Yair Mintzker

"Jew Suss" was Joseph Oppenheimer, who in 1733 became a "court Jew" to the duke of Wurtemberg, one of the many tiny German states which then constituted the Holy Roman Empire. A court Jew was a Jewish banker who handled the finances of, or lent money to, European royalty and nobility. Court Jews were needed because prohibitions against usury - lending money for interest - applied to Christians but did not apply to Jews. The position brought privileges to the Jew concerned, but also risks; removing the Jewish banker was sometimes the easiest way for his aristocratic employer to eliminate his debts. And in the case of the Jew "Suss", it seems that it was resentment of his power and privilege at court that brought about his downfall, when his employer, duke Carl Alexander, died suddenly. Oppenheimer was immediately arrested, accused of various unspecified criminal and moral misdeeds; he was tried and condemned to death, and hanged in public just outside Stuttgart.

There have been numerous historical treatments and encyclopedia entries about the case - from contemporary 18th century accounts to modern ones - and it has been woven into a number of works of fiction, including novels, plays, an opera and two films. Of the latter, the most infamous example was the vicious Nazi propaganda film made at the behest of Goebbels. Remarkably, the state archives in Stuttgart contain about thirty thousand pages of handwritten documents from the time period of the trial; they include protocols of the interrogations of Oppenheimer, his alleged accomplices and many witnesses; there are also descriptions of Oppenheimer's conversations with visitors and much else. Why, with this multiplicity of information on "Jew Suss", would anyone think it worthwhile to write - or read - a new history?

In spite of the wealth of material, Oppenheimer remains an elusive figure. We might well suppose that he was stitched up by non-Jews, who resented his position of power and privilege or who perhaps had had their own interests adversely affected by him; but the specifics of his alleged crimes are too vague, and not enough is known about his life prior to Wurtemburg to make judgments about his character. The author of the present book takes a very different approach to the case, by deliberately not seeking a conclusion about Oppenheimer’s guilt or innocence. Instead he examines, the accounts of four different people who interacted with Oppenheimer during or after the period of his trial; Philipp Friedrich Jager, the judge-inquisitor who wrote the factual part of Oppenheimer's verdict and thus the basis for his death sentence. This is followed by the stories of two men who visited Oppenheimer during his last days; Christoph David Bernard, a university lecturer, born a Jew who had converted to Christianity; and Mordechai Schloss, who published the only contemporary Jewish account of Oppenheimer's life and death. The final chapter of the book tells the story of David Fassman - a "litterateur and fabulist from Leipzig", who was one of the earliest biographers of Joseph Oppenheimer.

This book thus is as much an account these four people - their lives and their motivations - as it is of "Jew Suss" himself. The author believes that there is no point in trying to reconcile their different views of Oppenheimer, but that much can be learned from them about the lives of Jews in 18th century Germany and about the, often fraught, relationships between them. It is indeed a fascinating study of a microcosm of Jewish history in Europe.… (altro)