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

mothers of the children who gave their offspring to be nursed. The remainder
of this chapter will be devoted to these women and their dilemmas.
Note that the emphases of my discussion reflect those of the medieval
sources. As such, this case is a superb example of the difficulties the extant
sources pose to learning more about medieval women and their lives. I began
this chapter by stating that at times mothers and their children had conflicting
interests. These conflicts are at the crux of the legal literature. Consequently,
we have no information about routine practices. The legal assumption was that
if the family unit was harmonious and complete, any problems that arose
would and could be worked out within its framework. The sources that discuss
wet-nursing practices allow only a very partial glimpse into the lives of these
families, at the instances when problems with wet nurses required outside
intervention.
As the authorities assumed that families could usually solve whatever prob-
lems arose in connection to breast-feeding within the framework of the family,
there are few discussions of married women who chose to breast-feed or to not
breast-feed their children. Discussions of this subject come up in one context
only—contraception. Subsequent pregnancies, especially when a woman was
breast-feeding, endangered the life of the nursing infant.^135 While modern
medical research has suggested that, due to poor nutrition in the past, fewer
women were able to conceive while breast-feeding, apparently, conception dur-
ing this period was not an uncommon experience,^136 and medieval Jewish
sources discuss the issue at length. Permission to prevent conception, men-
tioned already in the Talmud, was also discussed in medieval texts.^137 Unlike
Christian society, in which church directives indicated abstention from sexual
relations during the entire period of nursing, as mentioned above, some Jewish
legal authorities allowed nursing women to use a form of contraception known
as a mokh—a cervical sponge; no legal authority recommended abstention.^138
While the legal sources discussing these issues cannot shed much light on
the daily lives of mothers whose lives were not fraught with difficulties (such
as wet nurses who quit and husbands who did not want them to breast-feed),
the medieval attitudes toward contraception can enhance our understanding
of family planning, as well as the circumstances surrounding the employment
of wet nurses. If contraception was forbidden, then the need for a wet nurse
was greater. In families where, for religious reason (such as fulfilling the com-
mandment of procreation),^139 the couple wished to have more children as
quickly as possible, women would surely hire wet nurses. In other cases, how-
ever, whether because of poverty or out of a need or desire to space children,
the permissibility of contraception was important, and Jewish women regularly
employed this method of birth control. Indeed, some authorities argued that
nursing women must use some form of contraception to prevent an additional
pregnancy in order to protect the life of the existing infant.^140

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