Edith Stein

Edith Stein (b. 11 October 1891–d. 9 August 1942; religious name St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) was born into an observant Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). Renouncing religion as a teenager, Stein enrolled at the University of Breslau to study psychology, where she first encountered phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s writing and thought. Stein subsequently transferred to the University of Göttingen to study under his supervision and became a central member of the intimate Göttingen Circle. Stein’s studies were interrupted with the outbreak of World War I in 1918, when she volunteered as a nurse with the Red Cross and served for two years in a military hospital in the modern-day Czech Republic. Moving to Freiburg after her service, Stein worked as Husserl’s assistant until the end of the war, when she participated in the establishment of the new German state by advocating for women’s suffrage in Breslau. Unable to earn a faculty position in philosophy as a woman, Stein wrote and taught in her family home. In 1921, Stein had a conversion experience when reading Teresa of Avila’s autobiography and was baptized on 1 January 1922. Stein’s initial application for admission to monastic life was denied and she was encouraged to pursue a vocation of teaching instead. Stein taught at a teachers’ college in Speyer before moving to a position at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster. In 1933, Stein was removed from her faculty position because of her identity as a Jewish woman and was granted entrance into the Carmelite monastery in Cologne, Germany. Stein took monastic vows and lived there until moving to a sister monastery in Echt, the Netherlands, to evade Nazi persecution. Stein was arrested on 7 August 1942, deported, and killed at Auschwitz two days later. Following her death, Stein was beatified as a martyr and canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Known as the “Holocaust martyr,” Stein is a controversial figure in Jewish and Christian discourse because of her status as a canonized Jewish convert and Holocaust victim. Beyond this contentious legacy, Stein is survived by twenty-eight volumes of philosophy, scholarship, theology, mystical texts, and correspondence—texts that have inspired nearly eighty years of scholarship. Recent scholarship is particularly interested in Stein’s syncretism of Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysics and phenomenology, writings on women and the state, and religious and mystical texts.