Background
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was a German Jewish banker and court Jew for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart.
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was a German Jewish banker and court Jew for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart.
By the 1720s, however, Oppenheimer was already working as a court Jew in Mannheim, Darmstadt, and finally Frankfurt am Main, where he was introduced to Karl Alexander, the future Duke of Württemberg, in 1732. When Karl Alexander ascended the throne in the following year, Oppenheimer served as his chief financial adviser.
Joseph Oppcnhcimer’s own rise to fame and fortune began in 1732, when Prince Carl Alexander of Württemberg gave him the post of court factor. Soon afterward, he was granted similar privileges by the landgrave of Hesse and the electors of Cologne and the Palatinate.
As Duke of Württemberg (1733-1737), Carl Alexander aimed to establish an absolutist regime financed by a mercantile economy, and lor this he needed Oppcnheimer’s resourceful expertise. Having been made the duke’s privy councillor and virtual minister of finance, Oppenheimer repaid him with loyal service, encouraging private enterprise to fill the exchequer and working hard to strengthen his master’s authority. Like other court Jews, he also used his growing influence for the small Jewish community’s benefit. At the same time, however, he adopted a morally questionable, apparently licentious life-style which, together with his authoritarian manner and bid for a title of Joseph Süsskind Oppenheimer. In the medallion below, the cage in which he was executed.
Immediately after the duke’s sudden death, in March 1737, Oppenheimer and some other high officials were arrested and charged with offenses against the state. Jew Süss alone was convicted of mismanagement and embezzlement, deprived of all his assets, and unjustly sentenced to death. While in jail, he became a strictly observant Jew, reciting daily prayers, growing a beard, and insisting on kosher food. When all Jewish efforts to secure his ransom had failed, Oppenheimer spurned the proposal that he avoid the gallows by embracing Christianity. “A free man can decide whether to change his religion, not a prisoner.” he maintained. As crowds gathered to witness the spectacle, Jew Süss defiantly met his end proclaiming the Shema on April 2, 1738, when he was hanged inside an iron cage suspended high above one of Stuttgart’s thoroughfares. Anti-Semitic engravings and medals were produced depicting his execution.
Within the German Jewish community, Oppenheimer was honored as a martyr, the victim of political intrigue and anti-Semitic hatred. According to certain rumors, his body had been spirited away for interment in Fürth while another corpse had been substituted for the one exhibited in Stuttgart. His career was to inspire a best-selling historical novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, which Lothar Mendes turned into a Gaumont British movie (1934). The Nazis later promoted the filming of Jud Süss (1940), an anti-Jewish screen version directed by Viet Harlan.
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The story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was the subject of a number of literary and dramatic treatments over the course of the past two centuries. The earliest of these having been Wilhelm Hauff's 1827 novella titled Jud Süß. The most successful literary adaptation was Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel titled Jud Süß based on a play that he had written in 1916 though never performed and subsequently withdrawn by Feuchtwanger.
Ashley Dukes and Paul Kornfeld also wrote dramatic adaptations of the Feuchtwanger novel. In 1934, Lothar Mendes directed a film adaptation of the novel in which Süß was portrayed by actor Conrad Veidt:42–44 An anti-semitic Nazi propaganda film titled Jud Süß was made in 1940 by Veit Harlan, in which Süß was portrayed by actor Ferdinand Marian.
In the 1990s, the German sculptor Angela Laich created a sculpture devoted to Joseph Süß Oppenheimer as well as illustrations for German historian Hellmut G. Haasis's book Joseph Süß Oppenheimer genannt Jud Süß. Finanzier, Freidenker, Justizopfer.
In 2016 was released the movie Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, loosely inspired in the Oppenheimer's life, starred by Richard Gere.