The Other Oppenheimer
Finance, War and Moral Dilemma
The name Oppenheimer is now famous. The Hollywood movie about Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb, has made sure of that. But Robert was not the first famous Oppenheimer, nor is he likely to be the last.
The name Oppenheimer comes from the German town Oppenheim, on the Rhine near to Frankfurt, where branches of the Oppenheimer family seem to have moved in the 17th and 18th centuries. Other well-known Oppenheimers include Sir Charles Oppenheimer, the 19th century English consul-general in Frankfurt, Franz who was an early German sociologist and Florence, who became Florence Greenberg after her marriage and was the doyenne of cookery writers (I wrote about her a few weeks ago).There were also at least three Oppenheimer artists: Max in Austria, Charles in Scotland and Joseph, born in Berlin who spent the last years of his life moving between England and Canada.
These days, American journalist and author Mark Oppenheimer writes an entertaining column here on Substack and recently the Oppenheimer Blue Diamond, named after the collector and dealer Sir Philip, briefly became the most expensive jewel in the world when it was sold in 2016 at Christies. There is also a clutch of Oppenheims, including the 19th century plagiarist Simon and the English politician, Baroness Sally.
The most famous Oppenheimer of all, before the movie was made, was the 18th century Joseph Süsskind Oppenheimer. Known as Jew Süss he was the principal financier and state counsellor to the Duke of Württemberg. Hounded by antisemites, Oppenheimer was arrested after the Duke died and falsely charged with embezzling state funds. The German Jewish community tried to ransom him but failed. He was hanged in April 1738. In 1940 he was made the subject of a vile Nazi propaganda film but is best known today because of Leon Feuchtwanger’s classic novel, Jew Süss, published in 1925 and still in print.
The first Oppenheimer to make his name known was Samuel Oppenheimer of Heidelberg. An older relative of Joseph Süsskind Oppenheimer, he was born in 1630. Samuel gained his reputation as a Jewish courtier, or Court Jew, providing finance for the Austrian emperor Leopold I and equipping his armies during Austria’s 1673-9 war with France. The High Commissioner of the Army praised the quality of service that Samuel offered, saying that his prices were very fair. But when the time came for him to be paid, there was no money. The War Ministry said they didn’t have a penny to give him; that the cost of fighting such a long war had emptied their coffers. Meanwhile Samuel’s own suppliers were pressing him for payment. All the ministry was prepared to do was to try to fob him off with worthless promissory notes.
Samuel now realised why rulers and monarchs preferred to deal with Jewish suppliers than Christians. Supplying an army was no-win business. When the battle went against them, the generals blamed their suppliers for providing inferior equipment or poor food. The people in whose lands the war was fought blamed them for buying up all the crops and leaving them with nothing to eat. And the soldiers blamed them whenever provisions or ammunition ran short in the field. All in all, when things went wrong it was handy to have a Jewish provisioner to scapegoat. And when it came to money, it was far easier to avoid paying a Jewish contractor than a Christian.
In desperation, Samuel Oppenheimer wrote a personal letter to the Emperor. He told him that he had lent the Empire money at a time when nobody else was willing to do so. He implied that if he was not paid, and was forced into bankruptcy, it would be far harder for the Emperor to find someone to lend him money next time he needed it. Even so, his letter didn’t have as much impact as he had hoped. He only received small sums of money from the Treasury, not enough to pay all his suppliers and sub-contractors.
However, Samuel Oppenheimer was a resourceful man, one of a very small number of Jewish financiers provisioning the royal houses of Europe. They were able to do so, not so much because their pockets were deep (although most were) as due to the unique nature of the Jewish economy at the time. Jews in Europe had been excluded from the professions and merchant guilds for centuries. It had obliged them to establish an alternative economy, one that operated in parallel with the mainstream but outside it.
It hadn’t been a conscious decision to create a Jewish economy, it was the consequence of the way in which Jews had been forced to live. Still, it had two unique strengths. One was the thousands of poor Jewish pedlars who scraped together a living, buying and selling used goods and pieces of scrap from the peasants of Europe. Among the detritus they bought were old metal implements and worn coins. They sold these on until they ended up with the metal dealers in cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg and Prague. The metal dealers supplied the royal mints; in 1629 Jews had supplied 29% of the silver bought by the Imperial Mint in Breslau, by 1704 this figure had risen to 80%. The scraps that the pedlars collected underpinned the collective revenues of the Jews of Europe.
The other great strength of the Jewish economy was its pan-European network. Closely-knit and extending across the continent, the network operated to a great degree on trust; reputation in the Jewish financial community being a far more powerful guarantor for a loan than any legal documentation (though of course, there were exceptions). Letters of credit allowed money to be raised and transmitted quickly across vast distances. The Jewish financial network of the early modern period was far more flexible and responsive than its institutional counterparts. When the rulers of Europe needed money quickly, they knew who to turn to.
And so, although he had been fleeced by the Imperial Austrian Treasury in 1679 after the war with France, when the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683 Samuel Oppenheimer once again supplied the Austrian army with finance, armaments and provisions. After the siege was lifted he moved to Vienna, continuing to provision the Emperor’s army as it advanced southwards through Hungary. He built a fleet of river barges to ship food to them as they besieged Budapest and did the same when they reached Belgrade in 1688.
It is here that we have to pause and ask ourselves what sort of person Samuel Oppenheimer really was. Among the atrocities the Austrian soldiers committed when they stormed the city of Buda was to massacre 72 Jews who had taken refuge inside a synagogue. Hundreds more were taken captive. Subsequently many of the surviving captives were ransomed. The ransoms were negotiated and paid by Samuel Oppenheimer. By the man whose finance and supplies had made possible the Austrian invasion of Hungary and consequently had facilitated the massacre of Buda’s Jews.
We can’t put ourselves in Oppenheimer’s mind; we can’t know how deeply he thought about the ethics of his trade or whether it occurred to him that his own people would suffer as a result of his involvement. Nor can we know whether his decision to finance and supply the Austrian army was freely made or whether, as a Jew who found himself moving in circles far more powerful than his own, he really had any choice. Though it is surprising that of all the scholars whose accounts of Oppenheimer’s life I have read, none of them have mentioned or raised any question about the moral dilemma that must have confronted him.
As a Jew, Samuel Oppenheimer had many enemies. In Vienna the virulently antisemitic Cardinal Kollonitsch twice tried to have him removed from his role as military supplier. He failed, but by 1698, when the war with Turkey came to an end, the Emperor no longer needed him. In 1700 a mob ransacked his home, destroying everything, including the records of the money he was owed. He survived the attack but died three years later with the Imperial Treasury still owing him millions. Claims from the suppliers he had been unable to pay began piling up, his estate was declared bankrupt and the Emperor came under tremendous pressure to settle the debts, which of course were really his own. The sums involved were huge and for a while it looked as if Europe was about to be engulfed in a financial crisis.
The crisis was resolved when one of Oppenheimer’s former associates, Samson Wertheimer, stepped into his shoes. He, and Samuel’s son, Emmanuel Oppenheimer, resumed the provisioning of Austria’s armies. The age of the Jewish courtier was not over yet.