Yair Mintzker. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss

Yair Mintzker’s The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew examines one of the key figures in the history of German antisemitism. A few days after the sudden death of Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg in 1737, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to death and strangled to death in public, February 4, 1738. What the fictional character Shylock is to the British world, the historical Joseph Süß Oppenheimer embodies in the German context. The demise of the former court Jew, who was responsible for the fiscal operations at the court of Duke Carl Alexander in Württemberg, was told in thousands of pamphlets. These booklets, often illustrated, circulated in the German states of the Holy Roman Empire soon after Oppenheimer’s death. The sheer number of the published accounts is overwhelming, and comes in addition to an abundance of handwritten documents. The state archives in Stuttgart alone contain some thirty thousand pages of handwritten matter (6).

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