h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This lady has a rather tenuous connection to the Palatinate, but is considered "one of our own" by the citizens of Speyer.

Edith Stein was a Polish Jew, born in Breslau in 1891 to well-to-do parents. She was a pretty girl, who did really well at school and went on to study philosophy, psychology, history and German at various German universities. She lost her faith at the age of 15 and became an atheist. Her Road to Damascus moment was when she read the biography of St Theresia of Avila. She converted to Catholicism and taught for a while from 1923 in Speyer at the girls' school run by the Dominican nuns.

There the Pfälzer connection ends, but the significance of her life in those times is enough to make anyone want to claim her for themselves. She became a Carmelite nun in 1933, taking on the name of Theresia. During the 1930s, she wrote several letters to the Pope (Pius XI) asking him to take a stand on the persecution of Jews.

Under the pressure of the laws of the time, her Abbess betrayed her to the Nazis as being of Jewish stock, and she was killed at Ausschwitz in 1942.

She was canonised in 1987, in the effort of the Catholic Church to atone with the Jewish authorities.

She is remembered mainly for her writings, and many schools are named after her.

Deb

[Amy P]

Jews have had a long history of not being allowed to convert and be assimilated. The Spanish Inquisition was largely occupied with checking how well ex-Jews were behaving; if they were found to have kept their Christianity up flawlessly they were permitted to live, otherwise not. Those found innocent had their goods confiscated, all the same.

Leopold Bloom stands for the Irish Jewish community, despite having been brought up a Protestant and later converting to Catholicism. His father was Jewish before he had converted, but his mother was a Catholic.

Perhaps most weird of all is the case of Wittgenstein. In order that his sisters might be permitted to remain in Vienna in the 1930s, the family persuaded the Nazis that their grandfather was the illegitimate son of an employer, not the son of their great-grandfather. This was relevant to the Reich's laws, but irrelevant in Jewish genealogy: Jewishness is conferred by the mother.

It took the addition of a gift of quite a lot of gold to persuade the authorities, but they were permitted to stay.