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This is the fourth installment in a five-part series.
Part 1 [November/December 2000], "Living by Law, Looking for Intimacy," explored what Christians can learn from the debates that divide American Jews, taking as a point of departure Samuel G. Freedman's book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.
Part 2 [January/February 2001], "God of Abraham—and Saint Paul," focused on the pathbreaking "Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity" published last fall in the New York Times and the book of essays it occasioned, Christianity in Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer.
Part 3 considered medieval anti-Semitism and the Eucharist (via Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales).
Next, part 5 will conclude the series with Messianic Judiaism.
Reconsiderations of early-twentieth-century German Jewry are now fashionable. German Jews of this period were once portrayed by scholars as naive and overly optimistic. After the Enlightenment, so the story went, Jews threw off Judaism and embraced secular German culture with fervor. They thought that they could somehow become truly German, but the Holocaust proved them wrong. The secular, enlightened, philosophically minded Jews were marched to Dachau alongside the old-fashioned rabbis, with their beards and sidelocks and Yiddish.
The truth, historians now tell us, is far more complicated than that. In his eloquent book German Jews: A Dual Identity, Paul Mendes-Flohr makes the case, as the title of his first chapter suggests, that the German Jew had a "bifurcated soul." Yes, German Jews embraced German learning and culture, but they married it together, albeit uneasily, with Judaism. They didn't trade one for the other; they tried to have both. And at least one prominent German Jew of the period had what might be called a trifurcated soul, were there such a term. Edith Stein was a Jew, she was a leading philosopher of her day, and she became a Catholic.
Edith Stein was born in Breslau in 1891. Her father died when she was young, and her mother headed up both home and business, running a lumberyard, rearing her children, and remaining faithful to the Jewish religious practices of her youth. She lit candles, she fasted, she prayed. For her part, young Edith didn't have much use for prayer. She had been reading books from the library of her secular and sophisticated brother-in-law, Max. "Max and else were totally without belief; religion had no place whatsoever in their home," Stein later wrote. "Deliberately and consciously, I gave up praying here."
All the hours she might have spent praying she devoted to books:
I used my free time principally for reading, preferably drama: Grillparzer, Hebbel, Ibsen, and, above all, Shakespeare became my daily bread. I was much more at home in this colorful world of the great passions and deeds than in the everyday life around me. But the day I produced Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, my elder sisters protested energetically. They feared for my mental health; and I had to return the two volumes to the library unread.
The reading paid off: she aced gymnasium, studied philosophy at Gottingen, wrote a stunning dissertation on empathy. She was a star pupil of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. She could confidently look forward to a sparkling philosophical career.
And then Stein became a Christian. While visiting her friend and fellow philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martinus in 1921, she picked up a copy of Teresa of Avila's autobiography. She read it straight through, in a night, and when she was finished, she said "This is the truth." She never said more about her conversion, never explained precisely what spoke to her in those pages. When Conrad-Martinus later asked her to divulge the details, Stein replied, "Secretum meum mihi" (my secret is mine, my secret is unto me).
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