"Do Jews have big noses?", "Are they particularly business savvy?", "Can you make jokes about the Holocaust?", "Is 'Jew' a curse word?"

Seconds after visitors have stepped through the sliding doors and into the exhibition space at Berlin's Jewish Museum, they are confronted by these and other often equally disquieting questions, beamed onto the floor in front of them.

They were collected from comments in the 800 visitors' books the museum has compiled since it opened in 2001, and whittled down to 32 of the most frequently asked, to form the backbone of its latest show, The Whole Truth – What You've Always Wanted to Know About Jews (but might have been too afraid to ask, the title could have added).

A high point of the exhibition, in answer to the oft-asked question "Are there still Jews in Germany?" comes in the form of the Jew in the Showcase, a glass vitrine in which a different Jewish man or woman sits on a pink felt cushion each day to answer the public's pressing queries in person.

On Wednesday it was the turn of Dekel Peretz, a doctoral student in German Jewish history at the Moses Mendelssohn centre in Potsdam, who said he had initially been put off by fear he might feel like an act in a freak show.

"But my approach to it is to study the people just as they want to study me," said the 33-year-old from Ra'anana near Tel Aviv. "I'm really intrigued to find out what sort of things they ask me. In many ways my everyday life is anyway a bit like living in a box, being one of few Jewish people living in Germany – your mere presence in a pub triggers debates about the Holocaust or Middle East politics – so I wasn't fazed about taking part."

Before long he was deep in conversation with 62-year-old Eckhard Morgen and his wife, Manuela, 52, from southern Germany.

"We don't get much of a chance to meet Jewish people, so I was mostly interested to find out why he was so keen to be an exhibit and to talk about his Jewishness," said Eckhard Morgen.

He was moved, he said, by the story of Peretz's Moroccan, Romanian and Polish family, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.

Manuela Morgen said the couple would like to visit Israel, "but have always been put off by the violence". But the main hindrance, said Eckhard, is of "being German – I'd be concerned that with older people in particular who have experience of the Holocaust it would be really hard to converse".

That's one reason he had wanted to visit the exhibition, he said, and it lies at the heart of what the exhibition is about.

"My response to it is very emotional," Eckhard admitted. He stopped short of laughing at the Auschwitz jokes that were also part of the display, which for him "stuck in the gut".

Understandably, reactions to the exhibition have been mixed. Some commentators have called it naive, mawkish and voyeuristic, others daring and challenging.

Martina Lüdicke, one of its curators, said the main aim of it had been to "trigger an interesting discussion".

The trepidation with which the curators embarked on the project is expressed in their email exchanges as they developed it, which have been published. They wrangled over whether or not to include the question "Is sex with Jews different?" (it is included) as well as over whether it was right to put a Jewish person on display like, as one visitor put it, "Eichmann in the dock in Jerusalem".

"I think we should do it," concluded Michal Friedlander, a London-based curator for Judaica and Applied Art at the museum in an email to her colleagues. "As Churchill's parrot would say: 'Fuck Hitler'. Lets put a living Jew in a showcase, not a dead one."

As well as musings on the definition of kosher food and the Wailing Wall, there are references to David Beckham and Prince Charles, alongside Marilyn Monroe, who converted in the 1950s, and Charlie Chaplin, whose Jewish roots were said to lie in Hungary.

Beckham's credentials? The tattoo on his arm of a Hebrew verse from the Song of Solomon as well as his assertions that he is half Jewish. As for Prince Charles, he was circumcised by the then royal circumcisor, Rabbi Jacob Snowman, according to a tradition brought by George I from his homeland., The move apparently prompted suggestions of a greater affinity to Jewishness than the royal family have ever openly admitted.

"It is all part of the debate on what it is to be Jewish," said Lüdicke. "People want clear definitions, but there are none."

Indeed, it seems that some visitors leave the exhibition with more questions than they had when they arrived and it is questionable the extent to which some have been enlightened. Among the more than 200 sticky notes on a wall at the end marked "Any more questions?" visitors have written "How are Jews born?", "Why do Jews have peyos [side curls]", and "Is it still OK to call a child Adolf?"