The Problem of Edith Stein

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).

She wanted, immediately, to become a nun, but her spiritual directors insisted that she wait. So she waited, and while she waited, she wrote, and published, and taught, until the 1933 ban on Jewish teachers. Finally, that same year, she entered a Carmelite convent at Cologne. She stayed there for five years, until the superiors decided that she was not safe, and moreover that her presence was a danger to all the sisters there. She was transferred, with no small difficulty, to a convent in Echt.

Stein arrived there on New Year’s Eve, 1938. Her sister Rosa joined her—Rosa was not a nun, but she too had become a Catholic. Edith Stein lived and prayed in Echt until August 2, 1942, when the ss interrupted evening prayer at the convent and arrested the Steins. On August 5, Edith was interned at Westerbork. Two days later she was sent to Auschwitz. The exact date of her death is unknown; the best guess has it at August 9.

But Stein’s story doesn’t end with her death. Forty-five years later, the Roman Catholic Church beatified her, then canonized her, and the controversy began. To become a Catholic saint, one must be responsible for two posthumous miracles—unless one is a martyr, in which case the bar drops to one. Stein’s miracle was the healing of a child, overdosed on Tylenol. The child was hospitalized, her parents prayed to Stein, and the girl recovered. The other miracle? Martyrdom in the Shoah rendered that requirement moot.

But was Stein’s death the death of a Catholic martyr? Though the Nazis certainly killed many Catholics on account of their faith, Stein was not one of them; she died not because she was a Carmelite nun, but because she was a Jew. Outraged Jews around the world criticized the Church for usurping Stein’s death (and not just Jews; the church’s claim to Stein’s martyrdom is one of the many Catholic wrongs Garry Wills catalogues in Papal Sins). The protest, it seems to me, is reasonable: it is indisputable that Stein died not in odium fidei (Catholic fides, anyway), but because she was a Jew. The Netherlands Red Cross Bureau of Information certificate that records her arrest and death puts it plainly: she died “for reasons of race, and specifically because of Jewish descent.”

Edith Stein appears, at first blush, unique, this Jewish nun who died in Auschwitz and was canonized by the Catholic Church. But there are lots of contexts, lots of backdrops, that help situate Stein. Flirtation with Christianity was common among leading European Jewish intellectuals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and her chroniclers like to compare Stein to several near-Jewish converts of her day. The most frequent comparison is to Simone Weil.

Weil was a fiery French Jewish intellectual whom many readers have first encountered in her book Waiting for God, frequently found in that memorable silver HarperPerennial edition, with a watery image of Weil, her perfectly round glasses and her sober young face, eerily peering up at the reader. Like Stein, Weil was a brilliant student, graduating from the Sorbonne at the top of her class, academically outdone by only one other student, another Simone: Simone de Beauvoir. Like Stein, Weil was unequivocally drawn to Christianity, but unlike Stein she refused to be baptized, preferring to remain a “Christian outside the Church.”

And unlike Stein, Weil was virulently anti-Semitic. She described Jews as “the poison of uprooting personified.” She privileged the individual, and could not abide the collective identity of Judaism: “A Roman always thought in terms of We,” she wrote. “A Hebrew also.” According to her biographer, Simone Petrement, Weil actually described herself in 1939 as an anti-Semite. She had neither joined the church nor repudiated her anti-Semitic invective when she starved herself to death in 1943.

Another frequent comparison is to Franz Rosenzweig, the twentieth century’s greatest Jewish philosopher. Rosenzweig, who died of Lou Gherig’s disease before the Nazi rise to power, almost converted to Christianity as a young man. He carried on a tortured correspondence with his cousin, Eugen Rosenstock-Hussy, who had converted, and at last Rosenzweig determined to join the church. But he wanted to enter Christianity as a Jew.

To that end, Rosenzweig attended a service on Erev Yom Kippur, the evening of the Day of Repentance, the Jewish calendar’s most holy day and the occasion of its most haunting liturgy, the Kol Nidre. And there, in synagogue, on his way to Christianity, Rosenzweig realized that Judaism could provide a vital path to God. In a sort of inversion of Paul’s moment on the road to Damascus, Rosenzweig committed his life to Judaism.

He went on to write not only provocative works of Jewish philosophy but also the Ur-text for what we would now call Jewish-Christian relations. The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig’s magnum opus, pays attention to both Judaism and Christianity, and argues for a dual-covenant perspective, the idea that there are potentially two real covenants, one between God and Jews, cemented at Sinai, and one between God and Christians, cemented in Christ.

Comparing Stein to Rosenzweig is a bit trickier than comparing her to Weil. Implicitly, if not explicitly, the question is, If Rosenzweig could find meaning in Judaism, why couldn’t Stein? Why did she have to convert? (One of the most intriguing answers to this question has been offered by Jewish feminists. Taking note of Stein’s many erudite essays on the role of women, they ask, Had Rosenzweig been shunted off to the balcony when he turned up at shul for his Yom Kippur service, would he have been so drawn to Judaism? The convent provided a space for women’s religious leadership and learning that Judaism, in 1930, did not.)

Reading Stein against the backdrop of these leading Jewish thinkers is useful—it makes both Stein’s intellectual prowess and her spiritual quest less sui generis. But to read Stein solely in this context is to miss the point: the point, that is, of her conversion. To understand Edith Stein, one must read her not only in conversation with Jewish intellectuals who didn’t convert, but alongside Jewish—and Gentile—intellectuals who did convert.

When, last summer, I first read the memoirs of Raissa Maritain, I felt like I was finally beginning to understand Edith Stein. Maritain, the wife of Jacques Maritain, and a gifted philosophical thinker in her own right, grew up in France, the daughter of Russian Jews. She met her husband at the Sorbonne, and they struggled together toward Catholicism with many fits and starts before finally being baptized on June 11, 1906.

I imagined, as I read, that had Edith Stein ever given us her conversion story, had she made her secret ours, it would have read something like Raissa Maritain’s. Raissa’s was an intellectual quest as well as a spiritual one, and her reading in philosophy was every bit as important to her conversion as any experience she might have had closeted away in prayer.

Maritain never disavowed her Jewish roots. Indeed, the Holocaust pervades her memoirs. The preface to We Have Been Friends Together, written in 1940, opens with the dramatic declaration that “There is no longer any future for me in this world. Life for me draws to a close, ended by the catastrophe that has plunged France into mourning . …We have almost lost the hope which sustained us in our work and in the trials of our life: the hope that Christian love could pervade and transform the world.”

Reading that sentence, I thought that Raissa Maritain had told me more about Edith Stein than all the dozens of chroniclers who sought to compare her to Rosenzweig, or hold her up against Simone Weil. Maritain crystallizes the point immediately: the Shoah was devastating, a life-ending catastrophe, but a catastrophe she understands not as the child of Russian Jewish parents, but as a Christian.

Several dissertations in progress at philosophy departments around the country suggest that we may soon see a new wave of Edith Stein studies, but for the moment those writing about Stein have largely ignored her contributions to phenomenology, focusing instead on Stein’s relationship to Judaism. Both Catholic and Jewish writers have labored to show that Stein didn’t abandon what they rather vaguely call her Jewish heritage.

This is a hard argument to sustain, not because of what Stein had to say about Judaism after her conversion, but because of what she had to say about Judaism before her conversion. She never had much of a connection to Judaism to begin with. To put it bluntly: Stein never turned her brilliant intellect to Judaism. She knew little about Jewish customs, and even less about Jewish texts.

If one were trying to trace Stein’s relationship with Judaism, a good starting place would be the book Stein was writing during her last months in Echt, Life in a Jewish Family. She offered the book as an antidote to Nazi poison. Calling Hitler’s propaganda “a concave mirror from which a horrendous caricature [of Jews] looked out,” she asked whether

having “Jewish blood” cause an inevitable consequence in the Jewish people? Is Judaism represented only by, or even only genuinely by, powerful capitalists, insolent literati, or those restless heads who have led the revolutionary movements of the past decades?

Those Germans who had had the opportunity to work or study or socialize with Jews knew that the answer was no. Many German Jews consistently exhibited “goodness of heart, understanding warm empathy, and so consistently helpful an attitude.” To Germans who didn’t know Jews firsthand, Stein offered her memories of life in a Jewish family.

It is a fat book, but disappointing from the perspective of today’s memoir. It offers a chronicle of events, not of an inner life. There is little flashy self-revelation: no sex, no trysts, not even many emotions. And there is not, in this memoir of Jewish life, all that much about Judaism.

Like Weil, Stein never knew much Yiddishkeit—she wasn’t what today’s gatekeepers would call Jewishly literate. The Judaism we read about in Life in a Jewish Family is mostly that of Stein’s mother Auguste. We read of Auguste’s Jewish education: “a bit of Hebrew, but … too little to enable them later to translate on their own so as to pray with understanding. The commandments were learned, parts of the holy Scripture were read, some Psalms were memorized.”

It sounds habitual and dreary, wholly unsatisfactory to the intellectually insatiable Stein. Indeed, there are slivers of ambivalence, spikes of criticism, even as Stein is defending Jews against Nazi propaganda. Her description of her mother’s prayer plays into all the stereotypes: Jewish prayer is rote, Jews’ relationship with God desiccated, they’re going through motions, there is, in another Stein’s phrase, no there there.

If Edith Stein had an ongoing relation to Judaism, it was evidenced in her famous parting sentence, spoken to comfort her terrified sister as the SS officers claimed the two Steins: “Come, Rosa. We are going for our people.”

But this tells us far more about Stein’s Christianity than it does about her relationship to Judaism. “Our people” might have been the Jews, and Edith Stein might have meant that the Jews belonged to the Steins, and the Steins to them, by dint of their Jewish blood. Or “our people” might have been the suffering—all those who suffered in the death camps, not only Jews but also Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents—and she might have meant that the suffering belonged to her and her sister by dint of their Catholicism, by dint of the Cross. Edith Stein knew that her suffering for the Jews was bound up with Christ’s suffering at Golgotha. Because he had suffered for the Jews, she could suffer; and because he had suffered for the Jews, she was, indeed, obligated to suffer.

When people speak of the “problem” of Edith Stein, they usually mean her canonization: Was it appropriate, sensitive, in good taste? Or was the Vatican usurping a Jewish tragedy and claiming it for its own?

Edith Stein, to be sure, has advanced Jewish-Christian conversations. But if her canonization sparked conversations that otherwise never would have happened, her conversion is also the place where those conversations falter, because her conversion was not only an embrace of Catholicism but also a rejection of Judaism.

In an era when affirmation is the necessary starting point for any dialogue, that rejection poses a problem. It is a problem for any convert trying to participate in conversations between Christians and Jews, because however vociferous our denunciations of supersessionism, however nostalgic our memories of Shabbat dinners, we rejected Judaism. We said it wasn’t true enough, gracious enough, abundant enough. That is the place where my Jewish friends and I, where my relatives and I, run out of things to say. It is the problem of Edith Stein.

Lauren F. Winner is a doctoral candidate in the history of American religion at Columbia University.