Edith Stein and Regina Jonas by Emily Leah Silverman (review)

Edith Stein and Regina Jonas, two Jewish women born in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, lived unique religious lives and suffered the same fate: death at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. Emily Leah Silverman presents a comparison of these two very different women from the perspective of queer theory. Edith Stein became a nun, Regina Jonas a Rabbi.

“Queer theory gives us a language and a way of talking about a Jewish nun’s and a woman Rabbi’s out-of-placed-ness,” Silverman writes. “It argues for the infinitely possible ways of acting and being in the world through performance. How they perform, dress, speak and desire reveals who they are and not what they are. Queer theory shows us how uniqueness is possible by arguing for the social construction of fluid identities.”

Stein, as a Jewish nun, and Jonas, as a female rabbi, fit this definition, and the comparison is an inspired one. Both women were deeply spiritual and confident in their respective callings, and both wrote openly about their beliefs. They came into their identities at a critical time in European history, during the Nazi takeover of Germany, and despite their “difference,” they died like so many other Jews in that time—in the gas chambers. Yet in their deaths, Silverman finds something else unique: a resistance to the Nazi aim and ideology. At the end of the book, Silverman defines that resistance as a theology of liberation. For Stein, liberation came through her belief that her death would be a sacrifice—a holocaust—and, like the crucifixion, an atonement for the sins of her fellow Jews. For Jonas, it came through being with her people, giving succor and encouragement and keeping them from despair.

Cleverly referring to the linguistic root of the term Ivri—Hebrew—Silverman invokes “crossing over” as defining the essence of who these two women were. They both crossed a line: the taboo faith, the gender role. But I am not sure Silverman has a complete understanding of the Jewish and Christian theology that underpinned the faith of believers in that period. Her definitions of Judaism are basic, and she does not seem to understand the differences between European and American Reform Judaism. Her descriptions of Christianity appear one-dimensional, while her assumption that Nazi officers in the camps would have done a double take at seeing a nun in full habit with a yellow star sewn to the cloth is unlikely. Nazism saw Judaism in racial, not religious terms, and Stein would by no means have been the only nun sent to the gas chambers.

A number of assumptions are made in the book, which may be inevitable in the case of Regina Jonas, about whom so little is known. However, some of them can easily be challenged, and some are contradicted within the book itself. I was surprised, too, that more was not made of Regina Jonas’s class origins, or of her religious Orthodoxy in the world of Reform Judaism. That surely would add to her “queerness.” Nor does Silverman make anything of the fact that the Jews objected to Edith Stein not just out of a general fear of Christianity, after centuries of persecution, but also because the Carmelite order she joined was dedicated specifically to the conversion of Jews. She maintained her identity as a Jew, perhaps, not as an act of resistance, but because it was key to her mission.

Silverman seems to have been rather let down by her editor, who did not pick up on the great number of repetitions in phraseology, definitions and ideas. It is as if each chapter were an individual, stand-alone essay, without reference to what has gone before. I would have preferred less emphasis on Regina Jonas being addressed as Rab-binerin or on Edith Stein’s nun’s habit. These points, made once, were interesting, but after being made repeatedly, they weakened the ending, where Silverman returns to her initial image of...