Frederick Neumann papers

Frederick (Friedrich) Neumann was born in Vienna, January 10, 1899. He studied philosophy at the universities of Vienna and Freiburg/Breisgau. His teachers included Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Gomperz, with whom he corresponded extensively. Neumann wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hermann Lotze.

Neumann's family background was Jewish, but he became a Christian as an adult, deeply influenced by Søren Kierkegaard's work. Upon his conversion, Neumann gave up an academic career for Christian service. In 1927 he married Edith (Editha) Spitzer, also an adult convert to Christianity, whom he met two years earlier at a meeting of the Swedish Society for the Conversion of Jews to Christianity. After a brief missionary stint in Yugoslavia, they returned to Vienna where he worked for the British Society for Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews.

Fearing his arrest after the German occupation of Austria in 1938, the Neumanns fled Vienna via the Danube, travelling through Zagreb, northern Italy, and Paris, arriving in London, where he was ordained a Congregational minister. From 1939 to 1947 they lived in Haifa, Palestine, where he served as a missionary.

In 1948, the couple went to the United States, where he became associate director of the Newcomers Christian Fellowship, a service organization for refugees in New York. Frederick Neumann later became minister of the Bushwick Avenue Congregational Church in Brooklyn and visiting professor at the Hartford Seminary, his only academic position. He died May 13, 1967.

Edith Spitzer Neumann was born in Vienna in 1902, youngest child of lawyer and art collector Alfred Spitzer. She studied chemistry and physics at the University of Vienna, receiving a doctorate in chemistry in 1927. She worked as a bacteriologist at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, then as microbiologist at Maimonides Hospital for 20 years. After her husband’s death, she moved to Manhattan and became medical director of the Jetti Katz Clinical Laboratory, retiring in 1982 at age 80.

Upon retirement, she oversaw the publication and translation into German of her husband’s sermons and in 1983 established the Frederick Neumann Memorial Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary. In honor of her work and philanthropy, she received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art First Class in 1998. She died in New York June 29, 2002, at the age of 100.

Leo Baeck Institute Archives