The Jew You Can Reach

Joseph Süß Oppenheimer had run Duke Karl Alexander’s money for four years: the monopolies, the sale of offices, the loans. The Duke was a Catholic over a Lutheran land, an absolutist over estates that loathed him, and beyond their reach. His financier was not. Like an early modern ICJ, prosecutors questioned 607 witnesses and filled thirty thousand pages. They proved nothing. They sentenced him to death without naming a crime, hanged him on February 4, 1738, and caged the body outside Stuttgart for six years.

Lion Feuchtwanger wrote a novel about that story in 1925, and he did not write it to acquit Süß. His Süß is vain, grasping, complicit; he does the Duke’s dirty work and takes his cut. The novel is about how the hanging worked. The Duke’s guilt and the Jew’s were one guilt, and only one of the two men could be hanged. The Jew was a man who could be seized. So the Jew became the sovereign in effigy, the one piece of the state within arm’s reach.

Now put a war where the Duke stood.

The war with Iran began on February 28 with strikes ordered in Washington. Nobody rammed a car into a National Guard armory or a U.S. Post Office. On March 12, the Duke’s anniversary, a man rammed one into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. In San Jose two men were beaten for speaking Hebrew on a sidewalk; the attacker shouted “don’t mess with Iran.” In Golders Green four Hatzola ambulances burned. In Liège and Rotterdam synagogues were bombed; in Amsterdam a Jewish school; in Toronto a shul was shot at. Within a week, monitors counted a third more incidents and a 1,700 percent jump in online calls to kill Jews. The men who chose the war ride in motorcades. Three fourteen-year-olds from a London Jewish school, assaulted last week, ride the bus.

One can think what one likes about the war and still notice where the blows fell. Whatever the sovereign owed, the bill arrives at the nearest Jew: the ambulance volunteer, the schoolboy, the two men on the sidewalk. Left and right differ only in the name they give the Duke. To one he is the globalist, to the other the colonial state. Both walk past the palace and knock on the same door.

Feuchtwanger gave his Süß a way out. Late in the novel he learns that his father was a Christian nobleman; one sentence would have saved him. He says the Shema instead. The historical Süß, offered baptism at the foot of the gallows, said the same. Feuchtwanger wrote it as history. Eight years later his books were burning, and by 1940 Goebbels was filming the same gallows with the sympathies reversed. The same Jew, seen from the crowd, was all he needed.

Keeping clear of power, or of Israel, or of Hebrew on sidewalks, would not have helped; a crowd does not check credentials. The estates knew it and Feuchtwanger wrote it down: what cannot be hanged gets a proxy. Ten thousand people, by some counts twenty, came to watch Süß hang, more than lived in Stuttgart. The Duke had been dead eleven months.