Selma Stern

Selma Stern (born July 24, 1890 in Kippenheim, Germany, d. August 17, 1981 in Basel) was a German historian.

Life

Selma Stern grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Baden. She was the first girl to attend the Großherzogliches Badisches Gymnasium in Baden-Baden, from which she graduated in 1909. Stern studied history at the University of Heidelberg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and she earned her doctorate from the latter in 1913. She was one of the first women to become a professional historian in Germany.

Shortly after the founding of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin in 1919, Stern accepted an invitation to become one of its first research fellows. There, she began work on the first two volumes of her magnum opus Der preussische Staat und die Juden (The Prussian state and the Jews), a study of Jewry in eighteenth-century Prussia.

In 1927, Stern married the director of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, historian Eugen Täubler.

In 1941, Stern and her husband fled to the United States, first to New York, and later to Cincinnati. From 1947 to 1956, she was in charge of Jewish-American Archives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. In 1960, she moved to Switzerland, where she lived until her death in Basel in 1981.

Works (selected)

• The Court Jew; a contribution to the history of the period of absolutism in Central Europe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950. Full text online at archive.org
• Der preußische Staat und die Juden. Mohr, Tübingen 1962 (7 vols.)
• Josel of Rosheim, commander of Jewry in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1965. Translated by Gertrude Hirschler. 1965.
• Anacharsis Cloots, der Redner des Menschengeschlechts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Deutschen in der Französischen Revolution. Kraus Reprint, Vadut 1965 (EA Berlin 1914, zugl. Dissertation Universität München 1914).
• Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. Herzog zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg. Lax, Hildesheim 1921.
• Jud Süß. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte. Müller Verlag, München 1973 (unaltered new ed., Berlin 1929).
• Ihr seid meine Zeugen. Ein Novellenkranz aus der Zeit des Schwarzen Todes 1348/19. Müller Verlag, München 1972.
• with Ludwig Lewisohn (trans.). The Spirit Returneth: a novel. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946.