The Many Deaths of Jew Süss

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

Yair Mintzker

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

A groundbreaking historical reexamination of one of the most infamous episodes in the history of anti-Semitism Joseph Süss Oppenheimer—"Jew Süss"—is one of the most iconic figures in the history of anti-Semitism. In 1733, Oppenheimer became the "court Jew" of Carl Alexander, the duke of the small German state of Württemberg. When Carl Alexander died unexpectedly, the Württemberg authorities arrested Oppenheimer, put him on trial, and condemned him to death for unspecified "misdeeds." On February 4, 1738, Oppenheimer was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He is most often remembered today through several works of fiction, chief among them a vicious Nazi propaganda movie made in 1940 at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is a compelling new account of Oppenheimer's notorious trial. Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence, Yair Mintzker investigates conflicting versions of Oppenheimer's life and death as told by four contemporaries: the leading inquisitor in the criminal investigation, the most important eyewitness to Oppenheimer's final days, a fellow court Jew who was permitted to visit Oppenheimer on the eve of his execution, and one of Oppenheimer's earliest biographers. What emerges is a lurid tale of greed, sex, violence, and disgrace—but are these narrators to be trusted? Meticulously reconstructing the social world in which they lived, and taking nothing they say at face value, Mintzker conjures an unforgettable picture of "Jew Süss" in his final days that is at once moving, disturbing, and profound. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss is a masterfully innovative work of history, and an illuminating parable about Jewish life in the fraught transition to modernity.

CHAPTER 1

The Inquisitor

Part 1: Vita Ante Acta

The hidden God has shown us this man for all too short a time. He was talented, industrious, honest, and a lover of truth and justice; it is as if he was born solely for the benefit of his community and country.

—W.J.J. Cleß eulogizing Philipp Friedrich Jäger, August 1745¹

Dr. Philipp Friedrich Jäger died in his Stuttgart home on Monday evening, August 2, 1745. He was only thirty-seven years old at the time, a man in the prime of life (see figure 4). Descended from a long line of provincial civil servants, Jäger had accumulated an impressive list of titles by the time of his death. He was doctor of both laws (civil and canon), governmental councilor to the duke of Württemberg, president of one of Württemberg’s most prestigious administrative bodies, and a judge on the duchy’s high court of appeals. The reported cause of death was typhus (hitzige Krankheit). In eighteenth-century Europe, it was not uncommon for a judge to contract this so-called jail-fever from those who stood trial before him. The damp and often overcrowded prison cells served as ideal breeding grounds for the lice that carried the typhus bacteria.²

The funeral took place three days after Jäger’s passing at the cemetery of the Spitalkirche, a few streets north of Stuttgart’s main marketplace. Many came to pay their respects: fellow judges and councilors, several church officials, a theologian and three law professors from Württemberg’s renowned university in Tübingen, representatives of the city of Stuttgart, government secretaries, the ducal archivist, and an unknown number of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Presiding over the ceremony was the deacon of the Spitalkirche, Wilhelm Jeremias Jacob Cleß, who also happened to be a relative of the deceased.³ According to Cleß, the scene was especially somber because it bore a close resemblance to other recent events in the Jäger household. Dr. Jäger’s wife, Charlotte Regina, had died two years earlier and of the nine children she had borne her husband over the years, only four girls were still alive.

In eighteenth-century Württemberg, it was part of the responsibility of clergymen like Cleß to deliver a particular type of eulogy at funerals, especially at those of eminent men. Known in Lutheran Germany as a “body sermon” (Leichenrede), the eulogy was composed of two equally important parts. The first was a sermon that highlighted the deceased’s piety by way of an interpretation of an appropriate biblical passage, while the second consisted of a more straightforward description of the life and death of the newly departed. Following the funeral, friends and family members would sometimes issue a printed (and edited) version of the eulogy, to which they would often add other materials such as individual elegies (epicedia).⁴

What we know of Jäger’s funeral comes from just such a printed eulogy. It tells us that the topic Cleß chose for the funerary sermon was King David’s pleas and complaints in Psalm 80:

Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved.

O Lord God of hosts, how long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people?

Thou feedest them with the bread of tears; and givest them tears to drink in great measure.

Turn us again, O God of hosts, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved.

Cleß deemed this psalm particularly fitting for the occasion of Dr. Jäger’s burial. By allowing this man to die, God had hidden his face from his flock and fed it with the bread of tears. What could possibly have driven God to deprive the deceased’s elderly mother and four little girls, as well as “the princely house of Württemberg and indeed our entire fatherland [Württemberg] of such a devoted servant of the government, one of the duchy’s most assiduous and talented councilors, protector of so many orphans, loyal member of our city and community through his many talents, erudition, experience, dexterity, industriousness, and fear of God?” “Why are you tearing this man away from us,” Cleß began one of his many pathos-filled protestations during the sermon, “a man who is so indispensable for the public good and who furthermore had still so much to accomplish?”⁵

Cleß’s funerary sermon repeatedly praised the deceased’s piety, industriousness, and many accomplishments, but it also contained echoes of lives less worthy than Jäger’s. Quoting from Scripture again, Cleß invoked the words of the prophet Jeremiah. “O Lord … let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?” (Jeremiah 12:1). The deacon wanted to know why God would let such a beautiful flower as Jäger wither while tares prospered. “You let this man die, but so many others, who are nothing but a burden on this earth, you let live?” There was nothing left to do but to place one’s trust in God’s infinite wisdom. “Lord, thy ways are mysterious and thy path in the great waters. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”⁶

After the sermon came the second part of the eulogy, consisting of a description of Dr. Jäger’s pious and extraordinarily industrious life. Cleß, who had first-hand knowledge of these matters, talked about the deceased’s parents, birth, upbringing and education, marriage, children, final disease, and death. He did not forget to list Dr. Jäger’s many important positions, including his membership in “several important princely committees” whose existence and significance were apparently so well known to his audience that Cleß felt no need to elaborate. “Dr. Jäger,” Cleß finally said, “was amicable to all…. Deferential to his superiors, sincere and forthcoming toward his colleagues, obliging and unassuming to his inferiors, he was a personification of the good family member and friend.”⁷

Later, when Jäger’s colleagues, friends, and relatives prepared the eulogy for print, they added over fifty pages of elegies to Cleß’s text. Councilor Günther Albrecht Renz, for instance, recalled in rhyme the common purpose that had driven him and Jäger in many an intense working hour together; the two law professors Georg Friedrich Harpprecht Sr. and Wolfgang Adam Schöpff bemoaned (in Latin) the death of a man they both had known and admired for many years; Christian Friedrich Sattler, Württemberg’s ducal archivist, reminisced about the many years of friendship he had enjoyed with Jäger; and Johann Philipp Pregizer, a government secretary who at one point spent four years living in the Jäger household in Stuttgart, wrote an especially emotional elegy. Addressing the dead man directly, Pregizer wrote that “[a]ll I can and know I owe to the many hours / Which you have devoted to me,” and “Go now with the faithful servants [of the Lord to heaven] / And inherit there the due rewards of the pious and righteous.”⁸

Philipp Friedrich Jäger was the judge who composed the factual part of the verdict in Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s case. If one trusts what was said at his funeral, his was a truly exemplary life.

Early Life

Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s future judge was born in the town of Schorndorf, about fifteen miles east of Stuttgart as the crow flies. His father was Georg Friedrich Jäger, Schorndorf’s town secretary (Stadtschreiber); his mother, Anna Maria, was daughter of a town secretary herself.⁹ One nineteenth-century genealogist traced the Jägers’ roots to the early seventeenth century, when the forester Georg Jäger, Philipp Friedrich’s great-great-grandfather, migrated to Württemberg from the northern German territory of Anhalt. The next three generations of Jägers occupied important administrative positions in several Württemberg districts. The forester’s son served as ducal commissioner (Untervogt) in the important district of Urach, and the latter’s son held the same position in Herrenberg. Philipp Friedrich’s father’s position as town secretary in Schorndorf was only slightly less important than that of his father and his father’s father before him. In Schorndorf, as in each of Württemberg’s several dozen district towns, the town secretary was one of the ducal commissioner’s closest aids.¹⁰

The Jägers belonged to a particular social group that had long dominated the ranks of Württemberg’s administrators. Known as the Ehrbarkeit (the “worthies”), in the first half of the eighteenth century this group numbered a few thousand individuals out of a population of about 350,000 in the duchy as a whole.¹¹ The Ehrbarkeit’s prominence in Württemberg owed to the fact that the local nobles had basically seceded from the duchy—the exact details of this story should not concern us here—and came under the direct protection of the Holy Roman emperor as so-called Imperial knights. The duke of Württemberg ruled his territory from Stuttgart (and later, Ludwigsburg), assisted by a group of close aides and a series of governmental bodies such as the administrative and privy councils (Regierungsrat, Geheimrat) as well as a few main general departments (war, church affairs, treasury, and so on). Issuing orders from the court was not enough, however. In order to implement ducal policies on the ground and deal with local administrative and legal matters, the duke placed his commissioners throughout the duchy, each in a town that served as the administrative center of a district (Amt). Such administrative centers were the historical power base of the Ehrbarkeit.

Over the years, the Ehrbarkeit managed to dominate each district’s main political offices and through them the district’s representation in Württemberg’s general territorial assembly (Landtag). Influencing the latter institution was crucial, because according to Württemberg’s constitution (Tübinger Vertrag, 1514), the territorial assembly was the only political body with the authority to raise new taxes from the general population. At a time when the dukes needed more and more money to finance their military expenditures and some grandiose Baroque building projects, a political conflict between the dukes and the Ehrbarkeit was a constant possibility, if never an unavoidable fact. The dukes needed a stronger army and more money, but also good administrators in the districts; the Ehrbarkeit was reluctant to vote for new taxes, but it also depended on the duke as the source of its social and political legitimacy.

The ongoing tensions between the dukes and the Ehrbarkeit did not affect the latter’s political hegemony in towns like Schorndorf. The Ehrbarkeit was too entrenched in such towns for this to happen. The situation at the ducal court, on the other hand, was quite different. Because the pool of educated and experienced administrators in the duchy was quite small, the Ehrbarkeit manned not only the administration in the districts, but many positions in the central government as well. (The absence of a native nobility whose members would normally fill many of these positions was crucial in that respect.) In the decades leading up to Philipp Friedrich Jäger’s birth, this situation was rapidly changing. According to one estimate, as late as the 1650s, seventy percent of Württemberg’s administrative councilors still belonged to the Ehrbarkeit; by the first decade of the eighteenth century, not a single one did. A recent study called into question some aspects of this estimate, though not its overall conclusion.¹² In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the dukes of Württemberg were increasingly turning to foreign advisors to replace native ones they deemed politically unreliable.

The general political circumstances in Württemberg aside, we also know a substantial amount about the particulars of Jäger’s youth in Schorndorf. Information comes from three groups of sources. In addition to the individual elegies and Cleß’s eulogy of 1745, we have quite a few archival documents about the Jäger family and a lot of evidence about early eighteenth-century Schorndorf itself. It goes without saying that all three sources must be treated with great caution. The eulogy and the materials from the local archive, though they contain valuable biographical information, may be especially tendentious. A funeral is not the time or place to enumerate the darker sides of the deceased’s life, and many of the archival documents in Schorndorf were created and conserved by members of Jäger’s own family, three generations of which—Philipp Friedrich’s maternal grandfather, his father, and his brother-in-law—served as town secretaries.

Early eighteenth-century Schorndorf was a small but important town.¹³ With a population of about 2,000, it was one of those typical early modern hometowns where everybody knew everybody else. A view of the town from the north, drawn two decades before Philipp Friedrich’s birth, depicts Schorndorf in an almost idyllic fashion. Nestled within green vineyards, Schorndorf is a compact and well-fortified town, surrounded by drawbridges, a wide moat, bulwarks, and medieval fortifications. On the far left-hand side is the Burgschloss, a fortified castle that helped make Schorndorf one of Württemberg’s military fortresses. Picturesque to the modern observer, the castle was not necessarily viewed in the same way by the town’s burghers.

Part of the problem was that the Burgschloss garrison, though small, was manned by the duke’s, rather than Schorndorf’s, men, thus introducing a foreign element into the community. Worse still was the fact that the town’s strong fortifications, which were supposed to protect Schorndorf, only served to attract invading French troops to its gates. This happened several times in the decades before Philipp Friedrich’s birth, including once in 1687 (an event Philipp Friedrich’s father later described in print¹⁴) and again during Anna Maria Jäger’s pregnancy in 1707. In June of that year, Schorndorf surrendered to French troops who threatened to burn down the entire town if it did not immediately capitulate. The occupation of Schorndorf over the next three years cost its burghers an estimated 300,000 gulden, a financial shock a later chronicler deemed a major factor in the town’s decline. “One can boldly claim,” the chronicler argued not without some hyperbole, “that had Schorndorf never been a fortress, it would have become the most important provincial town in Württemberg.”¹⁵

In addition to the strong fortifications and the castle, the cityscape of early eighteenth-century Schorndorf was also dominate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note to Readers
• Introduction
• 1. The Inquisitor
• 2. A Convert’s Tale
• 3. Joseph and His Brothers
• 4. In the Land of the Dead
• Afterword
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index