Jud Süß is a 1925 historical novel by Lion Feuchtwanger based on the life of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was an 18th-century Court Jew in the employ of Duke Karl...
read more Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. In the course of his work for the duke, Oppenheimer made a number of powerful enemies, some of whom conspired to bring about his arrest and execution after Karl Alexander's death. The story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer had been the subject of a number of literary and dramatic treatments over the course of more than a century; the earliest of these having been Wilhelm Hauff's 1827 novella. The most successful literary adaptation was the Feuchtwanger novel based on a play that he had written in 1916 but subsequently withdrew. The novel was translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir. In the afterword to the novel, Feuchtwanger characterized Hauff's novella as 'naively anti-Semitic. In Germany, Joseph Goebbels had Veit Harlan direct a violently anti-Semitic film to counter the philo-semitism of Feuchtwanger's novel and Mendes' adaption of it. The Harlan film violated almost everything about the novel's characters and sentiments. In the Harlan film, Süß rapes a Gentile German girl and tortures her father and fiancé before being put to death for his crimes. Book in very good condition read less