Israeli born and raised, history Professor Yair Mintzker, prize winning author of scholarly, meticulously researched book, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, scrupulously re-examines the bizarre case of “court Jew” Joseph Oppenheimer nicknamed Jew Süss. Oppenheimer was once the personal banker and financial adviser to Duke Carl Alexander in the duchy of Wurttemberg within the staunchly Catholic Holy Roman Empire, a network of kingdoms, duchies and cities, most of which now comprise independent countries of Europe.
Accused of unfounded crimes---embezzlement, corruption, usury, adultery and “demandable maltreatments against the prince and country---based primarily on “rumors, gossip, outright lies and at best half-truths” Oppenheimer was found guilty on all counts and hanged. Over twenty thousand witnessed the “spectacle” of his execution, his corpse locked in a steel “gibbet” (cage) especially constructed for the occasion, as a warning to others.
Oppenhiemer’s trial and courtroom drama has been the subject of several historical accounts, citations in academic journals, popular magazines, newspapers, as well as a vile anti-Semitic propaganda film issued at Goebbels’s request in 1940. Dwarfed in magnitude even by such sensational “trials of the century” as that of, Alfred Dreyfus, Nelson Mandela, and O. J. Simpson, the name, “Jew Süss” remains to the German collective imagination what Shakespeare’s “Shylock” is to the English-speaking world. Mintzker’s seven-year research into thousands of original, handwritten documents, pamphlets, poems and essays, encapsulates the most crucial testimony of four witnesses. Two of whom were Jews who played a crucial role in the verdict of a Jew on trial in Christian society in 1738, and provide insight into the Europe’s unstoppable love affair with anti-Semitism.
Dr.Philipp Friedirch Jager was the chief “inquisitor” as well as head judge at the trial. A proud member of an old elite German family better known as “the worthies” Jager represented the old aristocratic base of the Duchy of Wurttemberg, the complete antithesis of the character of “malignant foreigner Jew Süss.” Judge Jager interrogated Oppenheimer for forty-five days and was entrusted to write the “facts” leading to a death sentence.
Christoph David Bernard, a convert from Judaism to Lutheranism testified after Oppenheimer refused conversion. When asked about his personal feelings about Oppenheimer, Bernard responded, “Once he grew in riches and importance, he became disgusting to me, so I avoided him.”
Mordecai Schloss a “competing court Jew” and David Fassman a mystery writer of the time, both saw Oppenheimer the night before his execution. Both impugned Oppenheimer’s reputation claiming, “no one had anything good to say about him.” Yet curiously after Oppenheimer’s death Fassman praised Oppenheimer’s martyrdom and righteousness as a Jew. Obviously, Jews could never safely testify and praise another Jew in the 18th century Holy Roman Empire—which incidentally, French philosopher Voltaire claimed, “was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.”
Mintzker’s prize-winning book awakens us to the suffering, “the many deaths” of a Jew within an anti-Jewish culture. Mintzker’s compelling account furthers our understanding of Europe’s long history of antisemitism, the happy participation of slaughter of Jews three hundred years later and the seemingly eradicable, recurrence of the multi-threaded Hydra of antisemitism in Europe today.