Yair Mintzker - The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew

The Many Deaths of Jew Sss

The Many Deaths of Jew Sss

The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew

Yair Mintzker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2017 by Princeton University Press

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Jacket art: Adapted from Elias Becks woodcut, A True Depiction of the Jew Sss and His Room in the Herrenhaus, 1738. Courtesy of Wrttembergische Landesbibliothek, Graphic Collection

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ISBN 978-0-691-17232-3

Library of Congress Control Number 2017934500

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of the Langberg and Satin families

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Contents

Acknowledgments

During the seven years it took me to research and write this book, I received generous financial support from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, as well as from Princetons History Department, the Class of 1942 Preceptorship in History, and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In Germany, my research was facilitated by conversations with a series of archivists, librarians, and fellow historians. I thank especially Gudrun Emberger, Sonja Grund, Alexandra Haas, Uwe Jens Wandel, Ronald Fischer, Reinhard Mayer-Kalkus, and the indefatigable Thomas Reimer. One of the greatest pleasures in working on this project was to meet and befriend Hellmut Haasis, whose courage and generosity I shall not soon forget. Hellmut: bleib xond. Keith Baker, David Bell, Elisheva Carlebach, Laura Kounine, Natasha Mhatre, H. C. Erik Midelfort, Hannah Mintzker, Lyndal Roper, James J. Sheehan, and Hari Sidhar read drafts of individual chapters or the manuscript as a whole. I am grateful for their comments and for saving me from many factual and interpretative errors. Any that remain are of course my very own. Carolina Alvarado, Brooke Fitzgerald, and especially Sara Marcus helped with crucial editorial advice during the final preparation of the manuscript; Tsering Wangyal Shawa prepared the maps; Daniela Blei prepared the index; and Brigitta van Rheinberg and her team at Princeton University Press took extraordinarily good care of my manuscript. I am grateful to them all. My final thanks go to Katie, Naomi, and Lydia. I love you.

I dedicate this book to the loving memory of my grandparents, Dov and Sarah (Sala) Langberg, as well as to Dov, Elka, Manya, and Henya Satin. May their memory be a blessing and their souls forever bound in the bundle of life.

Note to Readers

I wrote this book for a broad audience. For that reason, I preferred using common English terms where such were available (Rosh Hashana, cheder). Otherwise, I followed the romanization principles of the American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress (ALA-LC), but refrained from using diacritical marks which might otherwise have confused and frustrated many a nonspecialist.

FIGURE 1. Central Europe in the early eighteenth century.

FIGURE 2. Wrttemberg and its environs, ca. 1730.

The Many Deaths of Jew Sss

FIGURE 3. Bruno Rehab. Poster for the first screening of the film Jud Sss, 1940. Source: Deutsches Filminstitut / Postercollection.

Introduction

My business is to record what people say; but I am by no means bound to believe itand that may be taken to apply to this book as a whole.

Herodotus, Histories, 7.152.3

Joseph Sss Oppenheimer, better known as Jew Sss, is one of the most iconic figures in the history of anti-Semitism. Originally from the Jewish community in Heidelberg, in 1733 Oppenheimer became the court Jew (personal banker and advisor) of the duke of the small German state of Wrttemberg. When the duke died unexpectedly in 1737, the Wrttemberg authorities arrested Oppenheimer, put him on trial, and finally executed him for what they termed Oppenheimers damnable maltreatments of prince and country.).

Though he was executed nearly three hundred years ago, Oppenheimers trial never quite ended. Even as his trial was unfolding, it was already clear that what was being placed in the scales of justice was not any of Oppenheimers supposed crimes. Indeed, the vague verdict pronounced in his case conspicuously failed to provide any specific details about the reasons for the death sentence. The significance of his trial, and the reasons for Oppenheimers public notoriety ever since the eighteenth century, is to be found not in the dry language of legal treatises but in the role his story has played as a parable about the rise and fall of prominent Jews in Christian Europe. Oppenheimers meteoric ascendance during the years he spent in Wrttemberg and his no less spectacular fall have been viewed by many as an allegory for the history of German Jewry both in Oppenheimers time as well as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here was a man who tried to fit in, and seemed to for a time, but was eventually rejected; a Jew who enjoyed much success but then fell from power and met a violent death. Thus, at every point in time when the status, culture, past, and future of Germanys Jews have hung in the balance, the story of this man has moved to center stage, where it was investigated, novelized, dramatized, and even set to music. It is no exaggeration to say that Jew Sss is to the German collective imagination what Shakespeares Shylock is to the English-speaking world.

The historical figure of Joseph Sss Oppenheimer is incredibly elusive, and any understanding of him must begin with the political and legal regimes under which he lived and died. Oppenheimer spent almost his entire life in the southwest corner of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (see no central executive, no bureaucracy, and no standing armybut it did have some common features, such as a head (an emperor) and various representational bodies. Especially important for understanding Oppenheimers case is the fact that the Empires members shared a common legal system scholars term inquisitorial.

An inquisitorial system is best contrasted with an adversarial one. In an adversarial criminal legal system, the court serves as a neutral referee between two principal adversaries: the prosecution and the defense. This is the system used today throughout the English-speaking world. In an inquisitorial system, on the other hand, judges are entrusted with actively investigating cases, rather than merely adjudicating between the two opposing sides. The inquisitorial system as such should not be conflated with the particular historical institutions of the Papal or Spanish Inquisitions, which are but two examples of a larger system. The judge-inquisitors in Oppenheimers trial were not ecclesiastical officials entrusted with combatting heresy, but state servants who applied the inquisitorial procedures common in the Holy Roman Empire to Oppenheimers particular case.