ish woman should not, according to this understanding, aid in providing sus-
tenance for a non-Jewish child.
Jews, Christians, and MuslimsThe Jewish approaches to breast-feeding were based on Greek medicine and
on foundations the Jews shared with their neighbors, Christian and Muslim.
From a medical perspective, breast milk was seen as part of the blood system.^35
When women nursed, they often did not menstruate. Therefore, according to
ancient medicine, breast milk was menstrual blood that turned into milk, and
when a woman became pregnant again, the milk turned back into blood.^36
This idea, as well as the belief that pregnant women could not nurse, were at
the foundation of the legal principles concerning breast-feeding.
On the whole, the baby’s father and his power are at the center of these dis-
cussions. By law, only in exceptional circumstances could someone other than
the father decide how his child would be fed and cared for. In Roman society,
for example, the father was responsible for employing a wet nurse.^37 As we saw
above, according to Jewish law, the father was responsible for the nursing of his
son or daughter. The halakhic principles were meant to protect the life of the
infant as well as provide a clear-cut division of labor between both parents.
Early Christian law does not contain any discussions of nursing or of who is
obligated to nurse. In what some see as one of the great accomplishments of
early Christianity,^38 infanticide was strictly forbidden. There were, however,
no guidelines concerning nursing such as those found in Jewish sources. Re-
search on the first centuries of Christianity has suggested that many Roman
women breast-fed their own children, although women of the highest social
and economic status hired wet nurses. Despite the evidence of this social re-
ality in which wet nurses were frequently employed, it seems there was no leg-
islation concerning the social arrangements made, nor was there legislation
concerning the remarriage of nursing mothers.^39
Medieval families shared similar characteristics. In some cases, the mothers
nursed their infants themselves, while in other households, especially in the
wealthier ones, wet nurses were hired. The medieval compilers of canon law
were concerned with nursing mothers in a number of instances, but were
mainly interested in the implications of nursing on correct marital relations;
hence, they do not discuss the welfare of children or the remarriage of moth-
ers. Rather, they forbid nursing women to have sexual intercourse with their
husbands. The reason for this prohibition, however, was not to prevent an ad-
ditional pregnancy, but rather, because they realized that a nursing woman’s
chances of conceiving were not good, and they did not want good Christians
to have sexual relations for nonreproductive purposes.^40 Despite this differ-
ence, the social circumstances of breast-feeding in Jewish and Christian soci-
eties contained many similarities, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter.