abandon children for reasons of moral superiority. While I would agree that
cases of abandonment were few and far between within the Jewish commu-
nity, they were by no means unheard of.^97 In addition, this woman, who pur-
portedly abandoned her baby, was, like many of the Christian women ac-
cused of the same crime, a single mother. Abandonment cases were probably
fewer among Jews than among Christians for two reasons: First, the Jewish
communities in Ashkenaz were small and tight-knit—hiding a pregnancy in
such a community was probably very difficult, and abandoning a baby after
attempting to hide a pregnancy—even harder. As the case above demon-
strates, there were incessant rumors about the identity of the mother of the
abandoned baby. A second reason Jewish mothers, even in dire circum-
stances, would have been more hesitant to abandon their infants than Chris-
tian women, is that Jews were a minority culture. According to Jewish law,
an abandoned baby found in a Christian city was by definition not a Jew. Fur-
thermore, if this infant were taken in by passersby, they could just as well be
Christians as Jews. In other words, abandoning an infant probably meant
abandoning him to Christianity.^98
InfanticideBoswell and others have indicated that abandonment on the church steps or
in the marketplace was only one of the ways for parents to rid themselves of
unwanted offspring. In addition, some infants were killed immediately after
birth, often by their mothers and the women who attended her. Some of these
children were born with handicaps and peculiarities and were killed out of
dread of such physical impairments.^99 Sefer H·asidimdiscusses a case in which
an infant was born with “teeth and a tail.” Some people recommended that the
infant be killed immediately, but eventually, following the advice of the sage,
they cut off the teeth and the tail and allowed the child to live.^100 In this case,
it was not the mother who wanted to kill her child but “some people.” This fear
of deformed infants, a fear that exists in modern times as well, does not illus-
trate medieval cruelty so much as the fear of deformity. In medieval times, mal-
formed children were often considered bewitched or changelings, causing par-
ents to fear them and at times even to expose or kill them.^101
Despite this fear, and the fact that many of these infants died for natural and
unnatural reasons, medieval Christian sources manifest the tremendous devo-
tion of some mothers to their deformed children. They searched for remedies
and went on pilgrimages to holy sites, praying for miracle cures.^102 Perhaps the
case mentioned in Sefer H·asidim, in which the sage is asked for his advice, is
a Jewish parallel to the quest for miraculous cures.
Other children killed at birth were those born to unwed mothers or the fruit
of an adulterous relationship.^103 Two such cases are reported in Sefer H·asidim: