Joseph Süss Oppenheimer served as the court Jew for Duke Carl Alexander of Württemburg in the early eighteenth century. Following the duke's death in 1737, Oppenheimer was tried and publicly executed on February 4, 1738, for “damnable maltreatments of prince and country” (1). The trial was significant in its own time and was also the subject of later novels and screenplays, including the 1940 Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss. Mintzker's book is the latest in a long line of historical and fictional depictions of this trial, and his approach to the subject is innovative.
Mintzker does not attempt to reconstruct Oppenheimer's life, downfall, and trial, nor does he analyze the same documents that previous scholars and writers consulted. Outlining the methodological difficulties of mining those sources for an unbiased account of Oppenheimer's trial, Mintzker instead dedicates his book to exploring four different personae connected to the man or his trial. These include Phillip Friedrich Jäger, one of the main inquisitors (a blend of prosecutor/judge) in the trial; Christoph David Bernard, a convert from Judaism to Christianity who consulted to the inquisitors by translating Yiddish letters, visited Oppenheimer in prison, and penned an account of his meeting with Oppenheimer a few weeks after the execution; Mordekhai Schloss, a Jewish colleague of Oppenheimer who was deposed during the trial and who also visited the latter just prior to his execution; and David Fassman, a Christian author who never personally met Oppenheimer, but who, following the trial, composed an imagined conversation with the court Jew in his ongoing series Conversations with the Dead.
This approach provides the reader with new insights into the trial. In one wonderful example, Mintzker analyzes Jäger's unsuccessful prosecution of Christina Wilhelmina von Würben (née Grävenitz) several years before the Oppenheimer arrest. Von Grävenitz had been the mistress of Eberhard Ludwig, the Duke of Württemburg preceding Carl Alexander, and she was charged with similar offenses. Mintzker astutely outlines the striking parallels between her case and the later Oppenheimer proceedings, demonstrating how Jäger railed against foreigners at the Württemburg court. This approach contextualizes the Oppenheimer trial against the backdrop of local politics in the duchy and the Holy Roman Empire, rather than seeing it only through the prism of antisemitism.
Mintzker's narratives explore various types of documents written by both Jews and Christians. While the scope of source material is impressive, his analysis could have been sharper had he been more familiar with some of the Jewish communal sources that he examined. For example, Mintzker analyzes the appellations of kadosh, “martyr,” and tzaddik, “righteous one,” which were applied to Oppenheimer in various communal documents after the execution. Mintzker contrasts what he sees as the community's attempts to sanctify Oppenheimer in the wake of the trial with the convert Christoph David Bernard's rage that these terms were being applied to the disgraced court Jew. Yet greater familiarity with the memorial books, tombstones, or communal records of the Jewish community would have perhaps led Mintzker down a different analytical path. Any Jew who had been killed by a Christian, whether by execution, by accident, or in a personal dispute, was memorialized as kadosh in communal sources. In but one contemporaneous and illustrative example, Gumpert May, a Jew from Frankfurt who was murdered by a local Christian man with whom he had been having a sexual affair, was referred to as a martyr in the communal memorial book (Edward Fram and Verena Kasper-Marienberg, “Jewish Martyrdom without Persecution: The Murder of Gumpert May, Frankfurt am Main, 1781,” AJS Review 39, no. 2 [2015]: 267–301). Given that this was a standard appellation for anyone who had been killed by a Christian, the use of the term kadosh does not provide insight into the Jewish community's attitude towards Oppenheimer in particular. By contrast, Bernard's reaction to this term being applied to Oppenheimer is quite telling. As a former Jew, Bernard would have been familiar with the way the term kadosh was used in both liturgical and other communal contexts. His incensed reaction is therefore significant for understanding how he viewed or portrayed the Jewish community which he had abandoned for his new Christian faith. As Elisheva Carlebach (Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002] and Yaacov Deutsch (Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]) have respectively and meticulously demonstrated with regard to other early modern converts, omissions or manipulations are critical for understanding their motives in composing works about their former communities. The same conclusions seem applicable to Bernard's writings about Oppenheimer and the Jewish community.
Mintzker's work is nevertheless engaging. His creative analysis provides the reader with multiple perspectives and contexts for understanding the significance that this trial had in eighteenth-century Europe. Indeed, Mintzker discusses his methodology explicitly. He terms this a work of polyphonic history, one that presents multiple and even conflicting approaches to a given subject. Deploring the narrative style of contemporary history books, Mintzker claims that historians have failed to “look at topics from different angles” in their books as they do “in the classroom” (285). Indeed, Mintzker broadly critiques the work of contemporary historians, arguing that “linearity, unity, and omniscience are almost universal characteristics of contemporary historical writing” (284). Mintzker's book is thus quite consciously designed differently. First, he discusses the veracity or reliability of his sources explicitly. Second, he inserts crafted dialogues between himself as author and an imaginary reader as dividers between his chapters. (This particular reader found those conversations a distraction from an otherwise stimulating book.)
While I applaud Mintzker's multilayered approach to history, I disagree with his generalizations about contemporary historical writing. Previous scholars have also employed multiple and even all available sources to tell complicated stories (Moshe Rosman, introduction to Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Baʿal Shem Tov, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2nd ed. [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013], xviii). It is true that most scholars have adopted different narrative styles from the one that Mintzker chose for his book. Yet this does not mean that they reject the idea that sometimes historians just don't know the answer or that sometimes there is more than one answer (285).
Mintzker concludes his work by suggesting that through the exploration of the perspectives of those surrounding Oppenheimer, the reader can glimpse how Oppenheimer saw his own situation. Whether or not the reader has successfully “stood in Oppenheimer's shoes all along” by seeing and reading what Oppenheimer read and saw (283), it is undeniable that this book adds vast and rich knowledge to the infamous Oppenheimer case. It is written to appeal to a broad audience. Mintzker successfully renders complicated sources, particularly legal ones, accessible to his readers, and his descriptions of places such as Frankfurt and Stuttgart propel the reader into the complex narrative he has crafted.
