Edith Stein (German Jewish philosopher) Add a review

Edith Stein (in religion Teresa Benedicta of the Cross; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at Birkenau on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.

Stein was born into an observant Jewish family, but had become an agnostic by her teenage years. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915, she took lessons to become a nursing assistant and worked in an infectious diseases hospital. After completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1916, she obtained an assistantship there to Edmund Husserl.

From reading the life of the reformer of the Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila, Stein was drawn to the Christian faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church. At that point, she wanted to become a Discalced Carmelite nun but was dissuaded by her spiritual mentor, the archabbot of Beuron, Raphael Walzer OSB. She then taught at a Jewish school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position. Edith Stein was admitted as a student to the study of religion to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 25 November, on the first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresia in remembrance of Teresa of Ávila, Benedicta in honour of Benedict of Nursia). She made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.

The same year, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce and her biological sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern (tertiary of the order, who would handle the community's needs outside the monastery), were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. In response to the pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops on 26 July 1942, in which they made the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis a central theme, all baptized Catholics of Jewish origin (according to police reports, 244 people) were arrested by the Gestapo on the following Sunday, 2 August 1942. They were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and were murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers on 9 August 1942.