish notable who wrote Oppenheimer’s only contemporary biography; and a German author who wrote several popular stories of Oppenheimer and his trial.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “this fascinating intellectual journey deserves a wide audience outside the academic scope of the book.” Writing in Literary Review, Jonathan Steinberg observed that “at the end of each chapter, Mintzker answers methodological questions and defends his technique in a dialogue with an imaginary critic who raises doubts and difficulties. Whatever approximation to the truth the polyphonic method yields, it brings the society and its protagonists to life in a way I have never seen before. On account of the rich texture of the evidence, the ancien régime becomes real, while Mintzker’s lively prose turns the case into a detective story.” Steinberg pondered: “Which was the real Oppenheimer? Can we find a compromise among the four accounts, and on what basis? I certainly cannot, but Mintzker’s attempt to do so makes this work an excellent exercise.” In a review in Times Higher Education, Bryan Cheyette mentioned that “the gulf between the actual Oppenheimer and the fictive ‘Jew Süss’ is unbridgeable, which turns the subject of the book into a ‘structuring absence’ or Jewish ‘Godot’. Mintzker’s response to this impasse is to write a ‘polyphonic history’ that places four radically varied narratives in a fruitful dialogue. The main fault of this brilliant account is that the author is all too aware how clever it is.” Cheyette stated: “This is, alas, reinforced at the end of each chapter with ‘conversations’ between ‘Mintzker’ and a critical reader. Is it really necessary to hear how ‘intriguing’ the argument is, that a chapter ‘worked quite well’ or that the book as a whole has a ‘gospel structure’?”
Reviewing the book in the Jewish Review of Books, Jonathan Karp opined that “although he is a specialist in early modern German history, Mintzker understands the principal texts and touchstones shaping premodern Jewish mentalities.” Karp criticized that “the single serious flaw in The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is the author’s insistence that what is really a virtuoso scholarly performance is also a methodological breakthrough. Mintzker seems to have convinced himself that the kind of historical perspectivism he has practiced here is virtually unprecedented.” Karp explained that “modern historical writing, he argues, has remained tethered to an outmoded 19th-century realist style, when historians really should write more like ‘Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and Beckett.’ Perhaps it is in pursuit of this goal that Mintzker punctuated his narrative with stilted dialogues in which an imaginary reader challenges the author to defend his interpretations. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give one a sense of high modernist dialectical tension, it only guarantees that, one way or another, Mintzker emerges triumphant from every argument.” Karp summarized that “in the book’s conclusion Mintzker advances a final claim that even while patently contradicting his initial premise admittedly cannot be denied. The variety of perspectives of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer that Mintzker has explored, with all their ineliminable distortions, do give us revealing glimpses of the actual man in all his human pathos. That is a worthy enough accomplishment.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Century, August 23, 2017, Amy Frykholm, review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew.
Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2017, review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, p. 70.
Times Higher Education, August 24, 2017, Bryan Cheyette, review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss.
ONLINE
American Historical Association Website, http://blog.historians.org/ (April 23, 2014), author profile.
Jewish Review of Books, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/ (January 3, 2018), Jonathan Karp, review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss.
Literary Review, https://literaryreview.co.uk/ (June 1, 2017), Jonathan Steinberg, review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss.
German Studies Review, October 1, 2014, Benjamin Marschke, review of The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866, pp. 647-649.
Princeton University, Department of History Website, https://history.princeton.edu/ (May 30, 2017), Pooja Makhijani, “‘The Many Deaths of Jew Süss’: Mintzker Grapples with Truth in History;” (January 3, 2018), author profile.
Yair Mintzker
Yair Mintzker
Title:
Professor of History
Home Department:
History
On Leave 2017-2018
G-22 Dickinson Hall
609-258-8828
mintzker@princeton.edu (link sends e-mail)
Curriculum Vitae
Yair Mintzker studies the history of early modern and modern Germany, with particular interest in the Sattelzeit (1750-1850).
Professor Mintzker is the author of The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; paperback 2014), which tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified (open) places. His second book, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (New York: Princeton University Press, 2017), is a retelling of the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the notorious “Jew Süss.”
Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Mintzker received his M.A. in history cum laude magna from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). He is the recipient of several prizes, including the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize (2010) and the Urban History Association best book prize (2014), as well as fellowships from the DAAD, the Whiting Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Field:
Early Modern Europe
Modern Europe
Area of Interest:
(In alphabetical order)
Cultural History
Jewish
Political History
Social History
Urban History
Period:
17th & 18th Centuries
19th Century
Region:
Europe
Publications
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
The author
Yair Mintzker, associate professor of history at Princeton University, was born in Jerusalem, which he describes as “a tough, complicated and often violent city, which is also fascinating and indeed beautiful and profound. Even now, many years after leaving the city of my birth, my early experiences there continue to shape the way that I think about the world.”
He studied at Tel Aviv University and LMU Munich, although he found the experience “quite chaotic. I took classes in philosophy, literature, sociology, physics and even maths before difficult personal circumstances forced me to interrupt my studies. When I resumed my education, I homed in on history – a discipline that I thought would be flexible enough to satisfy my many conflicting interests. It was a decision that I never regretted.”
Already the author of The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (2012), Mintzker believes that it is “in [his] intellectual DNA to look at cultural phenomena from different angles and to search for more than one answer to the question ‘Why?’ Coming across the case of ‘Jew Süss’ was a godsend in that respect. I was drawn to the many uncertainties and contradictions in the case; that any attempt to reduce it to one plot line was bound to misrepresent it. Inspired among others by Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Orhan Pamuk’s masterful novel My Name is Red, I decided to write four parallel accounts of the trial.”
Yet Mintzker also sees the story as “a powerful parable about the modern world. This is why ‘Jew Süss’ continues to star in so many novels, films and plays, but also history books such as mine. Many contemporary politicians – including US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – are often compared with ‘Jew Süss’. This is a sign that the trial, although it was concluded almost three centuries ago, is not quite over yet.”
‘The Many Deaths of Jew Süss’: Mintzker grapples with truth in history
Pooja Makhijani, Office of Communications
May 30, 2017 9:16 a.m.
Yair Mintzker, an associate professor of history at Princeton, studies early modern and modern Germany, with a particular focus on the “Sattelzeit,” or the transitional period between the early modern age and the late modern age (1750-1850). This spring, Mintzker’s latest book, “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew,” was published by Princeton University Press.
Photo byDenise Applewhite, Office of Communications
Yair Mintzker, an associate professor of history, joined the Princeton faculty in 2009 after earning his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He studies early modern and modern Germany, with a particular focus on the “Sattelzeit,” or the transitional period between the early modern age and the late modern age (1750-1850). This spring, Mintzker’s latest book, “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew,” was published by Princeton University Press.
The topic of the book is the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, one of the most famous figures in the history of anti-Semitism. Oppenheimer, also known as “Jew Süss,” was the personal banker (“court Jew”) of a German prince in the early 18th century. After the death of his patron, Oppenheimer was arrested and put on trial for unspecified “misdeeds.” On February 4, 1738, Oppenheimer was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. When his jailers asked that he convert to Christianity, he refused. In “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss,” Mintzker investigates conflicting versions of Oppenheimer’s life and death as told by four contemporaries, none of whom provide a straightforward account of the events.
Mintzker’s first book is “The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which tells the story of the metamorphosis of 18th- and 19th-century German cities from walled to defortified (open) places.
You study the history of early modern and modern Germany. How does ‘The Many Deaths of Jew Süss’ fit in the broader scope of your work?
My work on “Jew Süss” was motivated by my larger fascination with the transition to the modern period in European history. My first book was about European cities, and how, during the 17th and 18th centuries, they began to lose their walled character to become the open, wall-less settlements we see today. The case of “Jew Süss” is similar. Oppenheimer’s trial took place right on the verge of the modern period. As such, it is an incredibly telling parable about Jewish life in the transition to modernity.
Book cover of “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss,” by Yair Mintzker
In “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss,” Mintzker investigates conflicting versions of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s life and death as told by four contemporaries.
Book cover courtesy of Princeton University Press.
Why does Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s story fascinate you?
I think that it is no exaggeration to say that “Jew Süss” is to the German collective imagination what Shakespeare’s Shylock is to the English-speaking world. His rise and fall is the stuff from which great legends are made, complete with a courtroom drama, lurid tales of sex and greed, and a horrible, violent death. Most importantly, Oppenheimer’s trial became very quickly a literary battleground on which different conceptions about the possible status of European Jews were encoded and contested. Oppenheimer’s trial, in other words, has always been about much more than Oppenheimer himself.
You write that the historical figure of Oppenheimer is ‘incredibly elusive.’ How so, and where did your research — both literally and figuratively — take you?
Oppenheimer’s trial left an incredible amount of documentation —30,000 hand-written pages, to be exact. But these sources, plentiful though they are, contradict one another all the time and, at times, even contradict themselves. As I was reading the trial documents both in Stuttgart, where the trial had taken place, as well as across Europe and even in Israel and the United States, it became clear to me that there is no one, clear answer to the question who Oppenheimer “really was.” Any attempt to claim otherwise would be misleading. This is why the book depicts Oppenheimer not once but four times. Think about it as a work of history inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s famous film “Rashomon” or even the four Gospels, for that matter.
The book includes passages between chapters that imagine conversations between you and your readers. Why did you include these interludes?
Over the years, I presented my work on “Jew Süss” in front of many audiences, and I was constantly fascinated by people’s reactions to what I had to say. The imaginary dialogues I include in the book represent an edited record of some of these exchanges. Moreover, I believe that history, like all humanistic disciplines, should be based on dialogue — between the present and the past, but also between different voices in the present about the past. Plato famously defined thinking as a kind of discourse between the soul and itself. I think that’s exactly right. Dialogues are the stuff from which thinking is made.
You say that none of the available sources about Oppenheimer can be trusted, which posed a significant challenge to you as a historian. How did you proceed with this?
The same way I do in my teaching — by constantly looking for new angles from which to understand what happened. Toward the end of the book I basically say that historians should not pretend they know everything about the past but neither should they claim to know nothing. In between the hammer of false omniscience and the hard place of post-truth relativism there lies a whole world of possibilities. As a historian, I inhabit this world in my daily work with students, and explore it in my essays and my books. I think the result is really quite special.
How do you convey to your students the challenges of examining and analyzing history?
I believe that at the end of the day we learn by ourselves and for ourselves. Because we’re curious, or driven, or — which is perhaps best — because we are humble enough to seek assistance from others in answering our deepest questions and concerns. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes somewhere that in the great works of the past “we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” As a history professor, I am certainly demanding with my students, but I do not try to inundate them with information or pretend I know everything. Rather, I try to inspire, to find the “rejected thoughts” of my students, and to help them phrase and answer their questions with the historian’s tool kit.
AHA Member Spotlight: Yair Mintzker
April 23, 2014 Permalink Short URL
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our talented and eclectic membership, AHA Today features a regular AHA Member Spotlight series.
YairYair Mintzker is an assistant professor of European history at Princeton University. He usually lives in Princeton, New Jersey, but this year he is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany. He has been a member since 2005.
Alma maters: MA, Tel-Aviv University, 2003; PhD, Stanford University, 2009.
Fields of interest: political, social, and cultural history of continental Europe in the early modern and modern periods.
What projects are you working on currently?
I am currently writing a book about the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, aka “Jew Suss.” Oppenheimer is one of the most iconic figures in the history of anti-Semitism. Originally from the Jewish community in Heidelberg, in 1732 Oppenheimer became the Court Jew (special financial advisor) of the duke of the small German state of Württemberg. When his patron the duke died unexpectedly in March 1737, the Württemberg authorities arrested Oppenheimer, put him on trial, and condemned him to death for unspecified “misdeeds.” On February 4, 1738, Oppenheimer was hanged in front of over 10,000 spectators just outside Stuttgart. He is most often remembered today through the vicious Nazi propaganda movie made about him in 1940.
Have your interests changed since graduate school? If so, how?
My first book, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), is certainly quite different from my current project. We all know that in premodern times, practically all European cities were fortified places. This was crucial to guaranteeing cities’ commercial, political, and legal privileges. In the book, I used a wealth of primary sources to tell the story of how and why that ceased to be the case: why we came to live in open cities.
Although my projects on defortification and “Jew Suss” are different in many respects, they both stem from my deep conviction that historians should explore more than one answer to the question Why? In Defortification, I did this by showing how defortification cannot be reduced to a single factor like changes in military technology, industrialization, or urban expansion. In my new book, I demonstrate how the history of the trial of “Jew Suss” contains more than one story. Any attempt to reduce it to only one thread would distort our understanding of the trial in a fundamental way.
Is there an article, book, movie, blog, etc. that you could recommend to fellow AHA members?
I would highly recommend a general introduction to Niklas Luhmann’s sociological work such as his “Interaction, Organization, and Society” in The Differentiation of Society (Columbia Univ. Press, 1982). Despite the fact that Luhmann is the most important German sociologist since Max Weber, he is practically unknown among American historians.
What do you value most about the history profession?
Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about katabasis (journeys to the underworld) recently, but these days I really can’t get this one thought out of my mind. Most of us—those who do not work on very recent history—write about, and often even conduct imaginary conversations with, dead people. Just like Odysseus, Aeneas, or Dante, historians descend into the underworld, come back to the world of the living, and tell a story. It is an incredible exercise to be doing almost every day of your life: at once terrifying, shocking, numbing, humbling, entertaining, and enlightening.
Other than history, what are you passionate about?
Working on a very disturbing execution in the 18th century, it is absolutely wonderful to be able to go home every evening, forget work for the rest of the day, and spend time with my family. History can be captivating to such a degree that one forgets that the present and future are actually much more important than the past.
Any final thoughts?
Teaching is not a chore that distracts us from what is “really important.” It is our social responsibility to share with others our research, thinking, and writing about the past.
12/16/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The
Notorious Trial and Execution of an
Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
Yair Mintzker. Princeton Univ., $35 (368p)
ISBN 978-0-691-17232-3
This remarkable book does much more than offer a gripping reconstruction of the 1737 trial of Joseph Suss
Oppenheimer, who had been the personal banker and advisor of the duke of a small German state and was
executed, after the duke's death, for serious crimes against the state. Such a reconstruction would already
have been a significant achievement, as the rigorous attention to detail and nuance bring the case vividly to
life. But Mintzker, a history professor at Princeton, also explains the challenges presented to a historian in
ascertaining the truth about the trial, and the rationale behind his way of dealing with the evidentiary record.
He articulates, cogently and with a refreshing lack of academic terminology, "a general methodology to help
deal with common historical dilemmas in which the contradictions in the sources seem frustratingly
irreconcilable." He combines direct quotes from the available sources, critical analysis, and efforts to "get
beyond what the sources describe" by examining the context of their creation. The sections analyzing the
trial from the perspectives of four men--including a judge-inquisitor--allow Mintzker to illustrate the merits,
and logic, of his approach. This fascinating intellectual journey deserves a wide audience outside the
academic scope of the book. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew."
Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 70. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d0285f87.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319326
JONATHAN STEINBERG
Power and Prejudice
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
By Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press 330pp £27.95 order from our bookshop
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The story of Jew Süss took place at the dawn of the modern era. The Holy Roman Empire still functioned but many observers thought it an absurd antique. As Voltaire sneered in 1756, ‘it’s not holy, not Roman and not an empire’. The essence of the Holy Roman Empire was the minute fragmentation of authority. One small region of southwest Germany alone contained archbishoprics, bishoprics, free abbeys, free cities, principalities, duchies, margravates, landgraviates, lordships and so on. There were Palatinate holdings, Fürstenberg holdings and Hohenzollern holdings, and the dukes of Württemberg had properties of all kinds. Large kingdoms such as Prussia or Saxony came close to being modern states, but their territories were still riddled with lands belonging to foreign authorities.
The Duchy of Württemberg became the site of the trial of the ‘court Jew’ Joseph Süss Oppenheimer. He was a very wealthy and powerful figure, who served a number of princes in southwest Germany, most notably Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, for whom he acted as financial adviser and master of the mint. Shortly after Carl Alexander’s death in March 1737, Oppenheimer was arrested and accused of numerous crimes, including embezzlement, adultery, debasement of the coinage and treason. After months of imprisonment and interrogation, he was put on trial. He was found guilty and publicly hanged in Stuttgart on 4 February 1738.
The life and death of Oppenheimer was portrayed in the single most notorious Nazi film, Jud Süss, a vivid and hideous anti-Semitic work that characterised him as greedy, lascivious and alien. It was directed by Veit Harlan and commissioned by Joseph Goebbels. After the war, in a web of lies and in a Germany full of ex-Nazis, Harlan denied contributing, through his film, to the massacre of the Jews of Europe. After all, he was just a film-maker and nothing more. In the denazification process he was tried for crimes against humanity and exonerated, but witnesses later accused him of doing everything possible to win the contract to make the film. He was accused again of war crimes but never punished.
What really happened? Was Oppenheimer guilty? What was his trial like? The complexity of the story has led Yair Mintzker to adopt a very unusual technique. He calls his book ‘a polyvocal, critical work of scholarship: a polyphonic history’. He provides four accounts, each with its own dedicated chapter, of the trial, examining the case in turn from the perspectives of four individuals connected with it: Philipp Friedrich Jäger, the judge-inquisitor who wrote the narrative of Oppenheimer’s alleged crimes that was used as the basis for the death sentence against him; Christoph David Bernard, a ‘university lecturer with a problematic past’, born a Jew in Lemberg in 1682, who met Oppenheimer on the eve of his execution and wrote an account of his last days; Mordecai Schloss, a Jewish notable who published the only contemporary account by a Jew of Oppenheimer’s life and death; and David Fassmann, a Leipzig-based author who wrote a series of popular works about the characters involved in the case. At the end of each chapter, Mintzker answers methodological questions and defends his technique in a dialogue with an imaginary critic who raises doubts and difficulties. Whatever approximation to the truth the polyphonic method yields, it brings the society and its protagonists to life in a way I have never seen before. On account of the rich texture of the evidence, the ancien régime becomes real, while Mintzker’s lively prose turns the case into a detective story.
The first chapter concentrates on Jäger and the Ehrbarkeit (the ‘honourables’), the several-thousand-strong upper bourgeoisie who dominated the legislature, which had power to raise taxes, and also provided the majority of lawyers, judges and higher civil servants in the state. The regional titled nobility had effectively become independent of the duke and answered only to the emperor, so the Ehrbarkeit acted as a kind of ruling elite as well as a social class.
The documents allow Mintzker to reconstruct in astonishing detail the life and career of Jäger, first as an advocate and then as a member of the court. Shortly before the Oppenheimer case he prosecuted Christina Wilhelmina von Grävenitz, the mistress of Duke Eberhard Ludwig, uncle and predecessor of Carl Alexander. Von Grävenitz was, ironically, accused of extorting money from the Jews, along with other crimes. She settled the case, to Jäger’s dismay, and not long afterwards he became prosecutor in the Oppenheimer case. Mintzker makes a detailed and plausible case that Jäger, having failed to secure von Grävenitz’s conviction, was determined not to let Oppenheimer get away in a similar case, even though the evidence had to be twisted.
The second chapter focuses on Bernard, a mysterious convert to Christianity, a teacher at the seminary in Tübingen, a translator used by the court and a missionary. Bernard, poor and hard-working, is as complicated a character as one could imagine and Mintzker shows his extraordinary learning in trying to make sense of him. The biblical, theological and textual skills that Mintzker deploys to decipher the evidence are not the least of the merits of this chapter.
The section dedicated to Schloss is set in the Frankfurt ghetto, a long, narrow lane in which over two thousand Jews lived and Schloss grew up. The lane’s habits, dwellings and schools created a very specific Jewish culture in Frankfurt, unlike that found elsewhere. By 1706 Schloss had reached such a level of financial prominence that Duke Ludwig and his mistress employed him as their court Jew. Consequently, he moved to the ducal court in Stuttgart, where he had a large family and many servants and was free of the restrictions of the ghetto. Ludwig created a splendid new residence, Ludwigsburg, just outside Stuttgart, and a large Jewish business community grew in Württenberg to furnish the supplies necessary to build and decorate the grand new buildings. Following Oppenheimer’s execution, Schloss helped to publish a work defending the probity of Oppenheimer and recording his piety when faced with the traditional evils of the Christian world. Schloss himself appears in this work as a ‘rabbi’ and as a witness to the accused’s innocence and faithfulness.
Finally Mintzker turns his attention to Fassman, a vigorous commercial writer in the flourishing market town of Leipzig, home of the great fairs, most famously the book fair. Fassman turned out nearly 250 seventy-page accounts of the intrigues and follies of the numerous courts of the Holy Roman Empire called ‘Conversations in the Realm of the Dead’. These take the form of classical dialogues of the dead. But whereas traditional dialogues of this sort involved great figures, Fassman wrote about political lives. As Mintzker puts it, Fassman ‘hit a subterranean reservoir of immense dimensions’. Fassman wrote three dialogues connected with Oppenheimer’s life and death, two involving Carl Alexander, in which the duke testifies to Oppenheimer’s honour and integrity, and one involving Oppenheimer himself, which reveals various versions of the protagonist.
At the end of this study, after considering all of these different accounts, Mintzker writes, ‘We are left with a blank or negative space at the very center of the book: with a kind of Godot-like Oppenheimer who never shows up. Or does he?’ He concludes, ‘we have stood in Oppenheimer’s shoes all along.’ This wonderful book raises all sorts of questions. We are left to make up our own minds. Which was the real Oppenheimer? Can we find a compromise among the four accounts, and on what basis? I certainly cannot, but Mintzker’s attempt to do so makes this work an excellent exercise.
Jewish Review of Books
Joseph the Righteous
By Jonathan Karp
Fall 2017
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
by Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 344 pp., $35
In keeping with his book’s title, Yair Mintzker hasn’t written a life of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the famous “Jud Süss” whose sensational rise and sudden, catastrophic fall in the German Duchy of Württemberg came to epitomize the perilous careers of court Jews in early modern Central Europe. Given the numerous published biographies of Oppenheimer, particularly the influential 1929 study by Selma Stern as well as more recent exhaustive reconstructions by historians Barbara Gerber and Hellmut G. Haasis, this is wise. Instead, Mintzker gives us what he somewhat ponderously calls a “polyphonic history” in which he presents Oppenheimer’s year-long investigation, trial, and execution, in 1737–1738, from the conflicting perspectives of his contemporaries.
Mintzker rightly insists that despite the extensive research of previous scholars Oppenheimer himself has remained an elusive figure. This is not because he was particularly mysterious or wished to cover his tracks, but rather because the extant documents stemming from the period of his ordeal simply do not allow him to speak in his own voice. But Mintzker does much more than expose the biased nature of the sources that have colored our inherited view of Jud Süss. He does something quite remarkable: He affords us detailed and often surprisingly sympathetic accounts of those who shaped Oppenheimer’s image to suit their own interests, needs, and perspectives.
It is true that, at times, this Rashomonic approach leads Mintzker to lose sight of his stated narrative purpose, so smitten is he with uncovering the curious details of these individuals’ lives. In fact, Mintzker is intermittently aware of this tendency and even occasionally defensive about it, but he needn’t be. For if at times Oppenheimer serves merely as the occasion, or the pretext, for these portraits, the result is no less fascinating.
Joseph Süss Oppenheimer was one of the later representatives of the phenomenon of the “court Jew,” which had its roots in the 16th century and flowered in the period following the Thirty Years War. The proliferation of large and small states following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, along with the war’s decimation of population and property, created an urgent need on the part of Central Europe’s new rulers for capital and credit. Jews, who had been excluded from most of Central Europe by the time of Luther’s death in 1546 (and in many places much earlier), were now invited in small numbers to come back as creditors, financiers, minters, crown merchants, and military suppliers. They weren’t popular, which isn’t surprising given that they were both stigmatized aliens and willing tools of new absolutist states which were seeking to bypass the fiscal authority of estates, guilds, and other traditional institutions. This made the court Jew and his retinue entirely dependent on the ruler’s protection—and uncertain continued favor.
Illustrations from Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s trial depicting the inquisition and transport to the execution.
Scenes from Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s trial. Top to bottom: Interrogation by the inquisition committee; Jews bewailing Oppenheimer’s fate; Oppenheimer transported to the execution site. (WLB, Grafische Sammlung.)
Mintzker uses the term court Jew quite loosely to encompass even fairly modest merchants. But the popular mind associates this type with such striking figures as Leffmann Behrens, who became the unofficial finance minister to Prince-Elector George Louis of Hanover (later King George I of Great Britain), or mightier still, Samuel Oppenheimer, the financier and military supplier of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, whose logistical genius proved crucial in routing the Turks amassed at Vienna’s gates in 1683. Like Joseph Süss, Samuel Oppenheimer’s services to the state did not in the end avail him. An angry mob and an ungrateful emperor despoiled his estate and seized his fortune before the dust could settle on his grave. But Joseph Süss with his miserable fate stands out even in comparison with such wealthier and more powerful predecessors—and not only because of the notorious film the Nazis made about him in 1940.
For one thing, during his rise Joseph Süss all but failed to pay the kind of lip service to traditional Jewish religious observance that the Jewish community expected of court Jews. Worse still, his aristocratic pretentions, numerous reported affairs, and overt political interventions threatened the fragile security of Württemberg’s fledgling Jewish population. In spite of these things, Oppenheimer’s refusal to renounce Judaism on the eve of his execution turned him into a genuine if unlikely martyr for some contemporary Jews. And his earlier insistence on residing outside of Frankfurt’s famous ghetto as well as his religious skepticism and haughty arrogance toward Gentile authority have won him the grudging admiration of many modern Jews.
Oppenheimer enjoyed five successful years as the court Jew of Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg. But on the very night in 1737 that his patron suddenly passed away, he, “his servants, and many other court officials were arrested, and soon a special inquisition committee was convened in order to investigate the court Jew’s ‘atrocious crimes.’” His accusers blamed him for the sidelining of old councilors and the creation of “a secret cabinet whose members he himself had advanced despite their notorious characters.” Their 80-page summary of the incriminating “facts” concluded, however, with less political and more damning charges:
He nourished himself only on robbery and treachery, and indeed often made it known throughout the land how he lived almost like a prince, engaging in prostitution, fornication, and possibly also incest, all extremely insolently, and sometimes even with Christian women.
There is, indeed, no denying that Oppenheimer had his share of Christian mistresses, but the year-long investigation into his misdeeds was essentially a frame-up. Even some Christians expressed doubts about his guilt at the time. Duke Carl Alexander’s son went so far as to label his trial a “judicial farce.”
Illustratin of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer.
Joseph Süss Oppenheimer. (WLB, Grafische Sammlung.)
Mintzker himself agrees, but his purpose is not to debunk the trial so much as to follow its crosscurrents. He does this by devoting a chapter to each of four figures who in different ways were connected with the proceedings: Philipp Friedrich Jäger, the legal inquisitor assigned to interrogate and draw up charges against Oppenheimer; Christoph David Bernard, a Jewish convert who wrote a pamphlet claiming to record his conversations with the condemned prisoner and his failed efforts to get him to accept Christ; Rabbi Mordechai Schloss, a Jewish business rival who sponsored a hagiographic Hebrew-Yiddish pamphlet about Oppenheimer after his hanging; and finally, David Fassmann, an adventurer, serial liar, and later best-selling author of numerous “dialogues of the dead,” reminiscent of the classic Steve Allen 1970s television show, Meeting of the Minds, in which famous and infamous past notables came together in the afterlife to argue and gossip. Unlike the other three, Fassmann was not involved in the trial, nor did he know Oppenheimer personally (although Oppenheimer appears to have owned at least one of Fassmann’s books). But Fassmann was intrigued by Oppenheimer’s precipitous fall and featured him in successively less flattering portrayals in three of his dialogues. How the members of this motley assemblage made use of Oppenheimer’s trial comprises the real core of this engaging book.
The chapters on Bernard, and especially those on Jäger and Schloss, are superbly rendered. Mintzker is not only a masterful historical researcher, he is a penetrating psychologist. His portrait of Jäger is a damning reconstruction of a zealous prosecutor determined to find a smoking gun where none existed. This was not just out of a misplaced sense of duty but in order to try to fulfill his own youthful promise that had, by the time of the Oppenheimer investigation, begun to fade. Though he resists reducing any of these personalities to social types, Mintzker rightly situates Jäger’s hatred of Oppenheimer in the context of the declining fortunes of his professional class, the learned bureaucratic stratum of premodern Germany whose traditional privileges were by then eroding. But more precisely, Mintzker ties Oppenheimer’s ordeal to the sensational trial of the previous duke’s ex-mistress, three years earlier, in which Jäger had humiliatingly failed to win a conviction, in part due to Oppenheimer’s intervention. To guarantee that he would not make the same mistake twice, Jäger personally interrogated Oppenheimer on 45 separate occasions. He knowingly violated judicial norms he had sworn to uphold through the misuse of evidence and the badgering of witnesses, and he even pushed hard for judicial torture when some of the other investigators proved more squeamish. As with many in his position, before and since, personal ambition and righteous indignation (much more than anti-Semitism, according to Mintzker) were inextricably entwined in Jäger’s furious campaign to see Oppenheimer hang.
Given that he paper trail on Rabbi Mordechai Schloss is skimpier than on Jäger, Mintzker’s reconstruction of the complex motives behind his efforts to vindicate Oppenheimer after his execution seem even more impressive. Schloss had been a court Jew in Württemberg and had his share of problems as well. In 1729 he and his son Moshe had been imprisoned for a month because of a fellow Jew’s complaint about the inferior quality of the wallpaper they delivered. Oppenheimer’s rise to power, a few years later, seems to have coincided with his own fall from grace. When he was called before the committee that was investigating Oppenheimer, Schloss “insisted that ‘he does not want to say anything that might hurt Süss, God forbid, because Süss had done him neither harm nor good.’” In almost no time, however, he shifted his ground and claimed “that Oppenheimer had always been a person about whom ‘no one had anything good to say.’” By the end of his deposition, he “supported the claim that Oppenheimer had stolen from the prince’s own purse as well as from the state’s and the estates’ coffers.”
Despite the key role he played in destroying Oppenheimer’s life, Schloss helped his soon-to-be son-in-law publish a book called The Story of the Passing of Joseph Süss, May the Memory of the Righteous Be for a Blessing. “It is,” Mintzker tells us, “the only document we know of that was composed by Jews in the immediate aftermath of the execution, and it told Oppenheimer’s story from an overall very sympathetic perspective.” The Story depicts Oppenheimer as a sinner who sincerely repented in prison and “whose soul departed in sanctification of the Lord’s name.”
What was Schloss up to? “The stark contrast between Schloss’s September deposition and the post-execution account could indicate a sense of guilt on Schloss’s part,” but The Story might point to other things as well. Its account, for instance, of “Joseph the Righteous,” as Oppenheimer is called in the text, made even semieducated Jewish readers think of the biblical Joseph:
Some of the Yiddish accounts of Joseph’s story portray him as a victim of false allegations. They emphasize that it was Potiphar’s wife who tried to seduce Joseph, not the other way around. If Schloss and Seligmann tried to invoke this particular interpretation in The Story, they engaged in what we may roughly call the inversion of the inquisition committee’s account: rather than Oppenheimer being a rapist (as Jäger, for instance, tried to suggest), Schloss and Seligmann represent him as an innocent victim of rape allegations.
Poster for the first screening of Jud Süss featuring a frightening illustration of a man's face.
Poster for the first screening of Jud Süss, a Nazi propaganda film, 1940. (Courtesy of Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.
Although he is a specialist in early modern German history, Mintzker understands the principal texts and touchstones shaping premodern Jewish mentalities, as this suggestion and his further reflections on the esoteric meaning of The Story amply demonstrate. He recognizes that Jewish vulnerability in this period was not only a function of overt anti-Semitism but of the way in which the legal status of Jewish communities could depend on the economic utility and shifting fates of individual court Jews. “What held their community together,” he astutely notes, “was not harmonious consensus or common practices, but individual and highly insecure commercial opportunities at a prince’s court. Theirs was above all a community of risk.” Reframing the story of Joseph Süss as that of the biblical Joseph helped the Jews of Württemberg cope with that risk.
The single serious flaw in The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is the author’s insistence that what is really a virtuoso scholarly performance is also a methodological breakthrough. Mintzker seems to have convinced himself that the kind of historical perspectivism he has practiced here is virtually unprecedented. Modern historical writing, he argues, has remained tethered to an outmoded 19th-century realist style, when historians really should write more like “Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and Beckett.” Perhaps it is in pursuit of this goal that Mintzker punctuated his narrative with stilted dialogues in which an imaginary reader challenges the author to defend his interpretations. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give one a sense of high modernist dialectical tension, it only guarantees that, one way or another, Mintzker emerges triumphant from every argument.
In the book’s conclusion Mintzker advances a final claim that even while patently contradicting his initial premise admittedly cannot be denied. The variety of perspectives of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer that Mintzker has explored, with all their ineliminable distortions, do give us revealing glimpses of the actual man in all his human pathos. That is a worthy enough accomplishment.
Read this article online at: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2782/joseph-the-righteous/
Who was Joseph Oppenheimer, and why was he killed?
Yair Mintzker doesn't know. He's more interested in why other historians keep trying to write a 19th-century novel about the 18th-century case.
by Amy Frykholm August 23, 2017
IN REVIEW
image of book cover
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss
The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
By Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press
BUY FROM INDIEBOUND
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At the center of Yair Mintzker’s book is the blank shape of the man whose trial and death he recounts. Joseph Oppenheimer, known as “Jew Süss,” was a “court Jew” who was executed in 1758 in Württemberg after being accused of various financial and moral crimes. Historians possess an unusually rich trove of documents pertaining to Oppenheimer’s death.
But the proliferation of documentation does not create a coherent portrait. Who was the man at the center of this controversy? What were his deepest commitments? Why did the courts go to such great lengths to prove the case against him? Who wanted him dead and why? Why did his death resonate out into the broader community, taken up in fiction and legend? The man remains a “pictorial negative space, a structuring absence.”
The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 by Yair Mintzker (review)
Benjamin Marschke
From: German Studies Review
Volume 37, Number 3, October 2014
pp. 647-649 | 10.1353/gsr.2014.0122
The Johns Hopkins University Press colophon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Benjamin Marschke
The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866. By Yair Mintzker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 285. Cloth $103.00. ISBN 978-1107024038.
This book, based on Yair Mintzker’s prizewinning Stanford dissertation, seeks to answer a question that is rarely asked: what happened to the walls around German cities? Mintzker asks this question to write a wide-ranging cultural/political history of German urban society from the perspective of city walls. As Mintzker points out, the blithe explanation is that the once ubiquitous walls around cities simply “disappeared” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the apparent denial of any agency in the defortification of cities seems invalid, of course. Mintzker also identifies and deconstructs three seemingly obvious explanations why Germans tore down their city walls: demographic/economic, industrial, and military. The demographic/economic explanation is that, as cities expanded, the building of large suburbs outside the walls made the walls less useful and more problematically obtrusive. The industrial explanation similarly argues that transportation needs demanded the breaching and dismantling of city walls. The military explanation is that new artillery made city walls obsolete militarily.
Throughout his work, Mintzker shows that each of these simple explanations is inadequate and that the reality of defortification was much more complicated. The economic/demographic explanation does not hold water because many rapidly growing cities expanded their walls, whereas many smaller cities dismantled theirs. The industrial explanation fails entirely because most German cities were defortified by the end of the Napoleonic Wars—long before the transportation needs of industrialization. Counterintuitively, Mintzker shows that the military explanation is also incorrect: in reality, city dwellers wanted to dismantle their walls because they were all too effective militarily (a point discussed later).
Mintzker begins with an exploration of the importance walls had for a city’s identity. In an exemplary cultural study, he presents a plethora of evidence from across Germany to show how much urban dwellers identified themselves and their communities with the architecture of the walls, towers, and gates that surrounded them. The city was anthropomorphized, i.e., it was imagined to be a living body, a body whose appearance and orifices were its walls and gates. Of course many of the ceremonies, symbols, and traditions of the urban community were directly connected [End Page 647] to the walls and the gates of the city. In this cultural context, as Mintzker shows, the “disappearance” of cities’ walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very intriguing. Given how much urban dwellers identified with their walls, it is rather unthinkable that they were unconcerned about their destruction.
After this initial contextualization, the book is organized roughly chronologically, a choice that works well. Mintzker’s narrative is easy to follow and is based on many case studies of different cities, based on archival sources from each. The basic argument is that in the long eighteenth century (1689–1789), it was the newly centralized German absolute monarchies that, following the model of French absolutism, drove the destruction of cities’ fortifications, which were the symbols of local political identity and the physical means of domestic political resistance. The monarchies replaced them with barriers designed only to facilitate tax collection and policing. This trend was supported by the fashions of monarchical representation, which found “open” cities with wide boulevards more impressive than the relics of obsolete military fortifications. At the same time, absolute monarchies, especially the Prussian one, intensely fortified and garrisoned those cities that were better situated to contribute to the defense of their territory. Given the pressure from absolute monarchies, urban communities were relatively powerless to resist the transformation of their walls. Indeed, as city walls became a symbol of state power, rather than a symbol of urban identity, city dwellers contributed to their “disappearance” by breaching them with illegal gates and stealing building materials from them.
The focus of Mintzker’s book is on the “great defortification surge” that took place during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mintzker’s survey of German cities convincingly demonstrates that in the century before the fall of the Bastille, only one-fifth or so of German cities were defortified. From that point until...
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew, by Yair Mintzker
Book of the week: Bryan Cheyette straddles truth and fiction in observer accounts of anti-Semitic persecution
August 24, 2017
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By Bryan Cheyette
The execution of Joseph Oppenheimer
Some trials define an epoch. The decade-long “affair” generated by the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1894-1906) exposed the deep fissures in post-revolutionary France; the 1953 trial of a prominent group of Jewish doctors in Moscow (accused of conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leadership) highlighted the excesses of Stalinism; and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela in 1964, after the Rivonia Trial, came to characterise the inequities of apartheid South Africa – which ended when Mandela was released in 1990. Each of these trials exposed the limits of law when racism and anti-Semitism shaped the political sphere.
The deformation of law by prejudice has a particularly long history. In Germany, the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in 1737 has the same symbolic resonance as Dreyfus, Rivonia and the “doctors’ plot” has in France, South Africa and Russia. For Yair Mintzker, the trial of “Jew Süss” is “to the German collective imagination what Shakespeare’s Shylock is to the English-speaking world”. The trial of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1597) was inspired by the 1594 trial and execution of the Portuguese-Jewish physician to Queen Elizabeth, Rodrigo Lopez, who was accused of poisoning her. But it is Shylock and not Lopez who has entered English culture, just as it is “Jew Süss” and not Oppenheimer (fabrication and not reality) who is part of German culture.
Oppenheimer was the principal financial adviser to Duke Carl Alexander of the small German state of Württemberg. He was the master of the mint and was given extensive trading privileges as a result of this elevated position. Although he was one of hundreds of “court Jews” dotted throughout the Holy Roman Empire, whose cosmopolitan trading networks and upward mobility were valued and resented in equal measure, Oppenheimer seems to have been particularly wealthy and influential. His supposed power, however, proved illusory and, when the duke died suddenly in 1737, he was immediately arrested and gradually transformed into the fictive “Jew Süss”. He was accused of “damnable maltreatments of prince and country”, vague charges that were later specified to include treason, embezzlement, adultery and debasement of the coinage. He was tortured for information to reinforce the indictment, his many properties were confiscated to pay for the inquisition, and he was executed 11 months later. This treatment was rightly described as “judicial murder” by Carl Alexander’s son, Duke Carl Eugen, a few years later. As many as 20,000 people, from far and wide, witnessed Oppenheimer’s execution on a bright red gallows. After the hanging, his deformed body was placed on permanent display in a bespoke iron gibbet.
“Jew Süss” is remembered today mainly because of the repugnant 1940 Nazi propaganda film, commissioned by Joseph Goebbels, purportedly about Oppenheimer’s life but in reality about the financial and sexual rapacity of German Jewry. The film, directed by Veit Harlan, was a response to a 1934 British film that highlighted the persecution of German Jewry as Hitler came to power. The British film, directed by Lothar Mendes, was in turn based on a 1925 best-selling novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, translated into English in 1926. All of the films and novels were called Jew Süss. Oppenheimer’s meteoric rise and stupendous fall, in other words, has become an abiding allegory for the fate of German Jewry.
Rather than the post-history of Oppenheimer, Mintzker shows that his “many deaths” cannot be separated from the diverse ways in which he was imagined by his contemporaries. To this end, he focuses on four figures: Philipp Friedrich Jäger, the judge-inquisitor; Christoph David Bernard, a converted Jew who saw Oppenheimer on the eve of his execution; Mordecai Schloss, a fellow “court Jew” in Württemberg; and David Fassmann, a popular writer of courtly intrigues. All of these figures wrote first-hand accounts of Oppenheimer or produced court documents (interviews, translations, contributions to the inquisitorial process). These documents are interpreted with consummate skill and weighed for their veracity, since “not all historical sources are created equal”. Despite an archive made up of thousands of documents (along with dozens of memoirs and interpretive accounts), there is no “actual” person whom the historian can retrieve. Oppenheimer, in Mintzker’s words, was “twice removed from the truth”; he could not speak for himself during his trial, and was relatively anonymous before his arrest. Instead, the documents produced by “the judge”, “the convert”, “the Jew” and “the writer” are contextualised and humanised to show the complex ways in which Oppenheimer was represented according to widely differing social, religious and political ends.
Jäger wrote the narrative of Oppenheimer’s alleged crimes that led to the death sentence, and he undoubtedly drew his “facts” from “a predetermined conclusion” (not least his prurient interest in Oppenheimer’s alleged sexual conquests). But the competing social and political spheres in which Jäger and Oppenheimer operated, rather than any innate prejudice, determined why Jäger pursued his quarry with such fanatical energy. Jäger was a prominent member of the mainly Lutheran Ehrbarkeit (“the honourables”), a large network of the haute bourgeoisie who populated Württemberg with bureaucrats and professionals and were independent of the duke’s authority. It was in this context that Oppenheimer became the antithesis of the Ehrbarkeit, a “shadowy agent, the real cause of Jäger’s own stalling career”. Württemberg was fragmented, a Lutheran duchy ruled by a Catholic duke. This explains why Oppenheimer, in one incarnation, was deemed to be “a creature of the unholy matrimony between Jews and papish princes”. Such is the anti-Catholic dimension to Oppenheimer’s persecution.
Jäger’s legal testimony is fittingly described as a mixture of “rumours, gossip, outright lies and (at best) half-truths”. Bernard and Schloss, on the other hand, viewed Oppenheimer through the prism of the biblical stories of, respectively, King David and Joseph. They were in competition with Oppenheimer, Bernard as a relatively impoverished Jewish convert, and Schloss as a fellow “court Jew”, which meant that both had particular axes to grind in their desire to harm Oppenheimer. Only Fassmann, who imagined a dead Oppenheimer in the underworld, wrote a series of three unalloyed fictions, which changed according to the mood of the times. What is clear from Mintzker’s inspired readings is that Oppenheimer became a cipher for much larger issues that had little to do with his actions. But it remains a mystery why “Jew Süss”, and no other “court Jew” in the Holy Roman Empire, was singled out for persecution.
The gulf between the actual Oppenheimer and the fictive “Jew Süss” is unbridgeable, which turns the subject of the book into a “structuring absence” or Jewish “Godot”. Mintzker’s response to this impasse is to write a “polyphonic history” that places four radically varied narratives in a fruitful dialogue. The main fault of this brilliant account is that the author is all too aware how clever it is. This is, alas, reinforced at the end of each chapter with “conversations” between “Mintzker” and a critical reader. Is it really necessary to hear how “intriguing” the argument is, that a chapter “worked quite well” or that the book as a whole has a “gospel structure”? Yet it can’t be denied that Mintzker has a great deal to be pleased about and he is right to hope that his “polyphonic” challenge to mainstream historiography will be successful.
Bryan Cheyette is professor of modern literature and culture at the University of Reading. He is currently working on a short book about The Ghetto for Oxford University Press.
The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew
By Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 344pp, £27.95
ISBN 9780691172323
Published 7 June 2017
Yair Mintzker
The author
Yair Mintzker, associate professor of history at Princeton University, was born in Jerusalem, which he describes as “a tough, complicated and often violent city, which is also fascinating and indeed beautiful and profound. Even now, many years after leaving the city of my birth, my early experiences there continue to shape the way that I think about the world.”
He studied at Tel Aviv University and LMU Munich, although he found the experience “quite chaotic. I took classes in philosophy, literature, sociology, physics and even maths before difficult personal circumstances forced me to interrupt my studies. When I resumed my education, I homed in on history – a discipline that I thought would be flexible enough to satisfy my many conflicting interests. It was a decision that I never regretted.”
Already the author of The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (2012), Mintzker believes that it is “in [his] intellectual DNA to look at cultural phenomena from different angles and to search for more than one answer to the question ‘Why?’ Coming across the case of ‘Jew Süss’ was a godsend in that respect. I was drawn to the many uncertainties and contradictions in the case; that any attempt to reduce it to one plot line was bound to misrepresent it. Inspired among others by Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Orhan Pamuk’s masterful novel My Name is Red, I decided to write four parallel accounts of the trial.”
Yet Mintzker also sees the story as “a powerful parable about the modern world. This is why ‘Jew Süss’ continues to star in so many novels, films and plays, but also history books such as mine. Many contemporary politicians – including US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – are often compared with ‘Jew Süss’. This is a sign that the trial, although it was concluded almost three centuries ago, is not quite over yet.”
Matthew Reisz