This study leaves aside films on the Holocaust to concentrate on the portrayal of Jewish life and milieus in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern age. It looks at films and TV plays featuring Jewish figures, starting with biblical times and the Reformation and above all tracing the progress of the Jews from the ghetto to the threshold of the present century. In so doing it examines the image of Jews and Jewry and Jewish-German relations as reflected in films on the Golem, Jud Süß, Mendelssohn and Heine, all the way up to figures in Yiddish films such as Tevya and the Dybbuk. The range of material covers various film and TV genres and while taking account of silent films and the Nazi era concentrates above all on films and TV plays shown in the Federal Republic after 1945.