or even occasional, Jewish practice. In any case, its appearance in Christian
sources is further evidence of Christian sensitivity to possible insults to their re-
ligion by Jews. In addition, frequently reissued edicts regularly mention the fear
that Christian women working in Jewish households would learn the Jewish
ways of life and ultimately convert. It would seem, though, that these protes-
tations were overcome by the needs of everyday life that compelled Christian
women to seek such employment and Jewish families to hire them.
in and out of the houseBoth Christian and Jewish sources discuss at length cases in which Christian
women nurse Jewish children in Jewish homes. This discussion confirms that
the instructions in the Mishna and Talmud in tractate Avodah Zara, which
state that gentile women should only be employed on Jewish premises, were
applied in practice. Scholars have assumed that, because Jews followed the
laws prohibiting idolatry (concentrated in tractate Avodah Zara), Christian wet
nurses who nursed Jewish children always did so in the home. Most medieval
sources seem to confirm this. Rashi, for example, explains the Talmudic in-
junction that a non-Jewish woman nurses Jewish children bir’shuta —in her
own domain—in the following way: “In her own domain—the domain of the
Jewess, but she should not give [the baby] to be taken to her [the non-Jewish
wet nurse’s] home, so that she [the wet nurse] will not kill him.”^108 His com-
ment echoes the talmudic explanation for this ruling. The fear of infants dying
at the hands of their non-Jewish caretakers outside the home features through-
out the discussions of this practice, although it is not considered a reason to
stop the practice. It would seem that while Jews felt they could supervise the
Christian wet nurses sufficiently within their own homes, they felt they could
not do so outside them. While most scholars have attributed this fear to the dis-
trust that existed between Jews and Christians in medieval society, it should be
noted that this concern is not solely an expression of religious tension. As
Klapisch-Zuber and Herlihy have shown, in fourteenth-century Italy, Chris-
tian children sent to the homes of wet nurses (as opposed to having live-in wet
nurses) suffered from higher mortality.
The argument that Christian women were employed only within Jewish
homes ignores one well-known source that suggests otherwise. In the Paris dis-
putation of 1240, R. Yeh·iel of Paris comments on the practice of sending Jew-
ish children to Christian wet nurses in Christian homes. As part of his argu-
ment for the good relations and trust that existed between Jews and Christians,
he states: “Go to the streets of the Jews and see... and they place our children
in their homes to be nursed.”^109 Some scholars have dismissed this comment
as an apologetic attempt of R. Yeh·iel’s to depict a more trusting relationship
between Jews and Christians than existed in reality. I would suggest, however,
that we accept his comment as testimony of a regular practice, since a number
of other sources from France corroborate it.