Selma Stern-Täubler (born 24 July 1890, Kippenheim, Germany – died 17 August 1981, Basel) was one of the first women to become a professional historian in Germany, and the author of a seven-volume work (3,740 pages) The Prussian State and the Jews, her opus magnum. Life Selma Stern grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family; her father was a physician. In 1901 the family moved to Baden-Baden. In 1904 she was the first girl to attend the Großherzogliches Badisches Gymnasium, a boys highschool, from which she graduated in 1908. She studied history, philosophy and philology at the University of Heidelberg, but left after three semesters and graduated at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1913 on Anacharsis Cloots. In 1914 she moved to Frankfurt to live with her mother and sister and started a career in German-Jewish history on a freelance basis. 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 research fellows in 1920. There, she began work on the first two volumes of Der preussische Staat und die Juden, a study of Jewry under Frederick William I of Prussia, published in 1925. In 1927, Stern received her doctorate and married the director and founder of the academy, the historian Eugen Täubler. In 1936 the Täublers moved to England in an attempt to move the academy, but returned to Germany a year later. In 1938 one of the volumes was ready to be published by the Schocken Verlag, but due to Nazi policy all the stock, including her manuscript and many documents were burned during Kristallnacht. Stern was not allowed to visit any public libraries or archives, but got help from several scholars to finish her work. In the introduction of Der preussische Staat und die Juden Stern mentions that one copy, dealing with the Jews under Frederick the Great, was saved by an anonymous female employee of Schocken publishing company, who came to their apartment in Charlottenburg at the end of November, 1938. In 1941, Stern and Täubler fled to the United States, crossing the Atlantic on the last boat before the USA entered the Second World War. (She was allowed by the Nazis to take the only surviving copy with her.) First they lived in New York; from 1947-1955, she was in charge of Jewish-American Archives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish