“Well, no. Why, should I?”
“Oh, it’s just,” said Lewyn, trying to remember the script. “Well, my ancestor was this guy in Germany, in the 1730s. What used to be called a ‘court Jew,’ in a town called Stuttgart. Wurttemberg,” he added, though he’d never been entirely sure whether Wurttemberg was like the city and Stuttgart like the state, or vice versa.
Jonas looked up from his ballot. Lewyn wondered if he was considering which way to go with this. There were several he himself could think of. “Okay,” Jonas said finally. “So, what’s a ‘court Jew’？”
“You weren’t allowed to borrow or loan money if you were Christian back then. You needed a … a Jewish person. To do that for you. So even though most Jewish people were living in ghettoes and weren’t allowed to do most kinds of jobs, if you were really good with finance you sometimes got, like, elevated. And my ancestor did. His name was Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, but he was also known as Jud Süss. He was the court Jew for this duke named Karl Alexander, and helped make life better for the Jews in the city, but he also made a lot of money himself. But then the duke died suddenly, and they arrested Oppenheimer and accused him of murder. Also a bunch of other stuff: lying, stealing, sex with Christian women. So they executed him. Actually, they tried to get him to convert to Christianity, but he wouldn’t. Goebbels made a film about it.”
“Who?” said Jonas.
Lewyn enlightened him.
Joseph Goebbels, in his zeal to imbue the citizens of the Thousand-Year Reich with a moral code, had dug up poor Joseph Oppenheimer again in the film version of this story, and murdered him again, this time with a few other crimes thrown in, all to remind the Volk what happened when they let the Juden live among them.
“Yow,” said Jonas. He was riveted.
The film, a great success with its 1940 audience, might have retained only a glancing relationship to historical fact, but it packed a lot of oomph. Goebbels’s version of Joseph Oppenheimer extorted and thieved just as soon as he’d wormed his way into power, and to make things worse, he persuaded Karl Alexander to open the city gates to a filthy, ailing, and praying horde of his fellow Jews. Those crimes were bad, of course, but not as bad as Oppenheimer’s sins against the pure Germans of Stuttgart, who had just been going about their ordinary pure German business, as they had always done, but were now subjected to humiliation, torture, and even rape. （The pretty Rhine maiden Jud Süss assaults will drown herself to spare her family the potential horror of a miscegenated child.） Once the duke dropped dead, the burghers of Stuttgart wasted no time, throwing the malevolent Jew in prison and, ultimately, hoisting his gibbeted corpse aloft. In the film’s final scene, the council chairman shoved the Jews back out the city gates, intoning that future generations would be wise to remember what happened in Wurttemberg.
“The point of it was to get people thinking about how great it would be to throw all the Jews out of Germany,” Lewyn explained to his roommate. “It was a big hit, all over the Third Reich. Bigger than Titanic!”
Jonas nodded. “And that’s, like, your … what, great-great-whatever-grandfather?”
There was no “whatever” about it. He, like his siblings, knew the precise and documented line from Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in Wurttemberg to the family of Salo Oppenheimer in Brooklyn Heights. The court Jew’s immediate family had fled Stuttgart even before his execution seemed certain: wife, sister, and children going first to Heidelberg, where—despite having taken the precaution of changing their name to the ubiquitous Levin—the association was common knowledge. After 1812, when citizenship was conferred on Jews, they moved again, to Prussia, still as Levins, still—even a century later—in fear of discovery. When Hermann Levin, our great-great-great-grandfather, disembarked at Castle Garden in the City of New York, in the year 1838 （a century to the month after the death of Jud Süss, in fact）， he had already spent a miserable voyage in contemplation of his new American name. It was a moment fraught with meaning, for the future and for the past. When his turn came, he approached the official, still undecided.