Selma Stern (1890–1981)

Selma Stern was born in Kippenheim, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, to a bourgeois Jewish family. Her parents were Dr. Julius and Emilie (Durlacher) Stern. In 1901, the family moved to the popular spa town of Baden-Baden for her father's medical practice. In 1904, she became the first girl to be accepted to the Baden-Baden humanities gymnasium, from which she graduated in 1908 with honors. That same year, despite the death of her father, she began her studies in history at the University of Heidelberg. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, she graduated and moved to Frankfurt-am-Main to live with her mother and younger sister. She would ultimately shift the focus of her studies from German history to German-Jewish history. In 1919, she accepted an invitation to become a research fellow at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies) in Berlin. There she met its director, Eugen Taeubler, whom she married in 1927. Stern-Taeubler began to write the first two volumes of her magnum opus Der preussische Staat und die Juden [The Prussian State and the Jews], a study of Jews in 18th-century Prussia, in the late 1920s. By the time she began work on the third volume, her world had changed radically. In 1938, the Nazis banned her from working in the libraries and archives in Berlin. Leo Baeck and other friends assisted her by copying documents that were inaccessible to her, as well as helping to save her manuscripts from destruction. In 1941, she fled with her husband to the USA on the last ship to leave Germany before the start of World War II. She became first archivist of the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1946, she wrote The Spirit Returneth, a novel set during the Black Death, and in a later book she discussed the parallels between the accusations against Jews in that period of the Middle Ages and the Holocaust. In 1955, she retired and was involved in founding the Leo Baeck Institute, an international research organization.