Produced at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, the 1940 film Jud Süss expressed Nazi anti-Semitism at its most vulgar. It was a distorted version of the true story of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who served as a “court Jew” to Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg and was arrested immediately after the duke’s death and then executed. Yair Mintzker’s recent The Many Deaths of Jew Süss explores the conflicting accounts of Oppenheimer’s trial and last days. In his review, Jonathan Karp explains the often misunderstood role of the court Jew:

[The] phenomenon of the court Jew . . . had its roots in the 16th century and flowered in the period following the Thirty Years War. The proliferation of large and small states [in what is now Germany] after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, along with the war’s decimation of population and property, created an urgent need on the part of Central Europe’s new rulers for capital and credit. Jews, who had been excluded from most of Central Europe, . . . were now invited in small numbers to come back as creditors, financiers, ministers, crown merchants, and military suppliers.

They weren’t popular, which isn’t surprising given that they were now stigmatized both as aliens and as willing tools of new absolutist states which were seeking to bypass the fiscal authority of estates, guilds, and other traditional institutions. This made the court Jew and his retinue entirely dependent on the ruler’s protection—and uncertain continued favor. . . .

But Joseph Süss . . . stood out even in comparison [with his] wealthier and more powerful predecessors. . . . For one thing, during his rise [he] all but failed to pay the kind of lip service to traditional Jewish observance that the Jewish community expected of court Jews. Worse still, his aristocratic pretensions, numerous reported affairs, and overt political interventions threatened the fragile security of Württemberg’s fledgling Jewish population. In spite of these things, Oppenheimer’s refusal to renounce Judaism on the eve of his execution turned him into a genuine if unlikely martyr for some contemporary Jews.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.