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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker David A. Meola The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew. By Yair Mintzker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 344 pages. $22.95 (paper). When modern scholars think about interrogative and pointed studies of German history in the early modern period, Yair Mintzker's name should immediately come to mind. Mintzker, an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, is an award-winning scholar whose first book The Defortification of the German City 1689–1866 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Urban History Association's best book prize in 2014. He followed up this first success with The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2017. Mintzker's new book is anything but a standard, run-of-the-mill interrogation of one Jewish community; rather, it is a multi-layered, exceptionally written, and intentionally provocative plea that calls for the expansion of the historian's proverbial "toolbox." The key to Mintzker's investigation, perhaps equally as important as the content of his book, is his use of "polyphonic" methodology. In a nutshell, Mintzker advocates looking at the history of his subject by examining the ways others have written about it, especially in cases that lack the voice of the primary subject of investigation—in this case, Joseph "Jew" Süss Oppenheimer, who was put on trial and executed in 1738. Moreover, Mintzker argues that as historians we do not always have the option (despite our own agency) to view Oppenheimer's (and perhaps other) history from "any angle we would like" ("Mintzker and I," Central European History 53 [2020]: 231). This sentiment clearly echoes that of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) argues that our histories are often structured by various forces, most of which are beyond our control. These "silences" in the historical record and evidentiary trail are important obstacles that many researchers have to overcome. In a sense, Mintzker's book is a history that deals with Oppenheimer but it is not really about him—it is a book about [End Page 190] a few individuals from the eighteenth century who wrote about Oppenheimer and helped shape both opinions and research about him for years to come. The four case studies that form the basis of the book deal with the trial of Oppenheimer, who was the financial advisor to Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg. After the duke died suddenly of a heart attack in 1738, Oppenheimer was arrested, investigated, convicted, and then executed for alleged crimes against the state. As readers will discover, all of these case studies are about contemporaneous and subsequent writers of the episode and each one portrays Süss Oppenheimer in a different light. Each chapter is focused on the interlocutor and their history. This allows for readers to get closer to the motivation of each individual writer and what they had at stake in describing Oppenheimer's life story. After we meet the individuals, we see their roles in the affair more clearly, but most importantly, we see the idiosyncratic traces they left behind that engage Oppenheimer's alleged crimes and infamous life. The first chapter uncovers the role of the person most responsible for Oppenheimer's guilty verdict—Philipp Friedrich Jäger, a local Württemberg jurist. In trying to prove Oppenheimer's guilt, Jäger was also defending his class—the Ehrbarkeit ("worthies")—and their supposed loss of standing when outsiders (such as Jews) transgressed societal norms. We learn about Jäger's past, including his upbringing and early legal career, but the main focus of the chapter is the process of writing the Species Facti—one of the most important legal documents in early modern German legal history. Perhaps the most interesting part of this chapter is the length to which Jäger went to establish Oppenheimer's guilt, creating propaganda to convince other jurists who resisted Oppenheimer's guilt that the man had committed some...