It satirizes the American way of celebrity, mass culture, education, and, of course, political persecution; not surprisingly, it wasn't released here until 1964.
Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions.
Of course, the history of persecution and the trauma of the genocide in Europe led to a belief in the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination and militant self-defence.
Not all asylum seekers are actually fleeing political persecution, of course – some in the detention centers are just looking for a better life and apply for refugee status in attempts to evade prison.
To that point, the misdeeds of the character Süss, despite the accusations launched at him, are only his personal failings (although several other Jews are shown to help him); the reference to Luther is a call to higher authority to justify persecutions beyond those shown in the film (persecutions, of course, which the Nazis enacted and far surpassed).
Christians, of course, have no monopoly on persecution.
"And that displacement can lead, in due course, to the coercion and persecution of those who refuse to acknowledge the state's redefinition of marriage, which is beyond the state's competence," they say.
(For instance, Alain Resnais's 1955 film "Night and Fog" is about the concentration camps but doesn't include any individual's experience or testimony, and it mentions the word "Jewish" only once, in the course of a litany of persecutions by the Nazi regime).
Overseas, of course, Tibet is a symbol of persecution, personified by the Dalai Lama.
Over the course of the last year, several widespread persecutions of (perceived) LGBT people have taken place, most notably in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.
