Edith Stein, a soulful modern thinker, was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. Born to a Jewish family in 1891, she was baptized into the Catholic faith on New Year’s Day 1922. In October 1933, she began the process of becoming a Carmelite nun, in which capacity she would take the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross on May 1, 1987 and eleven years later, on October 11, 1998, he canonized her. One year later he declared Saint Teresa Benedicta a patron saint of the European Union. Despite her conversion, or perhaps she would have said by way of her conversion, Stein continued to see herself as a Jew. On Easter in 1933, with a deep foreboding of the tragedies to come, Stein, as she described it, “spoke with the Savior to tell him that I realized it was his Cross that was now being laid upon the Jewish people, that the few who understood this had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all, and that I myself was willing to do this, if he would only show me how. I left the service with the inner conviction that I had been heard, but uncertain as ever as to what ‘carrying the Cross’ would mean for me.” In his homily on the occasion of her canonization, John Paul II described Stein and her beatification as opening “a new encounter with her God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He further prayed that “her witness [would] constantly strengthen the bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians.” In the thirty-five years since he uttered these words, John Paul’s vision has not come to pass. After the Nazi genocide, in the wake of catastrophic Jewish suffering, the Church’s canonization of an apostate Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz felt to many Jews as if the Church was pouring salt onto the wounds of historical Jewish persecution. This was made all the worse when, in 1984, Carmelite nuns, with the support of the Vatican, established a convent at Auschwitz in Stein’s honor. The Polish Church described the convent as “the sacred sign of love, peace, and reconciliation which will testify to the victorious power of Jesus.” International outrage ensued, and a ferocious controversy, with the Vatican agreeing five years later to move the convent, though the re-location did not happen until 1993, after further protests. For many Catholics, Stein remains not just an exemplar of Christian life and death, but also a symbol of the hybridity of human identity. When declaring Stein a patron saint of the European Union, John Paul II expanded his earlier characterization of her as a “bridge between her Jewish roots and her commitment to Christ” to “a banner of respect, tolerance and acceptance which invites all men and women to understand and appreciate each other, transcending their ethnic, cultural and religious differences in order to form a truly fraternal society,” which was symbolized by the European Union. In more academic contexts, Stein is often depicted as epitomizing the fluidity of identity as well as the human capacity for self-creation. In both religious and scholarly circles, many have pointed to Stein’s philosophical work on the problem of empathy, completed under the tutelage of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, as an example of life imitating art. Stein’s ostensible hybridity is taken as evidence of her arguments about empathy, and vice versa. But the thought, the life, and the afterlife of this extraordinary woman are more complex than these triumphalist stories might suggest. She was without question a decent, honorable, brilliant, and intellectually honest person who, by all accounts, exemplified kindness and care for others. Stein was indeed ready and willing to be sacrificed along with her people. But precisely in the context of anticipating their annihilation, Stein also criticized Jews for over-valuing life in general, and their own lives in particular. She saw herself as a prophet, writing in 1930 of “the urgency of my own Holocaustum,” and she believed that the fate of the Jewish people in the hands of the Nazis was, as she put it, “atonement for their disbelief.” Stein exhibited a fascinating combination of supreme confidence, some might say arrogance, and humility. In a meditation that she wrote in the last year of her life, she cast herself as a new Queen Esther, who had returned to history to save her people for a second time. But as opposed to the Esther of the Bible, who saved Jewish lives, Stein returned to the world to usher Jews to “the final battle” that would at last bring them to Christ and thereby bring Christ’s return. The new Esther and the old Esther had different notions of Jewish salvation. So too, ironically, if not tragically, the divergent Catholic and Jewish interpretations of Stein’s life and death point not to an empathetic loosening of rigid identities, but to a failure of empathy on all sides, and perhaps even to the reality of persistently fixed identities. Far from bridging Jewish and Christian identities in the service of Jewish-Christian dialogue, Edith Stein’s real contribution to Jewish-Christian dialogue is the challenge for each side to recognize the deep, perhaps insurmountable, chasm that lies between Judaism and Christianity, a chasm of which Stein seemed at times unaware while at other times all too aware. These larger questions of the nature of personal identity and the specificity of religious identity make thinking about Stein’s life and philosophy more urgent in our time. It is simply not possible to rest with a singular judgment of Stein. She reminds us that moral exemplarity does not exist without its own ambiguities, and that one can only claim otherwise by discounting the fragility of being human. 
It is important to begin by acknowledging Stein’s courageous solidarity with the plight of Jews in the darkest hour of their suffering. This is especially true when recalling others of
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