Edith Stein, judia, filosofa y carmelita

A biography of Edith Stein, attempting to analyze her complex personality. Born in a religious but tolerant Jewish family in Breslau in 1891, she practiced Jewish rites and traditions until she discovered the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, whose assistant she became. Barred from the academic world as a woman in 1919, she was a schoolteacher and a philosopher when she converted to Catholicism in 1922. In a growing antisemitic climate of hostile propaganda and violence, Stein entered a Carmelite monastery. After the "Kristallnacht" pogrom she moved to the Dutch monastery of Echt, where she was discovered and registered as a Jew by the Gestapo in 1940. In 1942 she was deported to Westerbork and Auschwitz. She was beatified by the Vatican in 1987. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)