{"id":13527,"date":"2025-01-07T21:12:38","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T02:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=13527"},"modified":"2025-01-07T21:12:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T02:12:38","slug":"joyce-avrech-berkman-edith-steins-life-in-a-jewish-family-1891-1916-a-companion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2025\/01\/07\/joyce-avrech-berkman-edith-steins-life-in-a-jewish-family-1891-1916-a-companion","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Avrech Berkman, Edith Stein\u2019s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891\u20131916: A Companion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joyce Avrech Berkman, Edith Stein\u2019s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891\u20131916: A Companion<\/i>, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 170 pages. ISBN 978-1-66691-249-4.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Antonio Calcagno, King\u2019s University College at Western University\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A leading historian of the life and work of Edith Stein, Joyce Avrech Berkman presents readers with an outstanding new volume on Edith Stein\u2019s autobiography, <\/span>Life in a Jewish Family<\/span><\/i>. Philosophers interested in the phenomenological movement, Continental philosophy, as well as medieval philosophy will find this work enlightening as Berkman highlights important facts and observations about Stein\u2019s philosophical and personal trajectory, including her relationships with Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Erich Przywara, among others. Historians and scholars interested in personal narrative and autobiography will also find this volume valuable as the author develops a critical framework for approaching and assessing autobiographical works through her engagement with Stein\u2019s own autobiography. Philosophically speaking, Berkman also presents notable reflections on the role and potential uses of autobiographical thinking for philosophy itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The companion guide opens with an introduction in which the author explains how her text unfolds: the first part focuses on a close reading of Stein\u2019s autobiography, which provides readers a description and assessment of significant aspects of its content, especially in relation to its reception by Stein\u2019s family as it moved through various publication and translation processes after Stein\u2019s death; the second part of the book explores questions, from the methodological perspective of an historian interested in ideas and philosophy, arising from and critical assessments of Stein\u2019s project as well as her autobiography and personal narratives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter one closely examines Stein\u2019s own text, which was written, as Stein notes, to show what Jewish life was like and how it was no different than life in non-Jewish families. <\/span>Stein\u2019s autobiography was written as Jews faced growing hate and violence in Germany under National Socialist rule. Berkman provides useful background information about Stein\u2019s native city of Breslau and the Jewish community living in this vibrant and important commercial city.\u00a0<\/span>Berkman identifies the objective of her reading of <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>: \u201cMy synopses of each of the ten chapters of <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>and of their internal sections aim to bring sharper focus on Stein\u2019s impersonal and personal goals and their overlapping interplay\u201d (19). For example, the first part of the autobiography opens with a reflection on Stein\u2019s parents and grandparents, with special emphasis on her mother. In a deep sense, Berkman rightly reads Stein\u2019s autobiography as a \u201ctribute\u201d (25) to her mother\u2019s strength, resilience, and profound love for her children. Furthermore, Berkman makes sure to provide useful historical information, which serves to better contextualise and grasp Stein\u2019s own life and her writing about it. For example, the historical background provided explains the German school system as well as academic and professional opportunities open to women at the time (1907\u20131910). One sees here Stein\u2019s own determination to not settle for what was available to women in her own day; rather, we see how Stein envisions what could be possible for her, which includes, as we see later, a deep commitment to social reform, especially on women\u2019s right to vote and to hold academic positions at German universities. Phenomenologists interested in the relationship, both personal and philosophical, will find Berkman\u2019s discussion of Stein\u2019s university days at G\u00f6ttingen very useful. For example, Berkman nicely chronicles how Stein\u2019s focus on empathy, which was developed in her doctoral dissertation, consolidated both Husserl\u2019s and Stein\u2019s own views on the topic (55).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter two, \u201cGrasping the Meaning of <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>,\u201d achieves two important tasks. First, it sets the autobiography \u201cwithin the history and theory of the genre of self-narrative\u201d (74). Scholars interested in narrative theory and autobiography will find Berkman\u2019s ample engagement with key\u00a0<\/span>scholars in the field enlightening, especially as the author navigates between modern and postmodern forms of narrative and their interpretation. Second, Berkman unpacks for readers the significance of important moments in the autobiography: \u201cThe second section\u2019s discussion of <\/span>Life\u2019s <\/span><\/i>themes, perspectives, and judgments, reveal much about Stein\u2019s life outlook, her moral, social, political, and aesthetic assumptions and values, as well as her psychological dynamics (her needs, wishes, and desires). They also unveil her values\u2019 historic and cultural influences and wherein she resisted dominant mores and presented alternative values. This chapter further explores <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>in relation to Stein\u2019s other autobiographical and biographical writings, and to aspects of her scholarly philosophical writing, highlighting pertinent points of correspondence and deviation\u201d (74\u201375). I find this section of Berkman\u2019s book most gripping, for it presents us with another Stein: we understand and come to learn about why perhaps Stein may have written what she did, what lies behind Stein\u2019s own words, for example, what may have lay behind Stein\u2019s own suicidal urges (85). Moreover, the use of Stein\u2019s self-narrative outside of <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>helps readers supplement what was started but remained unfinished in it. For those familiar with Berkman\u2019s scholarship on Stein, readers will immediately recognise how Berkman\u2019s analyses help us delve more deeply into the complexity and life of Stein. Berkman succeeds in helping us amplify our understanding of Stein and her rich existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book concludes with chapter three, \u201cThe Afterlife of <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>.\u201d Though Stein\u2019s work has been studied in both philosophy and theology, and though <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>has been an important source of spiritual and religious testimonials of Stein\u2019s heroism in the face of murderous Nazi oppression, it should also be remembered the autobiography has been taken up and explored by playwrights, artists, filmmakers, sculptors, and glass window designers. (131). For example, Berkman discusses the playwright Arthur Giron\u2019s play, <\/span>Edith Stein <\/span><\/i>(145). Fascinating and revealing here, <\/span>too, is the reception of and reaction to <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>by Stein\u2019s own family. Berkman writes: \u201cIlse Gordon, whom Stein cared for during her roughly eight months\u2019 stay with her sister Else and her family in Hamburg\u2026offered a mixed reaction. She deemed <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>as mostly \u201cin agreement with what I myself experienced and found out during my vacations spent in my grandmother\u2019s. But the book contains a few errors.\u201d Gordon cites Stein\u2019s mistaken dates and attacks Stein\u2019s views of her religious attitudes as \u201ctoo curt and judgmental\u201d (133). Berkman writes about Susanne Batzdorff\u2019s, Stein\u2019s niece, father\u2019s reaction to <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>: \u201cMost upset with <\/span>Life\u2019s <\/span><\/i>depiction of family members was Susanne Batzdorff\u2019s father, Hans Biberstein, who decried Stein\u2019s highly unsympathetic portrayal of his mother and self-serving white-wash of Stein\u2019s mother as \u201cgross misrepresentations\u201d (133). Finally, Berkman views Susanne Batzdorff\u2019s position as a middle ground view of <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>: \u201cAlthough Susanne Batzdorff denounced Stein\u2019s critique Susanne\u2019s father and [paternal] grandmother as ranging from \u201cridicule to sharp censure,\u201d Batzdorff trod a tactful middle course. Allowing for natural biases in both Edith Stein and family members as well as for the fallibility of memory, she concludes: \u201cwhile I do not want to accuse Edith of deliberate distortion of facts, I do detect in her story a one-sided point of view in which she somewhat uncritically takes the side of her mother\u2026.but, in all, we are glad to have the authentic document from the hand of an aunt we all loved and revered\u201d (133). By chronicling how some of Stein\u2019s family received <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>, we not only learn more about Stein\u2019s rich and personal family life, but we also see Stein herself from a different perspective, which creates an important critical distance, especially when we begin to investigate and assess Stein\u2019s works, including <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Berkman\u2019s book is deeply informative and insightful. She unpacks for us the rich layers of Stein\u2019s person and life as they appear in the autobiography and in other writings. From a philosophical perspective, this companion guide allows one to understand the motivations and\u00a0<\/span>contexts that help give birth to Stein\u2019s own philosophical corpus, both the early phenomenological works and the philosopher\u2019s later engagements with Scholastic philosophy. Berkman has written an invaluable book that will help Stein scholars and those interested in her life grasp the depth and breadth, to use a Steinian turn of phrase describing the human soul, of her person and its living legacy.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joyce Avrech Berkman, Edith Stein\u2019s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891\u20131916: A Companion, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 170 pages. ISBN 978-1-66691-249-4.\u00a0 Reviewed by Antonio Calcagno, King\u2019s University College at Western University\u00a0 A leading historian of the life and work of Edith Stein, Joyce Avrech Berkman presents readers with an outstanding new volume on Edith […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119,317,38],"class_list":["post-13527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-edith-stein","tag-jewish-philosophy","tag-phenomenology","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 12:15:16","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13528,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13527\/revisions\/13528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}