For the student of Jewish history, Yair Mintzker's The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is an engagingly multifaceted work. Though ostensibly a biography of a famous (or infamous) Jew, it presents a social history of an era. As such, it is part of the scholarly literature on early modern European Jewry, but thematically, it also speaks to scholarship on anti-Semitic trials in modern European history. This multivalence lends itself to separate, though interrelated discussions of the book within the framework of Jewish history.

Jewish biography is a thriving field, as evinced by the large number of recently published Jewish biographies and by the fact that the National Jewish Book Awards have a discrete category for biography, separated in 2018 from the category of autobiography and memoir. With an emphasis on a vibrant narrative, even approaching novelistic at times, biographies are a notably accessible way to convey history. As a mode of writing history, however, biography is considerably less popular among professors of Jewish history than it is among non-academics—including rabbis, teachers at Jewish communal educational institutions, and journalists and columnists—who write history books.Footnote ¹ Indeed, it often seems as if academically trained historians cede the field of biography to historical writers who may not share our expectations for archival work, source criticism, or engagement with the preexisting literature.

This is not to say that academic scholars of Jewish history never write biographies, but intellectual and literary biographies seem to predominate among academic Jewish biographies.Footnote ² In essence, intellectuals (namely professors) choose to elucidate the lives of other intellectuals (namely religious scholars, academics, or writers). A notable exception to this broad trend is the ten-year-old Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press, which covers the lives of Jews from the worlds of politics, entertainment, arts and letters, and even sport. Although some books in the series have non-academic authors, many others have been written by leading scholarly experts on their subject.Footnote ³ Nonetheless, with their particular style and relative dearth of citations, it is debatable whether Jewish Lives biographies count as academic biographies, even when written by history professors. By contrast, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, which won the National Jewish Book Award for History in 2017, is assuredly an academic book, resting on an immense body of archival research and in dialogue with the scholarly literature, as well as a biography of a single Jew who was not a leading intellectual of his time.

As other contributors to this forum note in their essays, Mintzker's methodology is particularly innovative. To bring a new angle to the well-known story of the trial and execution of Joseph Oppenheimer, Mintzker has opted for what he calls “polyphonic history,” an assemblage of differing, and largely simultaneous, perspectives on the event, reminiscent of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's technique in the film Rashomon (1950). Mintzker's narrative mediators are three men directly involved in the trial and one contemporaneous outside observer: investigating magistrate Philipp Friedrich Jäger; Christoph David Bernard, a Jewish apostate who attempted to convert Oppenheimer to Christianity; Mordechai Schloss, one of Oppenheimer's business competitors and a member of the Jewish community; and David Fassmann, a popular writer and author of an early, heavily fictionalized biography of Oppenheimer. This methodological choice is, however, more than a stylistic innovation. It is largely a reaction to the archival and literary silence of the central figure. Mintzker needed to find a way to write Oppenheimer's story when Oppenheimer's own version of events was simply not available. Additionally, based on source availability, Mintzker has written a Jewish story largely, though not entirely, using non-Jewish sources.

In many ways, Mintzker's response to the variety of challenges he faced, both thematic and in terms of available sources, finds a satisfactory resolution in his utilization of biography. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is rich in thick description and might be considered a social history as well as a biography. (The tensions between these two genres are problematized in the article by Sarah Maza.) Mintzker uses the four juxtaposed narratives as vehicles for relating aspects of the history of the Duchy of Württemberg and the Holy Roman Empire in the early eighteenth century, as well as the social history of Jews in that era. His exposition of the situation of the Jews is foregrounded in the third of his four narratives—“Joseph and His Brothers: Third Conversation”—based on an account by Mordechai Schloss and Callmann Seligmann, who knew Oppenheimer well and witnessed his trial.

In both of these decisions, Mintzker indicates intriguing ways that academic Jewish historians can write biography, combining captivating narrative and rigorous analysis, overcoming gaps in the source base where these lacunae might undermine the entire enterprise. In doing so, we have an opportunity to bridge the gap between writing for an academic audience and writing for a popular audience.

Mintzker is certainly not the only Jewish historian who has made such choices. Even in Eliyahu Stern's intellectual biography of the Vilner Gaon, a paradigmatic religious and intellectual figure of the eighteenth century, the examination is made more accessible and more meaningful by thoroughly contextualizing the Gaon's life and achievements.Footnote ⁴ The success of Lisa Moses Leff's The Archive Thief, focusing on a Jewish scholar previously little known outside of certain circles, speaks to the potential for academic biography embedded in a larger story. Leff illuminates the work of Jewish cultural salvage and reconstruction after World War II as she relates the extraordinary life of Zosa Szajkowski.Footnote ⁵ My book The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction and Mirjam Zadoff's Werner Scholem: A German Life contextualize the experiences of a single family to make broader points about Jewish life in Germany in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁶ Additionally, in looking at the Scholems before World War I, I faced a similar challenge as Mintzker, namely a paucity of autobiographical sources from the subject(s) under examination. This is where other, non-Jewish voices and documents fill the vacuum and where the landscape of context comes to the fore. Naturally, this raises the question of the degree to which Jewish history or biography should be told through non-Jewish sources.

Perhaps an even more germane comparison can be made between Mintzker's book and Joshua Schreier's The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire.Footnote ⁷ Schreier uses the life of the merchant Jacob Lasry and several others to elucidate the changing status of North African Jewry under Ottoman and nascent French rule and revises our understanding of the beginnings of French colonialism in Algeria. A Jew's road to commercial success, wealth, and even political influence in that world differed from those of his Muslim and Christian neighbors and, as a result, entailed different perils. Moreover, and critically, in the absence of Lasry's own writings, Schreier heavily relies on non-Jewish sources and Jewish community records to tell Lasry's story. Considering Lasry's machinations and frequently unsavory reputation, Schreier has needed to read beyond the critiques of him in the available documents.

Ultimately, it is somewhat surprising that we do not have more scholarly biographies of Jewish figures beyond religious notables and intellectual heavyweights and that more academic historians of modern Jewry do not see the scholarly potential—or even potential profitability—of writing biographies. (This is, of course, excepting the aforementioned Jewish Lives series, which fills exactly that niche, though it minimizes the critical apparatus appended to the narration.) Todd Endelman has even made the case that scholars should write biographies of unknown or little-known Jews as a way to illuminate social history.Footnote ⁸ Despite its unconventional narrative style, Mintzker's book can serve as a model for writing Central European Jewish biographies, embedded in a larger context and appealing to a variety of readerships.

Additionally, for historians of modern European Jewry—including this author—the trial of Joseph Oppenheimer naturally invites comparisons to other anti-Semitic trials, such as the Tiszaeszlár affair; the Xanten and Konitz affairs; and the trials of Alfred Dreyfus, Leopold Hilsner, and Menachem Mendel Beilis, not to mention Leo Frank in the United States. In fact, the Jew on trial is a common theme in Jewish historiography, including several relatively recent monographs and edited volumes.Footnote ⁹

Although antisemitism underpinned all of the aforementioned cases, several particularly focused on the accusation of Jewish ritual murder. Scholars have noted that belief in the blood libel precipitously declined in Central and West Europe, particularly in Protestant lands, beginning in the sixteenth century. However, this belief remained popular in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Russian Empire, where Christian clergy—particularly Catholic clergy—legitimated the charge of ritual murder, and local oral culture perpetuated it even before the profusion of popular print culture.Footnote ¹⁰ By the late nineteenth century, the belief reemerged in Central Europe, leading to several major ritual-murder trials, hundreds of thousands of editorials and articles, and even parliamentary debates on the topic.Footnote ¹¹

The blood libel was not incidental to these cases, but rather integral to them. To name one example, the investigation and trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev in 1911–1913 was fundamentally about the allegation of ritual murder. Even when it was clear that there was insufficient evidence to convict Beilis of homicide, the prosecution made it an overt goal to prove that Jews engaged in ritual murder, and confirming or rejecting this allegation was one of the tasks entrusted to the jury.Footnote ¹² This contrasts with the arrest, investigation, and trial of Joseph Oppenheimer, as Mintzker notes. The prosecution accused him of financial corruption, subversion of Jewish residential restrictions, and sexual misconduct with Christian women, but the allegations against him did not include accusations of ritual murder. In fact, for all the disapprobation that Oppenheimer faced, fantastical, superstitious beliefs about Jewish religious practice did not inform the indictment. Indeed, the situation was more complicated than one might expect. The investigating magistrates did not “leave any record of Jew-baiting before Oppenheimer's trial,” and “despite the obvious anti-Jewish sentiments of some members of the court, one cannot reduce Oppenheimer's case to Judeophobia alone.” Mintzker continues, “Despite the occasional religious overtones, [magistrate Philipp Friedrich] Jäger's species facti was primarily about administration and politics, and only indirectly about religion or ethnicity.”Footnote ¹³

The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trials were in many ways a throwback to the medieval era, but they were decisively different in some significant ways. As Hillel Kieval has written, the application of modern science, itself a product of belief in rationality, became central to proving (or confirming) an irrational, premodern belief in Jewish criminality.Footnote ¹⁴ By the 1880s, science, including forensics, could not be ignored, and was even marshaled in support of allegations of ritual murder. Moreover, this use of science was not limited to the effort to appeal to juries and judges. As Robert Weinberg has argued, the trial of Mendel Beilis and the supposedly expert testimony brought to bear during the trial also were intended to instill belief in Jewish nefariousness to a wider, even international, audience in a modern, ostensibly rational age.Footnote ¹⁵ By contrast, in Oppenheimer's time, the inferior status of the Jew was assumed. Oppenheimer having dared to have a lifestyle that was a simulacrum of that of non-Jewish German elites exacerbated his plight.Footnote ¹⁶

Incidentally, though the most famous modern ritual-murder trials took place in Russia and Austria-Hungary, supposedly enlightened Prussia was not immune to this phenomenon. Popular belief in the blood libel informed the murder trials of Jewish butchers both in Catholic Xanten (Rhine Province) 1891–1892 and in predominately Protestant Konitz (West Prussia) in 1900–1901. Though neither higher state nor church authorities countenanced the accusation of ritual murder, the allegations found widespread acceptance among local residents, leading to the ostracization of and violence against the Jewish residents, who had enjoyed generally decent relations with their non-Jewish neighbors before these incidents.Footnote ¹⁷

That said, what stands out both for the scholar of Jewish history and for Jewish popular memory is not the similarity between the Oppenheimer case and other, later trials, but rather the difference. The Oppenheimer case looms large in memory because of its gruesome denouement and its later instrumentalization by the Nazis, but the actual role of anti-Semitism or Judeophobia was quite different from the various ritual-murder cases. Indeed, the political nature of Oppenheimer's arrest and trial calls to mind the case of Dreyfus more than that of Beilis.

Naturally, there were significant differences between Alfred Dreyfus and Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, chief among them the fact that Dreyfus was a fully enfranchised citizen of an egalitarian republic, not merely the tolerated subject of a monarch. However, noteworthy similarities also exist. Most importantly, neither man was initially targeted by the judicial authorities solely because he was a Jew, yet both affairs unleashed public anti-Jewish vitriol.Footnote ¹⁸ In both cases, that a Jew could have such an important role in the government or the military was an affront to traditionalist and nativist sensibilities, and anti-Semitism “was able to clothe itself in the garb of order, to pose as the defender of … society against an ‘invasion’ of outsiders.”Footnote ¹⁹ Also notable is that neither Oppenheimer nor Dreyfus was traditionally religious or engaged in Jewish communal activities. In fact, Oppenheimer differed from most early modern court Jews (or court factors, Hoffaktoren) in that he had ceased living in accordance with Jewish law, not to mention his ostentatious lifestyle. Although Alfred Dreyfus was married by a rabbi—in contrast to his brother Mathieu—and had indirect ties to French Jewish elites, he was not religious. Additionally, he was considered aloof or distant by his colleagues, and he was conspicuously wealthy for an army officer.Footnote ²⁰ Critically, neither man had a patron to protect him—Oppenheimer because of the death of Duke Charles Alexander and Dreyfus because he had not bothered to cultivate a patron among his superior officers. Oppenheimer's fame, or infamy, was preserved in collective memory and spread by Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel and the widely distributed 1940 film.Footnote ²¹ Dreyfus's story has achieved legendary status in no small part through its use by Theodor Herzl and later Zionists.Footnote ²² In both cases, political actors made use of these histories, though with wildly different perspectives. The Nazis exploited Oppenheimer's story to inflame anti-Semitism among non-Jewish Europeans, while Zionists used Dreyfus's story to demonstrate to fellow Jews the persistence of European anti-Semitism and, ultimately, the need for an independent state for the Jews.

The local Jewish reaction to both affairs is also telling. Oppenheimer had his share of rivals, if not enemies, in the Jewish community. Jewish court factors were often in competition with one another or had tense business relations. In fact, many were arrested or feared imminent arrest after Oppenheimer was incarcerated. Some of these court factors felt no sympathy for Oppenheimer, whereas others refused to testify against him. The Dreyfus affair unsettled a community that had felt insecure in its emancipation and had been historically deferential to the French political establishment. French Jews wondered if they and their liberties were expendable, and they felt embarrassment regarding a supposed traitor in their ranks. In the words of one historian, Dreyfus's “arrest, condemnation, and degradation were experienced … as a moment of intense shame,” and many Jews shared the popular belief in Dreyfus's guilt. After a period of passivity, silence, and indecision, however, Jewish public figures attempted to rally Republican sentiment and appealed to French humanitarian traditions as they agitated on Dreyfus's behalf.Footnote ²³ Naturally, such a course of action was neither possible nor really conceivable for Oppenheimer's coreligionists. Simply put, the legal, political, and social position of Jews in the early 1700s differed significantly from that of Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, especially Jews in Republican France. In the end, neither case fundamentally changed the Jewish community itself or its place in the wider, non-Jewish society.

Above all, what Oppenheimer and Dreyfus have in common is that they have become symbols, with evocative power that has far outlasted the immediate ripple effect of their trials. Therein lies the appeal of writing again and again, in a multiplicity of languages, about Oppenheimer and Dreyfus. The mere mention of their names conjures up associations and preconceived notions, rightly or wrongly, of a Jew who, having forged for himself a powerful position in non-Jewish society, found himself persecuted on the basis of his Jewishness.Footnote ²⁴ For many observers, their stories demonstrate the fragility of Jewish integration into non-Jewish European society. At the very least, they speak to the issue of non-Jewish acceptance (or rejection) of Jews as fellow citizens or neighbors on ostensibly equal terms. Above all, Mintzker's retelling of Joseph Oppenheimer's story illuminates the complexity of the Jews’ place in the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire and the precarious power dynamics that characterized their involvement in temporal politics in that last century before emancipation.

Yair Mintzker's remarkable The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is written as what the author calls a “polyphonic history”: because there exist no sources that reliably convey the subjectivity of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the court Jew to the Duke of Württenberg famously tried in 1737–1738 and eventually executed, Mintzker proposes to hone in on his central subject via the perspectives of four significant people who interacted with Oppenheimer during and shortly after his trial.Footnote ¹ Parsing the records left by a judge, a convert from Judaism, a fellow Jew, and a writer, Mintzker brilliantly re-creates Oppenheimer as a “structuring absence”Footnote ² whose essence can best be grasped via the anxieties of those who dealt with him in the last months of his life and the cultural codes they deployed to explain his fate.

In reconstructing the world that made Oppenheimer, Mintzker deploys a dazzling array of methods, some well established and others unconventional: the reader is treated to deep archival plunges into biographical material and social history, but also to biblical exegeses, literary analysis, lengthy transcriptions of several arresting sources, and dialogues between the author and a hypothetical skeptical reader that cleverly push the argument forward at the end of each chapter. Indeed, the overall tenor of the work is heavily dialogic, with conversations opening up within conversations, between Oppenheimer and his interlocutors: the author and his reader, the author and himself. Cumulatively, the approach works: it delivers a mesmerizing reading experience and ample food for thought. But to what end? I propose here to engage with the questions behind the book's central question—How, in the absence of trustworthy sources and the protagonist's own perspective, do we get as close as possible to Oppenheimer?—by asking my own questions about why exactly we are being asked to care about Jew Süss. What are the ultimate stakes of Mintzker's inquiry? In this contribution to the forum, which resonates with some of the themes raised by Jay Geller and Jesse Spohnholz, I will explore the question of whether The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is best understood as a biography or a microhistory. I frame the issue thus not because I believe that a book like this should necessarily fit into one of those genres, but because I hope that posing the question in this way is a good heuristic device for assessing both Mintzker's ultimate purpose and the strategies he employs.

An excellent guide to the distinction between these two genres is Jill Lepore's 2001 article “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” which delineates the characteristics of each while pointing to some slipperiness in the boundary between them.Footnote ³ To most historians, the difference between biography and microhistory will seem obvious: biographies are about famous people, whereas microhistories typically track the lives of the obscure. But as Lepore points out, such is not always the case. Microhistories can be about people who were famous in their own time—the sixteenth-century traveler and writer Leo Africanus, for instance, or the eighteenth-century speculator and politician William Cooper.Footnote ⁴ Conversely, an ordinary person is sometimes given the full biographical treatment, for instance the eighteenth-century American midwife Martha Ballard, whose life Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicled at length precisely in order to make the point that biography should not be reserved for (usually male) members of the social elite.Footnote ⁵ A more significant distinction might be that, as Lepore also proposes, biography always addresses the sweep of a person's life, whereas microhistories, even as they include accounts of their protagonists’ full lives, are typically built around a single moment of revelatory crisis. The essential difference, however, resides in the ultimate purpose of each genre: biography seeks to explain the individual, microhistory the world beyond the individual. The first seeks to establish singularity, the second exemplarity.Footnote ⁶

To which of these two categories does The Many Deaths of Jew Süss most obviously belong? On the face of it, the book has all of the characteristics of a microhistory. As the court Jew attached to Duke Carl Alexander of Württenberg, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer may have been known to many in his own day, but absent his trial and execution, and even more so his posthumous existence as an avatar of horrific twentieth-century anti-Semitism, he would not be remembered today. Although not poor or illiterate, he fits comfortably into the “obscure person” category; he was not the sort of individual posthumously deemed worthy of biographical attention on account of political, intellectual, or artistic activities or of conspicuous presence in high society.

Further appearing to confirm the book's status as a microhistory is the fact that its very title (including words such as “Deaths,” “Notorious Trial and Execution”) signals a focus on a moment of crisis rather than a whole life. There exists, of course, no single definition of microhistory, and the genre's scope and purpose have in the past been the object of considerable debate.Footnote ⁷ Works labeled microhistory have included everything from minute explorations of specific locales (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, for instance) to the most popular recent template, the stories of obscure individuals such as John Hu, Elizabeth Marsh, or Domingos Álvares, who crossed oceans and encountered unfamiliar cultures.Footnote ⁸ The most famous microhistories, name-checked in every discussion of the genre, do, however, focus on a moment of crisis, a break in the normal order of things, which involves or portends violence. Whether telling of the discovery of the fake Martin Guerre's identity, the arrest of the heretical miller Menocchio, or the torture and killing of animals by printers’ apprentices in eighteenth-century Paris, the iconic microhistory is built around, or builds up to, a moment of intense drama.Footnote ⁹ Here again, Oppenheimer's story more than fits the bill, starting with a sudden reversal of fortune and climaxing in a hideous, grandly theatrical execution.

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss also resembles many microhistories in its very style. Lepore observes that microhistorians often resort to unconventional devices in framing their narratives.Footnote ¹⁰ The genre was launched by historians of early modern Western societies whose urge was to bring to life the worlds of marginalized people: wanting to tell a great story but typically facing a paucity of sources, they resorted to imaginative speculation, sprinkling their prose with “must haves” and “might haves,” or using downright invention such as creating imaginary thoughts for their subjects. Because the style of a microhistory is often both intimate and speculative, authorial presence is typically more conspicuous than in other genres of historical writing. That presence can be implicit, as the writer openly divulges gaps in the evidence and leaps of faith, or quite explicit, as when Natalie Davis opens her Women on the Margins with a conversation between herself and her three cranky, skeptical protagonists.Footnote ¹¹ Mintzker's authorial presence is most concrete in the conversations with an imagined reader that punctuate the book, but almost as explicit in the candor with which he admits to the limitations of the sources he really needs and the methodological experiments he therefore conducts in search of the elusive Oppenheimer.

Lepore also notes that the author's presence has often featured clearly in microhistory because so many classics in this mode are framed as mysteries or puzzles, with the writer taking on the role of the detective; indeed, the person who arguably invented the genre, Carlo Ginzburg, sprinkles his writings with words such as “clues” and “enigma” and has repeatedly invoked Sherlock Holmes as his model.Footnote ¹² Lepore goes further, proposing that because the protagonists of microhistories are often people with unsavory reputations, writers commonly identify not with the main personage but with the investigator or judge who looks into their deeds and passes sentence upon them.Footnote ¹³ Natalie Davis, for one, does not hide her admiration for Jean de Coras, judge in and chronicler of the Martin Guerre case, whom she views as sympathetic to religious minorities, women, and the lower orders.Footnote ¹⁴ Mintzker, on the other hand, does not appear particularly drawn to any among his quartet of voices, least of all to judge Philipp Jäger, whom he describes as a man of deep prejudices, a frustrated careerist who projected his own jealous disappointment onto the accused. The judge's indictment of Oppenheimer, in Mintzker's view, was “[b]ased on rumors, gossip, outright lies and (at best) half-truths … [and] is one of the most radical and fictive versions of Jew Süss ever written.”Footnote ¹⁵

Investigators and judges in the past and sleuthing historians in the present loom large in the genre because, as Lepore observes, microhistories revolve around “people whose incompletely documented lives point historians toward a single question shrouded in mystery: Where did Menocchio get the idea that the world was born in putrefaction? Did Bertrande de Rols lie about Martin Guerre? Why was Hu locked up? Why wouldn't Eunice return to Deerfield?”Footnote ¹⁶ Not all microhistories follow this template, and The Many Deaths of Jew Süss certainly does not conform to it. Although it asks many questions along the way, the book proposes no big central mystery. Why was Joseph Süss Oppenheimer allowed to flourish, and then suddenly scapegoated and killed? There are convincing time-and-place specific answers to that question, which Mintzker duly provides, but to anyone remotely familiar with Jewish history, the larger answer is painfully un-mysterious. This sort of puzzle, though, is not Mintzker's concern, and therein lies the most compelling reason for reading his book as other than a microhistory.

The microhistorian, Lepore argues, is not fundamentally invested in her or his protagonist. Natalie Davis may be the exception here, because her affect, though not uncritical, tends toward the romantically empathetic—whether toward Arnaud du Tilh and Bertrande de Rols, Leo Africanus, or the trio of self-actualizing characters in Women on the Margins. More often, though, as Lepore suggests, microhistorians’ protagonists are devices rather than beloved alter egos.Footnote ¹⁷ Their stories are useful for drawing the reader in, but less an end in themselves than the means of accessing a broader question of historical culture: What was the nature of identity in premodern Europe? How did members of the “lower” orders encounter, appropriate, and reshape elite culture in early modern Italy? How could eighteenth-century apprentices express anger at their masters in a rigidly hierarchical artisanal culture? In the early 1700s, what features of Native American mores would be more appealing to a young Englishwoman than her own culture of origin? These are the central questions of classic works by Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, and John Demos, and they connect to fundamental areas of historical inquiry.

Here is the main characteristic of microhistory, the one that differentiates it most sharply from biography: however appealing its central drama, a microhistory aims to make a point about the historical landscape behind the story. In the essay that laid the theoretical foundations for the genre, Clifford Geertz describes a drama involving burglary, murder, a breathtaking escape, and a sheep raid. Through the alchemy of thick description, the story reveals the unspoken assumptions—typically puzzling ones to the modern reader—about honor and justice shared (though not equally) by Moroccan tribesmen, Jewish merchants, and French colonial authorities.Footnote ¹⁸ Although intriguing characters and good stories are selling points for microhistory (literally so, because such books nearly always make bids for lay readership and course adoption) they are not, conceptually, the purpose of the exercise. This point is applicable, I would argue, even to what one might call mega-microhistories, the broadest, most resonant accounts of a small event that shed light on large issues.

A particularly apposite example here is another instance of judicial anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus case. The 1894 framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason, and the subsequent dramatic events of his conviction, imprisonment, and eventual exoneration, have gripped the hearts and minds of generations, as they did contemporaries of the case.Footnote ¹⁹ However much one might admire Dreyfus the man or deplore his fate, however, the myriad classic narratives of l'affaire (as it is still known in France) are not biographies but, generically, microhistories: the particular story of what happened to Dreyfus matters because it revealed and intensified the nation's bitter division between a blood-and-soil nationalist political right and its secular universalist republican opponents. It dramatized a fundamental sociopolitical antagonism that reverberated through the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the Vichy regime. Alfred Dreyfus as a person was only contingently involved in this extended historical drama.

If we accept a definition of microhistory as a particular story that illuminates a larger historical issue, then The Many Deaths of Jew Süss does not fit the bill. This is not to say that Mintzker fails to use the Oppenheimer case to uncover important elements of its historical context—quite the opposite. The story of each protagonist illuminates a different facet of historical experience. Judge Philipp Jäger's story offers vivid details about the career of a hardworking, ambitious youth from a small town and establishes the multiple connections (from common historical actors to structural similarities) between the Oppenheimer affair and the sudden imprisonment and judicial persecution of Christina von Würben-Grävenitz, longtime mistress to Duke Eberhard Ludwig, six years earlier. Each of the chapters confounds any simple view of a monolithic Christian-Jewish split in eighteenth-century Württemberg. Jäger's hostility to Oppenheimer had many more causes than the anti-Jewish prejudice he certainly harbored. The convert Christoph David Bernard learned about Christianity in a seminary where he also taught Hebrew and Aramaic and practiced theological disputations that would inform his encounter with Oppenheimer. Chapter 3 introduces us, through the figure of Mordechai Schloss, to fractious communities of Jewish businessmen just as likely to help put one another in jail as to give one another assistance. Finally, the Lutheran writer David Fassmann, author of many “dialogues of the dead,” had no sympathies for Jews in general or Oppenheimer in particular, but nonetheless produced a heart-rending account of Oppenheimer's execution from the point of view of the condemned. Thanks to Mintzker's prodigious research, all of these different characters and settings behind the case come into view, but none are the author's ultimate focus. His gaze is trained on the ever-elusive Oppenheimer. To this reader, at least, it seems clear that The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is not a microhistory but a biography, albeit a highly unusual one.

In a couple of key aspects noted previously, Mintzker's study departs from the usual model of biographical writing: it does not concern a person of significant achievement or influence, and its focus is not on a whole life but on a specific moment of crisis. Why call it a biography, then? Because however much Mintzker digs into context and background, it becomes increasingly clear as the work progresses that the protagonist, Oppenheimer himself, is its true object. Lamenting a lack of reliable sources in his introduction, Mintzker makes clear that he wishes to establish some sort of truth, however tentative, about the man himself. Historians, he writes, “possess few documents about Oppenheimer's early career, but what they have is fairly reliable,” whereas the massive archive relating to the last months of his life “is extremely tendentious.”Footnote ²⁰ Neither contemporaries nor later historians, he continues, have been able to grasp with certainty what Oppenheimer had done to get into trouble, what it meant at the time, “and how Oppenheimer himself experienced his rise, fall, and violent death.”Footnote ²¹ That last phrase is telling: although the book offers a treasure trove of historical discoveries, in the end Mintzker seems most driven by the desire to get close to Oppenheimer, to gain access to his subjectivity.

Jill Lepore argues that affective investment in the subject is typical of biography rather than microhistory. Biographers typically “love too much,” sometimes to such an extent that love can turn to hatred or betrayal; their affect toward their subject is “more like that of a crazed stalker than that of a faithful husband.”Footnote ²² Microhistorians are less likely to fall in love with their subjects, she posits, because the latter are more akin to devices than to real people.Footnote ²³ Lepore's blunt distinction admits to many exceptions and shadings. We can all think of microhistorians—Natalie Davis again comes to mind, but she is far from the only one—who appear enamored of their subjects, and the word love hardly conveys the complicated feelings that biographers of racists, criminals, or dictators harbor toward their protagonists. As a general proposition, though, Lepore's point reinforces the view that biographers write “to” their subjects while microhistorians write “through” them.

By this definition, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is indeed a biography. Mintzker's introduction hones in on the problematic nature of the sources relating to the case and bemoans that because of their varying agendas later historians have never been able to understand Oppenheimer on his own terms.Footnote ²⁴ Although the book has more than one purpose, the recovery of Oppenheimer's point of view, of his subjectivity, recurs so frequently—especially in Mintzker's conversations with his reader—as to emerge as the central concern. In his introduction, Mintzker explains the purpose of his polyphonic method: “[W]e are about to see Oppenheimer portrayed from different angles.” Expanding on his approach at the end of the chapter on Judge Jäger, Mintzker offers analogies to hearing one side of a telephone conversation or reconstructing a game of chess from only one color's moves.Footnote ²⁵ While pushing back against historians who claim that the sources explicitly convey Oppenheimer's voice, Mintzker admits, about two-thirds of the way through: “You are right: Oppenheimer is the book's absent center; he is its pictorial negative space, its structuring absence.”Footnote ²⁶

Nor is the pursuit of Oppenheimer's subjectivity a purely intellectual endeavor. As the study reaches its concluding sections, it becomes increasingly clear that the project is an ethical one, a historian's pursuit of empathy for a person long dead. Mintzker's motivation comes into focus in his discussion of Mordechai Schloss and Callman Seligmann's The Story of the Passing of Jew Süss, which he reads as a text that, in allegorical fashion, gives voice to Oppenheimer's side of the story, fulfilling the captive's final request. On the subject of their book, Mintzker remarks that “composing or reading a text can also be a simple act of kindness.”Footnote ²⁷ Clearly, he has in mind his own book too, whose purpose he confirms in an eloquent concluding passage. Exposed to the reaction of several people who spent time with Oppenheimer, we the readers experienced the world as he did in the weeks before his death, and therefore have shared his perspective. It is no accident that we have not seen more of the protagonist, Mitzker audaciously concludes, because we have been positioned alongside him, “we have stood in Oppenheimer's shoes all along.”Footnote ²⁸ For the author and the reader, this act of empathy is the mitzvah that provides the rationale for the work.

In arguing that The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is a biography, I seek to illuminate what I see as the productive tension throughout the book between its positivistic rationale and its postmodern methods. With very rare exceptions, such as Edmund Morris's Dutch, the methodological posture behind biography is almost inevitably (and understandably) positivistic: however much the biographer may have an “angle,” her primary mission is to come as close as possible to the facts of the person's life through examining the most exhaustive documentation.Footnote ²⁹ Mintzker aligns himself with this posture in the opening pages of the book: he critiques the sources about Oppenheimer, bemoaning their lack of trustworthiness. The historian, he writes, “should never stop treating the sources critically. He or she should strive to differentiate between what is historically verifiable and what is probably or manifestly false.”Footnote ³⁰ An unimpeachable statement, to be sure, but also one that could have been written a century ago, and certainly a credo most biographers would echo.

But this old-fashioned commitment to the pursuit of an objective truth comes wrapped in the skeptical, postmodern ethos characteristic of most microhistories. There is the polyphonic design, which suggests that no single voice can be trusted to capture reality. Three of the four sections use literary analysis to capture the essence of their protagonists’ understanding of Oppenheimer. The author's dialogues with the reader further destabilize the book's analysis at the same time as they keep the author and his choices in full view of the reader. Biography as a genre tends to erase the author, seeking to grant the reader unmediated closeness to the book's subject. Writers of microhistories, on the other hand, are often candid about their choices and motivations: Natalie Davis famously introduces The Return of Martin Guerre as “in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”Footnote ³¹ Mintzker likewise bemoans historians’ attachment to the narrative techniques of Western realism and is not shy about delivering the occasional postmodern sounding statement (“Sometimes fiction precedes history by serving as its script”Footnote ³²). The very polyphonic structure of the book suggests a certain skepticism about ultimate truths.

Therein lies the methodological paradox of this biography clad in microhistorical garb. The virtuoso techniques of postmodernism (the blurring of fact and fiction, an acknowledged authorial presence, a multi-perspectival approach) are pressed here into the service of a traditional biographer's goal: getting to “the truth” about the man whose caged body was hoisted atop the gallows outside Stuttgart on February 4, 1738. Most works of history are driven by a mixture of their author's documentary, interpretive, emotional, and political agendas, none of which are necessarily spelled out. But The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is a highly self-conscious exercise, so it seems only fair to ask of its author: Why, exactly, should we care about Joseph Süss Oppenheimer?

In The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, Yair Mintzker offers a methodology—polyphonic history—aimed at solving problems faced by historians attempting to understand events for which all the surviving evidence is problematic and polemical. At its core, Mintzker's polyphonic history asks the historian to look for the production of that kind of evidence in the personal biographies of its producers but also in the larger political, economic, social, and cultural transformations shaping their lives. Polyphonic history allows Mintzker to identify multiple, overlapping stories. Thus, instead of recounting the life and notorious death of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, Mintzker turns his historical gaze on Philipp Friedrich Jäger, Christoph David Bernard, Mordechai Schloss, and David Fassmann—four men who played a role in framing what we know today about Oppenheimer. Looking for evidence of each man's motives helps us understand why they told Oppenheimer's story the way they did. In the process, Mintzker demonstrates that each of these individuals also presented—or, better yet, performed—a certain version of himself for various audiences. Polyphonic history offers Mintzker a powerful tool to complicate metanarratives in German history that treat anti-Semitism as a self-evident explanation for judicial violence against Jews.

Although Mintzker presents polyphonic history as sui generis, there is merit to reflecting on how the author draws on a deep historiographical tradition of microhistory, a term that the author does not use to describe his book. My contribution to this forum thus considers The Many Deaths of Jew Süss as standing in a long line of microhistories.Footnote ¹ I will begin by defining the genre before I consider a series of critiques that have been raised against microhistory, not to relitigate old arguments but to consider how well Mintzker's book fares under the weight of those challenges. Ultimately, Mintzker uses polyphonic history to demonstrate that Oppenheimer's trial and guilt were not the predetermined result of some fixed, monolithic anti-Semitism; instead they were the contingent outcome of acts taken by various actors, many of whom were anti-Semitic. What Mintzker's polyphonic history cannot do, however, is explain how that contingent outcome later came to be seen as predetermined. I conclude by suggesting a set of other methodological approaches that can solve this problem.

My definition of microhistory is open and inclusive. Its only defining characteristic is the reduction of scale of the historical subject to one narrowly defined event, relationship, person, or object, so that factors or developments appear that otherwise might not be perceptible.Footnote ² What I find most promising about microhistory is that by changing the scale of observation, historians gain new perspectives that can transform understandings of how and why larger-scale developments took place.Footnote ³ Microhistories can help us see how the outcomes of events were the products of many complicated and contingent decisions made by all sorts of people, not just political, social, or cultural elites.Footnote ⁴ Microhistories prioritize three central principles of historical inquiry—context, contingency, and complexity—as a way of deepening our historical understanding of change and causality.Footnote ⁵ Intentionally or not, reducing scale in this way also pushes against what some historians see as the tendency of projects framed on a larger scale—whether nationalism, materialist structuralism, histoire totale, or now “big history”—to hew too close to determinism. Instead, microhistories emphasize human agency and the contingency of outcomes.

Mintzker's book fits well within my loose definition.Footnote ⁶ Of course, by describing The Many Deaths of Jew Süss as a microhistory, it is not my intent to refute Mintzker's claims to originality. I am happy to admit that his polyphonic method is distinct from other microhistories. Rather, my point is that Mintzker's polyphonic history required that he first adopt a microhistorical approach, which in turn allowed him to present a complicated picture of how intolerance functioned in early modern Europe.

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss also has qualities not essential to the genre of microhistory, but which are common features of it. Many microhistories, for instance, focus on trial records and thus have a tendency to emphasize conflicts between individuals or between individuals and the state. Another common feature is the willingness of authors of microhistories to insert their voices into the analysis and narrative. Mintzker does this with his four conversations with an imaginary reader—a rhetorical device that bears some similarity to one used by Natalie Zemon Davis.Footnote ⁷ Other authors of microhistories embrace their subjectivity in other ways, by introducing autobiographical reflections, by walking their reader through their uncertainties, or by admitting when they are using their imagination because the surviving evidence has proven insufficient. Microhistorians also seem particularly willing to blur the line between literature and history, whether because they emphasize the role of narrative, because they borrow literary conventions like the dramatis personae of a play,Footnote ⁸ or because (like Mintzker) they find value in literary allusions. To my mind, none of these features is essential to what defines microhistory, though in style as well as function, Mintzker's book fits the genre. Admittedly, I am a kindred spirit, in the sense that I value imagining ways to solve seemingly intractable historical problems by looking at them from creative rethinkings of scale.Footnote ⁹ However, not all such reimaginings are created equal. Therefore, I would like to consider how well Mintzker's book stands up to three main critiques of microhistories.

First, some critics have suggested that microhistories’ narrow focus prevents them from offering conclusions with wider significance. In that sense, they warn, microhistory approaches antiquarianism. Others suggest that microhistories celebrate adding complexity as an end in itself, which they find unsatisfactory. This is how Simon Schama framed the critique nearly forty years ago:

Similarly and more recently, Naomi Lamoreaux finds it unsatisfactory when microhistories take complicating the past as a sufficient end in itself. “It is important also to ‘resimplify,’ ” she responds, “to fit the evidence into a new interpretive framework.”Footnote ¹¹ Without the ability to draw wider conclusions, these critics suggest, writing microhistories becomes a practice of scholarly navel gazing.

Second, detractors have suggested that microhistory naively venerates the agency of oppressed people, often explicitly or implicitly turning its subjects into heroes. For these critics, microhistories can serve as mere tools of political activism rather than as products of rigorous scholarly investigation. This was at the core of Thomas Kuehn's critique of Gene Bruckner's Giovanni and Lusanna and Robert Finlay's critique of Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre.Footnote ¹² Critics also note that microhistories are often content with showing the agency of ordinary people, again as an end in itself. Naomi Lamoreaux questions the claim that merely demonstrating that history is the outcome of many people's choices constitutes an original scholarly contribution.Footnote ¹³ Brad Gregory agrees, and he further argues that microhistories’ celebration of agency “exaggerates both the fragility of large institutions and the contingency of their development.”Footnote ¹⁴

A third critique is that authors of microhistories are not driven by methodological goals but by their eagerness to engage nonacademic readers, whether to inspire undergraduates or to educate the wider society. After all, microhistories are one of the few genres of historical works written by academics that have a track record of breaking into the mass market. This stems from their potential to take history writing to the level of human emotion in a similar way that novels do.Footnote ¹⁵ I have not seen this critique explicitly in print, though I have heard it informally from colleagues. Rather than dismissing this perspective as merely a condescending attitude toward popular histories, I will concede that there could be a substantive point here. After all, the goal of microhistories, as I described it earlier, is to reduce the scale of historical investigation so that factors or developments appear that otherwise might not be perceptible. If, however, historians write their histories only to convey to a wider public what was already perceptible to scholars, they are engaging in a rather different act: humanizing existing macrohistorical narratives rather than offering new conclusions that help us see beyond what we knew before. This is not inherently problematic—history's ability to appeal to a broad public distinguishes it from many other scholarly disciplines—but it falls outside of my definition of microhistory.

There have been individual microhistories vulnerable to these criticisms, but in my view, none of these critiques delegitimizes microhistory as a genre of history writing. Surely, some microhistories risk antiquarianism, but others offer vistas of otherwise unrecognizable facets of the past. Just as surely, some microhistories romanticize their subjects, but others offer insights into people's motivations that enrich our understanding of how and why historical developments unfolded. And, yes, some works that claim to be microhistories might be better described as popular histories or even biographies, but others offer powerful insights that will enrich both specialists and nonspecialists.

How does Mintzker's The Many Deaths of Jew Süss stand up when placed against this backdrop? In my view, very well. The book proves capable of engaging specialists and nonspecialists alike, avoids romanticizing Oppenheimer, and offers new insights on enduring historical metanarratives.

The metanarratives looming over The Many Deaths of Jew Süss relate to anti-Semitism. One of these is biblical. It sees reflections of the trial and execution of Joseph Oppenheimer in the sufferings of God's chosen people described in the Tanakh. This story does not have a beginning, middle, and end so much as it has (in common Jewish understandings of time) a beginning (the covenant), a very long middle (the history of the Jewish people), and an anticipated end (messianic redemption). However, Mintzker's book speaks also to another, more explicit metanarrative. The ominous image from the advertising poster for the 1940 film Jud Süss reproduced opposite page one of the book reminds readers of a narrative of anti-Semitism linked to the development of German nationalism. If this story has a beginning, it is perhaps Martin Luther's nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to a church door on October 31, 1517 (regardless of whether that event really happened or was merely later popularized as useful propaganda for the Reformation). Within this metanarrative, Oppenheimer's case offers one of many examples in the middle of the story, while the Shoah stands as an implicit end. Equipped with either metanarrative, one need not go further to explain the outcome of Oppenheimer's trial. In the first, his Jewishness alone is sufficient to explain his earthly suffering. In the second, the fact that he was Jewish and lived in the lands that would become the modern nation-state of Germany is sufficient to explain the outcome.

This is where Mintzker uses microhistory so incisively. The author admits the futility of trying to recover the agency of the oppressed—Oppenheimer—and instead aims at recovering the agency of those people who produced extant evidence concerning his trial.Footnote ¹⁶ Mintzker starts by taking a deep dive into a microhistory of the trial through the lens of the judge, Philipp Friedrich Jäger. Here, five points come to light that force an innovative retelling of Oppenheimer's trial. First, and least surprisingly, Jäger was immersed in anti-Semitic attitudes common in the Holy Roman Empire (and elsewhere) in the early eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Second, and more surprisingly, in an earlier trial of the Duke of Württemberg's former mistress, Christina Wilhelmina von Würben (née Grävenitz), Jäger had acted in defense of Württemberg's Jewish community.Footnote ¹⁸ Third, Jäger resented the role Oppenheimer had played in negotiating the settlement between Würben and the duke. Fourth, Jäger was a member of a social group (the Ehrbarkeit, the worthies) whose members were frustrated because of their increasing distance from the duke.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, the judge proved more interested in Oppenheimer's effort to divide the duke from the Ehrbarkeit than in anti-Semitic tropes. Finally, the fact that Jäger became a judge in Oppenheimer's case was only the result of a series of coincidences and convergences, not a strategic decision by any one person.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, Mintzker recovers Jäger's agency in the trial—stacking the deck against Oppenheimer—as part of a very personal story, without romanticizing Jäger.

Later chapters serve similar functions. Christoph David Bernard's story of his meeting with Oppenheimer before the latter's execution reflected his own efforts to present himself as a loyal convert, but it also revealed his resentfulness of Oppenheimer's success. In the process, Bernard erased the diversity among the Jews within Oppenheimer's social, familial, and professional networks. Bernard knew full well that not all Jews were on good terms with Oppenheimer. To promote his own floundering career and to challenge the widespread stigma that Jewish converts retained their allegiance to Judaism, however, Bernard presented Oppenheimer as part of a Jewish conspiracy against Württemberg's authorities.Footnote ²¹

Mintzker's attention to Mordechai Schloss proves helpful as well. It turns out that Oppenheimer had recently replaced Schloss as the duke's leading court Jew.Footnote ²² When Schloss was questioned about Oppenheimer in September 1737, he initially hesitated to speak against his rival, but out of fear for his life, he eventually provided testimony that Oppenheimer had stolen, lied, and cheated the duke and members of his government.Footnote ²³ Later, Schloss was one of two coreligionists who met with Oppenheimer (with Bernard present) to offer spiritual comfort on his deathbed. He also coauthored with his son-in-law a book that included a description of that encounter, which in turn fit into a genre of Jewish literature describing criminals who repented and then became righteous martyrs.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, there was considerable diversity and complexity in the relationships among Württemberg's Jews. Moreover, Schloss's behavior toward Oppenheimer was not consistent but depended on specific circumstances.

In the final chapter, David Fassmann's views about Oppenheimer and Judaism also appeared inconsistent and malleable, according to the rhetorical uses to which this hack author living in eighteenth-century Leipzig put Oppenheimer.Footnote ²⁵ In this case too, the practice of anti-Semitism becomes a subtler, more complex and contingent factor than the umbrella term anti-Semitism can capture.

Of course, Mintzker does not deny the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism—one finds its effects all through The Many Deaths of Jew Süss. Rather, he historicizes it at a microscopic level so that it becomes less essentialized and self-evident, even as it becomes more human and realistic. The goal of a good microhistory is not just to recover agency or to complicate narratives, but thereby to allow us to see things we could never see otherwise and to gain meaningful understanding of the past through the process. In that, Mintzker succeeds admirably.

I do have some quibbles with The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, though none pertain to my comments about Mintzker's methods as a microhistorian. For instance, I find the explanation of his methodology a bit fuzzy.Footnote ²⁶ He also probably overstates his case that few twenty-first-century historians have learned lessons from literary postmodernism.Footnote ²⁷ In addition, he sometimes adds information merely to humanize his subjects rather than to advance his argument, so it takes longer than I would have preferred to figure out which facts are critical and which are incidental. I anticipate this book is unlikely to be assigned in graduate seminars devoted to historical methodology because, as I read polyphonic history, it requires a pretty specific set of preconditions to be applied to other projects. But none of these relatively minor matters undermine what I think is the real power of Mintzker's book: the use of a creative kind of microhistory to demonstrate that judicial violence against Jews in the early modern Holy Roman Empire cannot simply (or rather, exclusively) be explained with a blunt appeal to anti-Semitism, even in contexts in which anti-Semitism was pervasive. As it happened, the famed trial and execution of Joseph Oppenheimer was the contingent outcome of actions taken by individuals motivated by personal matters that sometimes bore little direct relation to their views about Judaism or Jews, or about the behaviors or characteristics of Joseph Oppenheimer himself.

In sum, Mintzker's polyphonic microhistory displays the wide gap between the historicized and contingent trial of Joseph Oppenheimer and an ahistorical and essentialized anti-Semitism. What it cannot do, however, is explain how the one transformed into the other. How is it that contingent outcomes that required such intense scrutiny for Mintzker to understand later hardened into consequences that people saw as so self-evident as to barely require an explanation? Mintzker's polyphonic history provides part of the answer. After all, Jäger, Bernard, Schloss, and Fassmann all ignored evidence and inserted falsehoods into their accounts. But part of the answer lies in developments in later eras too, when Oppenheimer's case served the interests of people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My point is not meant as a criticism of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss but only as a comment that Mintzker's book raises an important question that polyphonic history on its own is insufficient to answer.

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss raises questions about where master narratives come from and why they prove so enduring, though Mintzker does not address these points explicitly. For this reason, other methodologies are worth considering. It may prove helpful to think across centuries, to follow how various contingent outcomes built on one another over time, intentionally or unintentionally erasing the complexity of court life in eighteenth-century Württemberg and replacing it with metanarratives whose outcomes later historians imagine as self-evident. Taking this approach might help restore contingency not only to Oppenheimer's trial itself (Mintzker's focus) but also to knowledge about Oppenheimer and his trial across time. In a way, that project would look a bit like the reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) provided by Susan Teger's Jew Süss: Life, Legend, Fiction, and Film, which looks at how ideas about Joseph Oppenheimer became later deployed in various moments to serve specific interests.Footnote ²⁸ My proposed version would require chronologically arranged vignettes as well as a through-line that explains how and why ideas about Oppenheimer's trial changed over time, each one layering onto what came before.

Mintzker's book offers an excellent starting point. He lays bare all sorts of historical silences that were intentionally masked by the producers of the records we have regarding Oppenheimer's trial. In this sense, his project bears some similarity to Michel-Rolph Trouillot's call to identify and unmask silences in the production of history. Trouillot identifies four moments in the process of historical production during which people with vested interests in the outcome silence the past: 1) the making of sources, 2) the making of archives, 3) the making of narratives, and 4) the making of history and asserting of its significance.Footnote ²⁹ What Mintzker has done pertains to the first phase. Investigating the second phase would involve uncovering how ideas about the trial were stored, how that knowledge was preserved, and what assumptions underpinned its (re)organization. This project would require not polyphonic history but methods promoted by advocates of the “archival turn,” like Randolph Head.Footnote ³⁰ The third investigation—how facts became ordered into coherent stories—might take its inspiration from Hayden White's analysis of nineteenth-century history writing.Footnote ³¹ And the last would need to examine historiographical debates as well as how ordinary people use histories in their daily lives, perhaps drawing on work by scholars of memory such as Aleida Assmann or Judith Pollmann.Footnote ³² No single method offers the silver bullet for historical inquiry, of course. What I am suggesting is that Yair Mintzker's polyphonic history—as a form of microhistory—not only stands on its own, but also allows us to see new possibilities for other methods as well.

Almost three years after The Many Deaths of Jew Süss was first published, I am no longer the same person I was while writing it, and the book is not quite the same one I remember having written. Older and a little wiser, I now look at The Many Deaths of Jew Süss with a mixture of familiarity and surprise: I continue to appreciate some of its merits but also see more clearly many of its faults, and though I still vividly remember what I set out to accomplish in writing it, I keep finding implicit arguments among its pages that I never before had consciously thought about.

Like all books, as soon as The Many Deaths of Jew Süss was published, it began to take on a life of its own. (Habent sua fata libelli, goes the old adage: “Books have their own fates or lives.”) Over the past three years, the book has reached thousands of people whom I have never met in person, and readers made sense of it in many contexts and ways I never could have anticipated in advance. Among all its readers, Sarah Maza, Jesse Spohnholz, Jay Geller, and Michael Meng stand out in their erudition and critical edge. I am grateful to these wonderful fellow historians for their engagement with The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, as well as to Monica Black, Mirna Zakić, and Michael Meng (again) for publishing, and indeed soliciting in the first place, the four essays in this truly polyphonic forum.

The following reflections were written in response to these forum essays, essays which made me go back to the book and re-read it closely for the first time since it first came out. I present my thoughts here as a reader of the book rather than as its author, a fact that explains—together with my life-long admiration for Jorge Luis Borges—why I keep making a distinction between who I was when I penned The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (“Mintzker”) and who I am now (“I”).Footnote ¹ What I set out to do in these comments, in other words, is not to circle the wagons and defend the author's “intention,” inasmuch as there ever was such a single motivation behind the creation of the book. Rather, I'd like to think about the book from the outside, as it were, and with the benefit of hindsight. Such a critical distance helps to focus the discussion on the book rather than on its author, and to shed light on where The Many Deaths of Jew Süss has succeeded so far as well as where (and why) it has not.

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The first and most immediate context in which the book seems to have mattered is what one early reviewer called “mainstream historiography.”Footnote ² Indeed, three of the four contributors to this forum discuss The Many Deaths of Jew Süss in these terms. This has to do with the book's explicit claims and peculiar style, but I think that it also owes something to the particular biography of its author. Princeton University's Department of History, where Yair Mintzker composed The Many Deaths of Jew Süss between 2012 and 2017, has a long and venerable tradition in European social and cultural history, with an emphasis on the early modern period and the practices of microhistory. It was at Princeton that Natalie Zemon Davis wrote about the curious case of Martin Guerre, Robert Darnton described the Great Cat Massacre, and Linda Colley traced the remarkable ordeals of Elizabeth Marsh. Though not a member of the Princeton faculty himself, Carlo Ginzburg drafted The Cheese and the Worms at Princeton's Davis Center for Historical Studies. Making sense of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss as a form of microhistory consequently seems both natural and right.Footnote ³

This interpretation has much to recommend it. As all four contributors insightfully observe, Mintzker's style owes much to his predecessors at Princeton. Sarah Maza, perhaps because of her own Princeton past, is especially sensitive to the implications of this local context. As she explains in her masterful essay in this forum, many of the techniques used in The Many Deaths of Jew Süss come directly from microhistorical studies. They include an attempt to reconstruct a lost social (symbolic) world; the emphasis on a moment of crisis; extensive use of legal sources; concentration on marginal figures; and a special sensitivity to narrative structure and the authorial “I.”

And yet, as both Maza and Spohnholz recognize, the label “microhistory” is not completely adequate in describing what The Many Deaths of Jew Süss does. The issue is not only that Mintzker never uses the term microhistory (a point which Spohnholz makes and which I have never previously considered), but also that, despite all its flair and circumstance, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss does not seem to make one decisive historiographical intervention: it does not conclude with an assertive statement about what Joseph Süss Oppenheimer's ordeal ultimately signified. The book's larger message—unlike that of almost every other famous microhistory—remains elusive or perhaps camouflaged.

Considering this issue now from a critical distance, it seems to me that one reason for this elusiveness is to be sought not in Princeton's tradition of microhistorical studies, but in Mintzker's divergence from it. Maza gets close to articulating the problem when she writes that, “Mintzker deploys a dazzling array of methods,” though her generosity of spirit leaves her perhaps slightly short of the mark. As opposed to Ginzburg, Davis, and Darnton, who were all deeply influenced by Geertzian thick description, Mintzker's book is much more eclectic in its methodology; it is not dominated by one hegemonic social theory.Footnote ⁴ Thus, in describing the trial of Joseph Oppenheimer, Mintzker uses many (and often conflicting) sociological theories. Among such methods one finds (a partial list): old-style social history, Biblical exegesis, Geertzian thick description, Niklas Luhmann-like systems theoretical approach, and echoes of Bourdieu's field theory.Footnote ⁵ Most important of all, perhaps, is Mintzker's use of speech act theory: his attempt to understand not what his sources describe, how they were produced, or even what they signify, but first and foremost what their authors tried to do or perform by writing them.Footnote ⁶

Is this book, then, trying to be a curious biography or some kind of Bakhtin-inspired literary creation, as Michael Meng so insightfully observes? Some evidence suggests that it is. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is influenced by Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and especially his Dialogic Imagination, and it echoes, however imperfectly, another famous Russian author—if not Tolstoy, as Meng suggests, then certainly Dostoevsky.Footnote ⁷ (Consider The Brothers Karamazov with its emphasis on multiple points of view, a murder, a trial, and a Grand Inquisitor.) Despite Mintzker's protests to the contrary, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is also clearly a type of biography, even if, as Anson Rabinbach once remarked to me, an anti-biographical one. At the heart of the book lies “a pictorial negative space” or “structuring absence” rather than a definitive account of a man's life.Footnote ⁸ Almost all reflections on the book have quoted the relevant passage, with Maza even doing so twice.

But above all else, I now think that the main methodological intervention of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss should not be sought in its relationship to microhistory, biography, or even Bakhtin. The book is much more ambitious, and controversial, than that. At first, Mintzker conceals this aspect of his book by claiming that he developed his polyphonic method in order to deal with the particular case of Jew Süss. In the imaginary dialogues with the reader, however, and especially in the book's conclusion, Mintzker gives the game away. Meng in particular sees through the ploy. On the very last page of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, Mintzker argues that historians in general, and not only historians of Oppenheimer's particular case, need to avoid what he calls, “the Scylla of false omniscience and the Charybdis of extreme relativism.” He continues: “Polyphonic history, rather than being the exception, should really be the norm.”Footnote ⁹

While re-reading the book for this forum, I thought that here especially The Many Deaths of Jew Süss becomes a real provocation, one directed toward traditional historians and postmodernists alike. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is a critique of classical historical writing in the sense that it objects to reducing stories to a single, linear narratological structure, wherein the historian “never once stops and says that she doesn't know something” or that the story “cannot be viewed from other angles as well.”Footnote ¹⁰ The book demonstrates that this pretense of omniscience is absurd vis-à-vis the body of sources in the case of Jew Süss, but also implies that it is untenable as a way of writing history in general. Concomitantly, Mintzker criticizes postmodern historiographical trends. The history of Joseph Oppenheimer is not simply complex; it is emphatically not the case that it can be viewed just from any angle one would like. Rather, Mintzker argues that the trial of the famous eighteenth-century court Jew consisted of several recognizable threads which can be identified, narrated, analyzed, compared, and explained. According to this historiosophy, not only reductionism to a single narrative is to be avoided, but also the common tendency nowadays to constantly “complexify” the past until not a single stone is left unturned and not a single storyline intact.

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In addition to scholars interested in historical writing as such, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss has also attracted a great deal of attention from students of Jewish history. Indeed, so far the book has mattered more in the field of Jewish history than anywhere else, and more in Israel than in other parts of the world.Footnote ¹¹ The four contributors to this forum echo this uneven reception. Thus, while Geller, the Jewish studies scholar, argues that the strength of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss lies in part in its ability to “bring a new angle to [a] well-known story,” Maza calls Oppenheimer's historical figure “obscure” and even asks, “Why, exactly, should we care about Joseph Süss Oppenheimer?”Footnote ¹²

Such wildly different reactions to the story of Oppenheimer's trial demand an explanation. The first to suggest itself is the well-known claim about the insularity of Jewish Studies as a discipline.Footnote ¹³ Jewish history concentrates on a particular set of characters, often deploys its own analytical vocabulary, and uses a distinct body of sources. That an eighteenth-century court Jew is less known to an audience of non-specialists in Jewish history than to scholars in the field might consequently seem almost banal.

Though it is tempting to attribute Oppenheimer's relative obscurity in modern-day America to the insularity of Jewish Studies, the argument is ultimately unconvincing. Oppenheimer's case is quite different from that of the Vilna Gaon, for instance. The figure of Jew Süss was famous among non-Jews even while he lived; he did not write in Hebrew; and, by all accounts, he was far from being an expert in Jewish theology. The reason for his obscurity in the United States is consequently different from that of other figures in Jewish history. Over the past several years, I have slowly come to the conclusion that modern-day America does not need a figure like Jew Süss because it already has a similar (even if completely fictional) one in Shylock: an iconic figure in the history of anti-Semitism whose story questions whether a Jew can ever be a full member of a Christian society and involves issues of money, sex, and the law.Footnote ¹⁴ Shylock occupies a unique place in the English-speaking imagination. We would never call him an obscure figure. When this is combined with the fact that most English speakers have never been exposed to the notorious 1940 Nazi movie about Oppenheimer, we begin to see, perhaps, why “Jew Süss” is such a powerfully symbolic figure in Continental Europe, but not in North America or the British Isles.

I was most impressed by Geller's erudite exposition on the place of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss in the long tradition of biographies of famous Jews, as well as his comparison between Oppenheimer and other “Jews on trial,” including most importantly Alfred Dreyfus. What perhaps gets a little lost in Geller's piece, however, are two aspects of Jewish history that I now recognize as central to The Many Deaths of Jew Süss. The first is the issue of the nature of the Jewish community. Though the literature on the topic is vast and often contested, historians generally agree that what made Jewish communal life possible in premodern times were shared institutions and practices.Footnote ¹⁵ Mintzker's treatment of Frankfurt's Judengasse repeats some of these claims.Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, however, Mintzker insists that Jews often lived in what he terms “communities of risk.” “What held the Jewish community [in Stuttgart] together,” he writes, “was not harmonious consensus or common practices, but individual and highly insecure commercial opportunities at a prince's court.”Footnote ¹⁷ Jews were invited to Stuttgart in order to compete against each other, and they remained there, however paradoxical it may sound, not despite but exactly because their community was in a constant state of strife.

With the help of Meng, Spohnholz, and Geller, I can now also see a second issue regarding Jewish history in The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, which is radically provocative, much like the book's challenge to general historiography. It pertains to the nature of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in early modern Germany. Unlike the older literature on the topic—the work of Jacob Katz is paradigmatic in this respectFootnote ¹⁸—The Many Deaths of Jew Süss follows recent scholarly trends and explores what Geller calls “the complexity of the Jews’ place in the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire and the precarious power dynamics that characterized their involvement in temporal politics in that last century before Emancipation.” Jews were not just the “other” of early modern Germany, Mintzker claims. Using the book's very structure to demonstrate his point, he shows that Jews were also objects of the law (Jäger); they were important transmitters of scholarly knowledge (Bernard); they played a significant role in the economy of many early modern states (Schloss); and they were active as participants in European court society (Fassmann).Footnote ¹⁹ Viewed in this light, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss reveals itself to be a kind of historiographical ambush. It lures us in with the promise of a tale about “one of the most iconic figures in the history of anti-Semitism”Footnote ²⁰ only to supply a plethora of evidence that, as Spohnholz puts it, “Oppenheimer's trial and guilt were not the predetermined result of some fixed, monolithic anti-Semitism.”

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This brings me to one last historiographical conversation in which The Many Deaths of Jew Süss seeks to intervene, one that is both obvious and strangely neglected, including by the four essays in this forum.

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is many things, but it is also, as Meng recognizes in the first sentence of his essay, a work of German history. Joseph Süss Oppenheimer is better known in Germany than anywhere else; the sources Mintzker uses are written almost exclusively in German; and the political, legal, economic, and literary contexts the book discusses are all linked to the history of German-speaking lands. Why is it, then, that it has proven more difficult to publish The Many Deaths of Jew Süss in German than in Hebrew or English? Why has the book attracted less media attention in Germany than in Israel or the United States?Footnote ²¹

Throughout his book, Mintzker insists that one has to understand texts in their historical context. Only then can one hope to see what specific authors tried to do or achieve by writing a particular piece. The concealed provocations in The Many Deaths of Jew Süss work relatively well in the context of general historiography and especially Jewish Studies, but they fall on deaf ears in Germany itself. The reason for this seems obvious in retrospect. Before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, literary treatments of Jew Süss, including in Lion Feuchtwanger's famous novel, presented Oppenheimer in an often-ambiguous light. In 1940, however, the Nazis broke with this tradition, and their anti-Semitic cinematic depiction of Oppenheimer's story has cast a long shadow over all subsequent accounts. Anyone who writes about Joseph Oppenheimer in Germany today has to cope with this legacy, however indirectly; Veit Harlan's Jud Süss cannot be unlearnt.Footnote ²²

To claim, as Mintzker does, that Oppenheimer's story is not simply about German anti-Semitism goes against the memory culture of the Federal Republic. A microhistory which highlights German anti-Semitism, like Helmut Walser Smith's The Butcher's Tale can be, and was, received with open arms.Footnote ²³ But what moral aim could Mintzker's argument about Jew Süss possibly achieve in Germany today? The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Mintzker's arguments about the need for a new type of historical writing. As Joshua Teplitsky argued in a recent review of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss in The Los Angeles Times, Mintzker's polyphonic history is a kind of “luxury that we cannot afford when truth claims are at stake,”Footnote ²⁴ and where does truth matter more than in the tragic history of German Jews?

I have reason to believe that Mintzker never considered this particular question seriously, nor do I have an adequate response to it even now. When all is said and done, therefore, the reception of The Many Deaths of Jew Süss teaches us not only about the state of Jewish history and historical writing more generally, but also about the uniquely high stakes in, and the special epistemological status of, Central European history. This is a point, unlike so much else about The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, we can all perhaps agree upon: Sarah Maza and Jesse Spohnholz, Michael Meng and Jay Geller, you, Mintzker, and I.