Mothers and Children. Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe - Elisheva Baumgarten

of Florence and analyzed the records concerning the employment of wet
nurses, the duration of children’s stays with wet nurses, and the statistics con-
cerning infant death.^14 Others, who objected to Ariès’s suggestion concerning
the emotional attachment between mothers and children, surveyed a wide
range of literary evidence, from belles lettres to canon law, for evidence of the
concern for children’s welfare.^15 These issues and debates have brought to
light many details concerning the care of infants and the nature of the rela-
tionships between parents and children in medieval society.
These questions have received little attention in Jewish studies. Only a
handful of articles have discussed the relationships between parents and chil-
dren, and breast-feeding practices in medieval times have received little no-
tice. A preliminary article was written by Ephraim E. Urbach investigating a
very specific topic—crib death. This topic is one that illuminates nursing
practices, as discussions of cases of infant death often provide details on child
care. In addition, the halakhic sources that discuss crib death convey the rab-
bis’ understandings of motherhood and of mothers’ interactions with their
children. Urbach’s article analyzes numerous halakhic responsa concerning
this topic, but only one of his sources is dated to the medieval period.^16 Other
articles that discuss nursing practices do so only in passing, as their main focus
is on attitudes toward children and childhood.^17 A basic premise of these stud-
ies is that Jewish families, unlike Christian families, did not send their chil-
dren out of their homes to wet nurses’ homes. Consequently, scholars have ar-
gued that Jews were more preoccupied than Christians with their children’s
welfare.
My discussion will posit the existence of childhood and infancy as distinct
stages in medieval society, and will examine the strong emotional ties between
parents, particularly mothers, and their children.^18 I will outline the social and
cultural aspects of breast-feeding practices in the Jewish communities of Ger-
many and northern France. The central part of the chapter will examine the
social practices connected to breast-feeding and wet nursing: How long were
infants nursed? If the mother did not nurse her children, did the wet nurse
come to the house or were Jewish children sent out to live in other homes?
Were wet nurses characteristic of a certain social class and how was their em-
ployment viewed? Was the wet nurse Jewish or Christian, and what were the
concerns when hiring a wet nurse? In light of this discussion, I will examine
the implications of these practices on the medieval Jewish communities and
their relationships with their Christian neighbors.
In contrast to the first parts of the chapter that focus on the household at
large—the Jewish family and its employees—the final part of the chapter will
discuss the social consequences of a topic of major concern in the responsa lit-
erature: women’s commitment to feed their own children. Most of the cases
discussed in the medieval literature concern instances in which the nuclear
family has fallen apart. What was a woman’s commitment to nurse her child

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