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A saint with many sides
All religions have much to learn from Edith Stein's life
MARLENE ADLER MARKS
Special to Jewish News
The canonization of Edith Stein, a Jewish intellectual who became a Carmelite nun and died in Auschwitz, hits a raw nerve. A Jew, a nun, a martyr, a saint: How to respond to each of these links in the chain? But though the move by Pope John Paul II has backfired with Jews, his theory is right: We all have much to learn from Edith Stein.
At a recent Mass celebrated before tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square, the pope praised Stein, who became Sister Teresa Benedicta, as "an eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the church." Strange as it seems, she was both, and neither. Her real life - and her real death - raise disturbing questions about religious faith and identity for both Catholics and Jews.
That, apparently, was among the pope's goals, to help us face these questions together. The Polish-born John Paul II, who has visited synagogues, recognized Israel and is otherwise sensitive to Jewish needs for healing on the Holocaust, wants to use Stein as a bridge; Stein's feast day may become an official annual Holocaust remembrance. Jews, however, are unlikely to buy it. We do need a bridge, but one that links Christians and Jews as equals. Sainthood for Stein does just the opposite, asserting Catholic control over Stein's myth, story and message.
What do we Jews care about Edith Stein? Well, we don't yet. Those who converted to other faiths but met a Jewish death are considered martyrs, but with a difference. Stein and her sister Rosa, likewise a Carmelite nun, were arrested in a Netherlands convent in 1942, in reprisal for the protest of Dutch Catholic bishops who objected to the transport of Jews to concentration camps. Stein was killed at Au-schwitz in 1942 at age 51.
But the stories of our lives are never simple. Stein was more than a convert, more than a victim. In 1938, she wrote to Pope Pius XII, urging him to condemn Kristallnacht, the Nazi attack on synagogues and Jewish businesses. Earlier, in 1933, even as she was losing her teaching job in a German university for being a Jew, she wrote her autobiography, "Life in a Jewish Family," with the goal of stopping racial hatred. Her life's work, and doctoral dissertation, were on the subject of empathy, which she called the primordial essential quality of man. She practiced it at some risk to herself.
Take for example, the matter of religious conversion, usually regarded by Jews as close to treason. Why did so many leading Jewish thinkers convert to Catholicism? There were many reasons, of course, including mere social convenience. But though Stein's was clearly a conversion of conviction, belief itself has its social context. As an intellectual with a doctorate in philosophy, Stein was part of a world that regarded Judaism as pass‚, the religion of history, while Christianity was the religion of humanism and enlightenment, the way of the future.
Why did Judaism come to be so narrowly defined, deemed so irrelevant and anti-humanistic? This question is certainly relevant today. In "Life in a Jewish Family," Stein gives hints of how German Judaism changed over time. Her own family honored all the Jewish holidays, yet the children had little formal Jewish education or Jewish faith. Her great-grandfather was a cantor, yet Jewish spiritual commitment was only a distant memory, through a great-grandmother whose favorite prayer was "Lord, send us only as much as we can bear." Stein declared herself an atheist until, at age 22, she came upon a biography of St. Teresa of Avila and was baptized as a Catholic.
As a woman, the limitations were compounded. Her father died when she was 2 years old, and Stein's mother took over the family lumber business over the strong objections of her relations, and finally made it a success. Stein's autobiography states that there were few options for women other than teaching, and she was resigned to her fate at an early age. As a young woman with an independent spirit, strong spiritual yearnings and the lack of Jewish education, all she knew of Judaism was that rules of modesty and piety left her with few outlets for her ambitions.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Stein's conversion as circumstantial. Yet, I can't help but wonder what Edith Stein might have made of today's lively Jewish world, filled with creative options and spiritual passion. And what might she have done with the education open to today's Jewish women? Certainly she would not have seen the convent as the unique opportunity for religious vocation.
One of Stein's biographers, Professor Rachel Brenner of the University of Wisconsin, says Stein herself would have no interest in sainthood. "She wouldn't want the fame or controversy," she told me. Too late now. But it's not too late to understand Stein's life. Eventually, we will need to place in context the complex pressures on men and women like Stein - thoughtful members of the German intelligent-sia who did not find their place in the Jewish community. We need to know why they left Judaism, and what they were seeking.
When I argued, at the time of her beatification 11 years ago, that Stein had a place in Jewish history, I was accused of bad taste and worse for defending an aberrant. Stein is part of our history? "Ugh," wrote one critic. "So is Jesus Christ." But historians today are resurrecting the Judaism of Jesus, so wait and see. But before we consign Edith Stein to the spheres, let's restore her to her time and ours.
Marlene Adler Marks is senior columnist of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and hosts a live chat room on America OnLine on Thursday evenings at 8 p.m. local time (Keyword: Jewish Chat). Send comments to wmnsvoice@aol.com.
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