Edith Stein (October 12, 1891 - August 9, 1942) was a philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr and Saint of the Roman Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. She was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia (then in Germany), into an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1922, she converted to Christianity. In 1934 she was received into the Carmelite Order. In 1998 she was canonized as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite name) by Pope John Paul II. Her feast day is August 9.

In 1904 she renounced her Judaic faith and became an atheist. At the University of Göttingen, she became a student of Edmund Husserl, whom she followed to the University of Freiburg as his assistant. In 1916, she received her doctorate of philosophy there with a dissertation under Husserl, "On The Problem of Empathy". She then became a member of the faculty in Freiburg.

While she had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Theresa of Avila on a holiday in 1921 that caused her conversion. Baptized on January 1, 1922, she gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer (1922-1932). While there she translated into German Thomas Aquinas' De veritate (On Truth) and familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933.

She entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne in 1934 and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she wrote her metaphysical book Endliches und ewiges Sein which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.

To avoid the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred her to the Carmelite convent at Echt in the Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft ("The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross").

However, she was not safe in the Netherlands—the Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism. In response, on July 26, 1942 Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish converts (who had previously been spared) there. Edith and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942.

Today, there is a school named in tribute to Edith Stein in Darmstadt, Germany as well as one in Hengelo, the Netherlands University of Tübingen has a women's dormitory named for her as well [http://www.edith-stein-heim.de/" target="_blank" >^*.

Some Jewish groups have challenged the beatification of Edith Stein. They point out that a martyr is, according to Catholic doctrine, someone who died for his or her religion; whether Stein was killed for her Jewish ethnicity, her faith or both is, for them, open to debate. The position of the Catholic Church in this matter is that Edith Stein also died because of the Dutch hierarchy's public condemnation of Nazi racism in 1942 — in other words, that she died to uphold the moral position of the Church, and is thus a martyr.

The Writings of Edith Stein

• Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1986
• On the Problem of Empathy, Translated by Waltraut Stein 1989
• Essays on Woman, translated by Freda Mary Oben, 1996
• The Hidden Life, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1993
• The Science of the Cross, Translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1998

• Knowledge and Faith
• Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to an Ascent to the Meaning of Being
• Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities
• Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942

See also

• Personalism

Carmelite nuns | Catholic martyrs | German nuns | German philosophers | German saints | German theologians | Natives of Silesia | Nazi concentration camp victims | Roman Catholic converts | Roman Catholic philosophers | Phenomenology | 1891 births | 1942 deaths

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