The Problem with Sainthood

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?

The Polish-born John Paul II, who has visited synagogues, recognized Israel and is otherwise sensitive to Jewish needs for healing in regard to the Holocaust, sees Stein as a bridge; he said Stein’s feast day may be used to commemorate the Holocaust each year. 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.

Why 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 Dutch convent in 1942, in reprisal for the protest of Catholic bishops who objected to the transport of Jews to concentration camps. Stein was killed in 1942.

But the story of our lives is never simple. I spoke this week with one of Stein’s biographers, Professor Rachel Brenner of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Brenner, a Polish-born Israeli whose parents are Holocaust survivors, is author of the recent “Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum” (Pennsylvania State University Press). “Today we place all the Eastern European Jews into one category of ‘victim,'” Brenner told me. “But there were many individual approaches.”

Stein was born in 1891, the youngest of seven children in Upper Silesia, near the Polish border. Her family was so pro-German that it left the town of Lublinitz when a plebiscite returned it to Poland. One of her uncles distributed food to German war troops, and Stein herself volunteered to be a nurse in World War I. She was educated in German schools, but celebrated Jewish holidays.

How did a nun emerge from such a family?

“We can’t look at the pre-Holocaust world anachronistically,” Brenner said. “We cannot judge them through our own eyes.”

Stein was more than a convert, more than a victim. In 1938, she wrote to Pope Pius XI, 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.

As an intellectual with a doctorate in philosophy, Stein was part of a world that regarded Judaism as passé, the religion of history, while Christianity was the religion of humanism and enlightenment, the way of the future. How Judaism came to be so narrowly defined is relevant today.

First, there was a spiritual crisis, as described by Stein in “Life in a Jewish Family.” Her great-grandfather was a cantor, and her pious great-grandmother’s favorite prayer was “Lord, send us only as much as we can bear.” Though her own family honored all the Jewish holidays, she had little formal Jewish education and hungered for spirituality. 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. She became Teresa Benedicta a Cruce of the Carmelite order.

Second, there were the limits she faced as a woman. Her father died when she was 2, and her mother took over the family lumber business over the strong objections of relatives, and made it work. Stein was irked that within the Jewish religious community, there were no similar role models of strength. It’s no wonder that she was drawn to Catholicism, with its long tradition of religious vocation for women.

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 outlet for a religious life.

Brenner said that 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 need to place in context the complex pressures on Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe. We need to know why some of them 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.

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. Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com