by Susan Jacoby
The history of the battle for emancipation of English Jews was no less drawn out and complicated than the same struggle in Germany—despite England’s longer and stronger tradition of limitations on the power of monarchy and guarantees of some individual liberties. Thomas Paine, as an excise-tax collector for the Crown (among many jobs) before his immigration to America, wound up in trouble with his bosses when, in coffeehouse debates, he forcefully voiced his indignation that Jews were required to pay taxes but not allowed to vote in the mid-eighteenth century. Depriving Jews of legal rights, he declared in what was then, in nearly all Christian societies, a novel argument, was a violation of the natural rights of man. When reports of Paine’s statements about Jews reached his superiors, he was ordered to cease involving himself in all religious and political controversy. He did not follow orders and was, predictably, fired. This no doubt made Paine more receptive than he would otherwise have been to the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, then representing the colony of Pennsylvania in London, that a man of Paine’s rebelliousness and passion for the rights of man would do better in the American colonies than in the mother country.
For Jews, the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, which had actually been aimed at Catholics, required a Christian oath and public acceptance of the Eucharist from the Church of England before a man could hold public office. Obviously, the acts would prevent any unconverted Jew from entering Parliament (although restrictions on Catholics had been lifted in 1829, both nonconformist Protestants and Jews were still affected by the laws passed during the reign of Charles II). The 1847 debate in the House of Commons presaged repeated attempts to release Jews from the oath-taking requirement; such bills were passed many times in the Commons but were defeated in the House of Lords. The debate was especially bitter because Lionel de Rothschild had been elected to the House of Commons from the City of London but, as an unconverted Jew, could not take the oath. The legislative wrangling over the oath continued until 1858, with a compromise that enabled each House of Parliament to determine the qualifications for its members. This was a personal compromise, however, applying only to Rothschild. It was not until 1866, with a new Parliamentary Oaths Act for both Houses, that office, holding for English Jews became a right rather than a privilege.
It is true that no Jew born in London in the 1790s was locked into a ghetto at night, as Jews were in Frankfurt. It is equally true that Jewish children in mid-nineteenth-century England, France, Germany, and even retrograde Russia were not being taken from their parents after being baptized by rogue Christian servants. But it is not true, as the encyclical “We Remember” explicitly claims, that Jews had achieved “equal status” in most states—by either the beginning or the end of the nineteenth century.
One may dismiss a conversion like Heine’s as a nasty, thoroughly self-interested business, undertaken by a man who disdained Judaism and Christianity equally and whose emotions about Germany were much more conflicted than, say, Disraeli’s feelings about England. But there is no denying that the depth of Heine’s cultural conflict was shared not only by many of his German Jewish contemporaries but by subsequent generations of converts from the ghetto to Auschwitz. Was Heine any more conflicted than Edith Stein, now a Catholic saint, canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998? Leaving aside, for a moment, the bitter subsequent controversy over Stein’s death as a Jew at Auschwitz and her canonization as a Catholic martyr, there is the Edith Stein, a philosopher and religious scholar, who was baptized in 1922 and whose deeply spiritual writings leave no doubt of the depth of her Catholic devotion. And yet Stein, just a decade later, would try to convince her fellow Germans (she still considered them her fellows) of the rectitude of Jewish families. Less than a century separates the opportunistic conversion of Heine from the more spiritual conversion of Stein, and only twenty years separate the gates of Auschwitz from the conversions of the last generation of German Jews who thought they had a future, as Christian converts or as Jews, in Germany.
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*1 This is true even in Spain, where the government has admitted ancestral responsibility for the expulsion of Jews in 1492 (though not precisely for the Inquisition).
*2 In a subsequent book, The Popes Against the Jews (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Kertzer recounts similar reactions to the ones I received from first readers of this manuscript. He recalls letters from readers asking, “You mean there was still an Inquisition in 1858? I thought the Inquisition was back in the 1400s or 1500s.” Kertzer is the son of a rabbi, Morris Kertzer, who was director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee from 1949 until 1961. His particular mission, so soon after the Holocaust, was the improvement of relations between Christians and Jews.
*3 Had Isaac D’Israeli been prescient enough to baptize his son because he expected him to become prime minister of England, it would have been a feat of clairvoyance on a par with American birthers’ claim that Barack Obama’s parents arranged to have his birth records transferred from Kenya to Hawaii because they knew their son was going to grow up to become president of the United States.
16
EDITH STEIN (1891–1942): THE SAINTHOOD OF A CONVERTED JEW
IF SINCERITY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF was the only criterion, there could be no comparison between the conversions of Heinrich Heine, in the early era of German Jewish assimilation, and Edith Stein, just a decade before the Nazi darkness began to obliterate that dream (or nightmare, depending on one’s point of view). Stein’s embrace of Catholicism and her later entry into the Discalced Carmelite Order emerged from the deep spiritual needs of a woman who was an intellectual, a philosopher, and something of a mystic, but who also respected her Jewish heritage in a way that Heine never respected his.
There was minimal opportunism in Stein’s conversion to Catholicism, because converting to Protestantism would have furthered the same social objectives (such as obtaining access to better employment prospects in academia) while causing much less angst among her Jewish family members and friends. Catholicism, as in Heine’s time, was regarded with much greater animus than Protestantism by German Jews, and a Jew who became a Lutheran was more acceptable—or less unacceptable—to observant Jews than one who became a Catholic. Despite Martin Luther’s crude anti-Semitism, the Jewish experience of being persecuted by Catholics was much longer and more intense, and many of Stein’s Jewish academic mentors and friends were themselves converts to Lutheranism.
Thus, there is a double irony to Stein’s present status as a Catholic martyr. Had she been a Protestant, she would still have met her death in a concentration camp as a Jew, but her Catholicism had already created a barrier between her and many Jewish friends who had converted to Protestantism. Without the international furor over the Vatican’s attempt to portray Stein not as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust but as a martyr for Catholicism under her religious name, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she would likely be seen today primarily as a female scholar and religious thinker, ahead of her time in the complicated history of twentieth-century feminism’s relationship with Western patriarchal faith.
Stein was a complex and somewhat opaque woman on both an emotional and an intellectual level. This reserve is more apparent in her unfinished autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, than in her religious and philosophical writings—in part because one expects more intimate revelations in a memoir, and in part because she never really comes to grips with the connection between her theological and philosophical ideas and her personal life. Most of the autobiography was written in 1933, after Hitler’s election as chancellor of Germany, and there is a sense of urgency, as Stein says explicitly, about her attempt to portray ordinary middle-class German Jewish life at a time when the Nazi demonization of Jews was in its early phase. And though the autobiography is packed with details about her family, Stein erects a perceptible shield between her feelings and the facts of her life. She tells us that she once dreamed of marriage and a great love, for example, but does not tell us why she abandoned that dream
for a life as a Bride of Christ.
One of Stein’s purposes in writing her autobiography—perhaps her main purpose, despite or because of her conversion to Catholicism in 1922—was to demonstrate that German Jews were loyal both to Germany and to their Jewish heritage. In her introduction, Stein states what must have been as obvious to her contemporaries as it is in retrospect—that the rise to power of the Nazis had “catapulted the German Jews out of the peaceful existence they had come to take for granted” and forced them “to reflect upon themselves, upon their being, and their destiny.” She quotes a Jewish friend who lamented, “If only I knew how Hitler came by his terrible hatred of the Jews.” Stein herself uses the phrase “the Jewish question” and claims that many Gentiles, including Catholic youth groups, “have been dealing with it in all seriousness and with a deep sense of responsibility.” Then she poses a question that inadvertently demonstrates how deeply anti-Semitic stereotypes had penetrated the psyches of German Jews themselves. She asks, “Is Judaism represented only by, or even only genuinely by, powerful capitalists, insolent literati, or those restless heads who have led revolutionary movements in the past decades?”1 Stein’s answer—as a woman whose childhood was spent in a somewhat observant German Jewish family in Breslau, as a former volunteer nurse who loyally supported Germany during the First World War, and as a product of the German education system from grammar school through university—is an emphatic no. It is Stein’s strong sense of Germanness, along with her indignation that some Germans might think of Jews only as “insolent” intellectuals, financiers, or revolutionaries, that links her to Heine and places her conversion in its social as well as spiritual context.
One telling anecdote about Stein’s mother could easily be a coda to Heine’s 1844 statement that “the Rhine belongs to me” and that he was “the free Rhine’s much freer son.” When Stein’s parents were married in 1871, the words of their wedding song were set to the melody of a popular martial tune, titled “The Watch on the Rhine,” which begins, “Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall” (“Tumult and cry like thunder’s roll”). The song was written around 1840 and refers to the French challenge to the boundaries of the Rhine—precisely the controversy that prompted Heine’s comments.*1 Stein observed that her mother had chosen the melody for her wedding song because she had always been a “German patriot” and therefore, even after the rise of Hitler, found it “incomprehensible that anyone should dare to dispute her German identity.”2 (Stein’s parents were married not long after the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” and this was a time of intense German patriotism, especially for Prussians. Incorporating the “Watch on the Rhine” melody into a wedding was the equivalent of playing “Dixie” in the South, or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the North, at an American wedding reception during the Civil War.)
Edith, as she recounts in a later portion of her memoir, would become an admirer of Bismarck. One of her most distinguished teachers at the University of Göttingen was the historian Max Lehmann (1845–1929), who strongly opposed Prussian militarism and whose ideal was English liberalism. “This was obvious especially in his course on Bismarck,” Stein would recall. “Since partiality always incited me to do justice to the opposite side, I became more conscious here than I had been at home [in her native Breslau] of the virtues of the Prussian character; and I was confirmed in my own Prussian allegiance.”3 In her autobiography, Stein never deals with the subject of exactly how those so-called virtues, whether attributed to Prussia in particular or to Germany in general, fitted into the nightmare the Jews were already beginning to live out under the Nazis (or into the different wartime nightmare of her youth).
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I became aware of Edith Stein in the early 1980s, when few of her writings had been translated into English, because the feminist movement had raised the profile of women in religion, and scholars were beginning to re-examine the lost contributions of women to religious thought. I was also interested in her for eccentric personal reasons. She grew up in Breslau, where many of my Jacoby ancestors had lived, and she initially attended the University of Breslau, where my great-grandfather Maximilian Jacoby was a student before he immigrated to the United States in 1849. My aunt Edith, Maximilian’s granddaughter, who was fifteen years younger than Edith Stein and was born in the United States, also became a devout Catholic convert from what was originally a highly assimilated German Jewish—and then American German Jewish—family. (When more of Stein’s writing began to be translated into English, in the 1980s, my elderly aunt, who by then had become involved with the “charismatic Catholic” movement within the church, read them with great interest.) With a particular kind of soulful, dark-haired beauty that unmistakably suggested her Jewish descent, Aunt Edith also bore a striking physical resemblance to Stein, as the latter appears in photographs taken in her twenties and thirties.
Among the most peculiar observations in Stein’s autobiography are references to her not looking Jewish—or, presumably, not looking like what Jews were thought to look like by anti-Semites. It is hard to know exactly what Stein was thinking when she wrote about her non-Jewish appearance in 1933. Perhaps she meant that she did not “look Jewish” in the sense that some Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews from shtetls “looked Jewish” by virtue of clothes, hairstyles, and manners connected with strict, old-fashioned religious observance. Or that she did not have the hooked nose and gross features portrayed in Nazi propaganda. But Edith Stein certainly did look Jewish, just as my aunt did, in a style, conveying adventurousness and braininess, evident in photographs of many intellectual American and European Jewish women in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Stein’s autobiography displays keen powers of observation, so it is hard to figure out why she was such a poor observer of what her own appearance probably signified to Gentile Others. Certainly, her conviction that she looked like a Gentile did not flow from any desire to “pass.” And yet she also makes a point of saying that she readily acknowledged her Jewishness before her conversion (and never denied her Jewish origins after her conversion) even though she did not have to.
Describing a friend—a convert to Lutheranism from Judaism—with whom she worked in a military hospital during World War I, Stein notes matter-of-factly, “Of course, in the lazaretto, anti-Semitic remarks were to be heard at times. On such occasions, Suse [the converted friend] forthrightly envied me the ability to come forward with a simple acknowledgment that I was Jewish. (By the way, this used to astound people since no one took me to be Jewish.)”4 Even though “Stein” is one of many German names that can be either Jewish or non-Jewish, it is simply impossible, looking at snapshots of Edith in her late teens and twenties, to think that no one in a German work setting would have suspected or assumed that she was a Jew. Had she been one of the small number of Jews who tried to survive the Second World War within large cities in Nazi Germany by hiding in plain sight (especially in Berlin), her appearance would have offered her little protection.*2 In any case, Stein’s views about the difficulty of a convert’s coming forth and saying she was Jewish, or that she had been born into a Jewish family, reveal a deep confusion about the capacity of a formal religious conversion to wipe out one’s cultural and ethnic background (and what many people in her time called “race”). And another premise underlies this story about responses to anti-Semitic remarks: Stein assumes that only a Jew (converted or not) would voice any objections. Her assumption, judging from many other contemporary memoirs, was undoubtedly correct.*3 Although garden-variety anti-Semitism certainly was not responsible for Stein’s conversion to Catholicism, it was an important part of the cultural context in which her life and spiritual yearnings must be viewed.
Stein was born on October 12, 1891—as it happens, the date on which Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, fell that year. She was the youngest of eleven children (seven of whom lived to adulthood) of Siegfried and Auguste Courant Stein. In the curriculum vitae accompanying her doc
toral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, in 1916, she wrote, “I am a Prussian citizen and a Jewess.” Auguste Stein was a woman of formidable strength, which she needed: her husband died when Edith was only two years old, leaving his widow with substantial debts and seven children to educate. Although she had never worked outside her home, Auguste took over her husband’s lumber business and made a success of it. “Supplying the bare essentials for our daily needs was not enough for my mother,” Edith recalled. “To begin with, she set herself an enormous task: no one should be able to say that my deceased father’s debts had gone unpaid; bit by bit, they were wiped out to the last Pfennig. Next, her children were all to have a good education.”5 That included the girls as well as the boys. Edith received what would today be called her elementary- and secondary-school education at a municipal girls’ school in Breslau, from 1897 to 1906. Then she studied three more years at the Realgymnasium (the closest equivalent would be a liberal arts college) associated with her former school. After earning her certificate of graduation from a humanistic Gymnasium—a requirement for going on to a university at what would, in many other countries, be called the graduate level—Edith began to study psychology, philosophy, and German philology, among other subjects, at the University of Breslau. Then, in what would be a turning point in her life, she moved on to the University of Göttingen for another four semesters and met her future mentor, the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl, a Jew who had converted to Protestantism (like so many of Edith’s academic friends and teachers), is an important figure in twentieth-century philosophy as a founder of phenomenology, which, to simplify greatly, emphasizes the study of phenomena, or conscious experience, from the subjective first-person point of view.*4 The phenomenological school of philosophy, as has been pointed out by many scholars, was not based on any premises that opposed Catholicism (or, for that matter, orthodox Protestantism). Stein did not have to undergo a “conversion” from her philosophical beliefs to become a Catholic, as she would have if she had been—to cite just two examples—a Spinozan or a dialectical materialist.