Schiltigheim and the Alsatian Inheritance

Élisabeth Charlotte Sigel was born on 21 July 1907 at Schiltigheim, a working town on the northern edge of Strasbourg, in an Alsace that had belonged to the German Empire since 1871 and would return to France in 1918. Her father was Lutheran, of the local bourgeoisie; her mother was Jewish, from Bohemia. Out of that doubly marginal inheritance — French and German, Christian and Jewish, and neither household devout — came a woman for whom no single tradition was simply given, and who spent seventy years thinking about how traditions belong to persons.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); this file covers her pre-Orthodox formation

The Border Country

Schiltigheim in 1907 was a brewing and industrial suburb of Strasbourg, in the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen annexed by Germany after 1871. Élisabeth’s first schooling was therefore in German; she entered a French lycée only in 1919, at twelve, after the Armistice returned Alsace to France (Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Paris: Cerf, 2007; summarized in the French biographical record at fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel”).

The consequence was permanent bilingualism and something more than bilingualism. Alsatians of her generation grew up with the knowledge that the frame of their lives — language of instruction, nationality, the very name of the country — was contingent, decided elsewhere, and reversible. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, her principal English-language interpreter, makes this the organizing image of her life: Behr-Sigel is a study in hybridity, “culturally both French and German,” with a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, baptized Lutheran, formed by Reformed leaders, and received into the Orthodox Church (Hinlicky Wilson, interview at Eastern Christian Books, November 2013; Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, London: T&T Clark, 2013).

It is worth resisting the sentimental reading of this. Hybridity of that kind is not, in the first instance, a richness; it is an exposure. In 1940 it would nearly cost her family everything (see Nancy, the War, and the Family). What it did give her, early, was an immunity to the assumption that one’s inherited religious world is simply the world.

The Household

Her father, of the Alsatian Lutheran bourgeoisie, and her mother, a Jewish woman from Bohemia, were both, in the biographers’ description, distant from religious practice (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Lossky). This matters for the shape of what followed. Élisabeth’s religion was not absorbed at home and then examined later; it was sought, from adolescence, in a household that neither imposed nor forbade.

[Disputed: the precise religious composition and observance of the family. The consistent report is a Lutheran (Alsatian Protestant) father and a Jewish mother from Bohemia, both non-practicing; Élisabeth was baptized in the Lutheran church. Whether her mother had any formal Christian affiliation, and whether Élisabeth's Jewish descent was through her mother alone, is stated in the sources consulted only in the general terms given here. Under the racial laws applied in France after 1940 her maternal descent made her and her children legally exposed regardless of baptism, and this is how the biography treats it.]

The Confirmation of 1921

At fourteen, in 1921, and on her own initiative — the biography attributes the impulse to the influence of school friends — she was confirmed in the Lutheran Church of Alsace-Lorraine, in which she had been baptized (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin). This is the first of the deliberate religious acts that punctuate her life, and it sets the pattern: a decision taken young, taken for herself, and taken toward more rather than less.

Around sixteen she joined the FUACE (Fédération universelle des associations chrétiennes d’étudiants — the French branch of the World Student Christian Federation), the movement that was then the seedbed of twentieth-century ecumenism. There she came under the influence of two figures of the first rank in French Protestantism: Suzanne de Dietrich, the Alsatian biblical teacher and one of the great lay theologians of the century, and Marc Boegner, later president of the Protestant Federation of France and a president of the World Council of Churches (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).

The importance of the student movement to her formation is hard to overstate and easy to overlook. It taught her three things she never gave up: that the Bible is to be studied and not merely quoted; that Christians of divided confessions can and must meet; and that a woman may be a theological teacher of men. She would carry all three into a Church that received the first two readily and the third with difficulty.

Philosophy at Strasbourg, and Levinas

After the baccalauréat she read philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Among her fellow students was Emmanuel Levinas, then a young Lithuanian Jew newly arrived in France and not yet the philosopher of the face and the other (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). The coincidence is worth noting without being made into an influence: no claim is made here that Levinas shaped her thought, and the sources consulted report the fact of the shared classroom rather than a documented intellectual relation. What the philosophical training did give her was a vocabulary of person and other that she would later find waiting for her in Vladimir Lossky’s Orthodox theology, and that became the hinge of her mature argument (see Person and Nature after Lossky).

The Russians

The decisive encounter of her student years was not with a book but with a people. When the Protestant theology faculty at Strasbourg admitted women in 1927 she enrolled, and there she met Russian students of the emigration — above all Paul Fidler, who put into her hands the nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophers and, in particular, Alexei Khomiakov and his idea of sobornost: the Church’s unity as a free accord in faith and love, neither the juridical unity of Rome nor the individualism the Slavophiles ascribed to the Reformation (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin).

Khomiakov’s sobornost was, for a young woman formed in the student Christian movement, an almost irresistible category: it named exactly the thing the ecumenical movement was reaching for and could not describe. It is the first Orthodox idea she took up, and traces of it are still in her ecclesiology sixty years later, in her insistence that the Church’s decisions on contested questions must be reached conciliarly and freely rather than by administrative closure (see The Question She Raised).

In the spring of 1928 these Russian friends invited her to Paris for Pascha at the church of Saint-Serge, celebrated by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov. The Paschal matins made an impression she never described as anything less than decisive (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky; on Bulgakov, see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy). She was twenty. Within eighteen months she would be Orthodox.

What the Alsatian Inheritance Gave Her

Three things, which recur throughout this collection.

A refusal of the merely given. She had inherited a nationality that changed, a language that changed, and a religious household that transmitted nothing by default. Everything she held, she had gone and got. This is the temperament of a certain kind of convert, and it explains both her lifelong fidelity to the Orthodox Church and her incapacity to accept “we have always done it this way” as a theological argument — a trait her admirers call intellectual honesty and her critics call the Protestant residue (see The Orthodox Criticism).

An ecumenism learned before it was a policy. The FUACE of the 1920s was ecumenical as a matter of shared prayer and shared study among students, before institutions existed to regulate it. Her later work with the World Council of Churches, the Institut supérieur d’études œcuméniques, and the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius is continuous with this, and so is her instinct that the Orthodox contribution to such meetings is to be Orthodox in them rather than to bargain (cf. The Ecumenism Debate).

A Jewish descent she did not disown. She was a Christian by conviction from adolescence, and there is no evidence of any Jewish religious practice in her life. But her mother’s people were her people, and when the persecution came she acted accordingly, at risk (see Nancy, the War, and the Family). Among the many links between her and St. Maria of Paris — the same city, the same milieu, the same spiritual father — this is one of the least remarked and not the least real.

References

Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. (The authorized biography; the source, directly or at one remove, of nearly all the biographical detail in this file.)
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), accessed 2026, following Lossky. (Birth at Schiltigheim 21 July 1907; Lutheran father, Jewish mother from Bohemia, both non-practicing; German primary schooling and French lycée from 1919; confirmation 1921; FUACE, Suzanne de Dietrich and Marc Boegner; philosophy at Strasbourg with Levinas; Paul Fidler and Khomiakov; Pascha at Saint-Serge, spring 1928.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013; and interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (The reading of her life as “hybridity in Christian faith.”)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigel.” oca.org, December 2005. (Protestant family; one of the first French women to study theology.)