In one city, there was a single woman who fornicated and became pregnant, and
when she gave birth, her [female] relatives advised her to kill the child and she
did so. And He who is Blessed delivered them into the hands of evil people and
they [the evil people] took their money and tortured them until they fled the
city.^104And:
A woman became pregnant as a result of fornication, and she questioned another
as to what to drink to abort her fetus. And one person [male] wanted to teach her,
but they said to him: “Don’t sin by assisting her to abort the infant.” He responded:
“She is better off aborting before the infant is born than killing it after it is born.”
They responded: “It is preferable that she sin without your help. Moreover, per-
haps the child will rescued from her or she will die and the child will live.”^105In the first case, the mother is a single woman and those supporting her at birth
recommend killing the infant, the evidence of her illicit affair. In the second
case, it is not clear if the woman is married or not. She turns to a woman who
must have been known to provide assistance to women who wished to abort,
and she somehow is referred to a man who can give her advice. The story raises
some interesting issues. First, there is a surprising lack of secrecy surrounding
the case, but perhaps this can be accounted for by the didactic genre of the
book and the lesson the author wants to teach his readers. A second and more
important point is that the man who had intended to advise her on the abor-
tion is certain that if she does not abort the baby at this stage, she will kill it im-
mediately after birth.
The same idea appears in a different story told by Caesarius of Heisterbach
concerning a motif that appears throughout the centuries in anti-Jewish litera-
ture. Caesarius tells of a Jewish maiden who had an affair with a Christian priest
and discovered she was pregnant. The girl feared that her father would kill her
if he found out about the affair and the pregnancy, and together the young cou-
ple convinced her parents that she was about to give birth to the Messiah. When
the infant was born and turned out to be a girl, one of the members of the Jew-
ish community killed the baby.^106 Although I have not found other sources that
distinctly mention killing unwanted infants, the circumstances mentioned
here as those leading to infanticide—unknown or illegitimate paternity—ac-
cord with those outlined in contemporary Christian sources.
I would suggest that, in general, insofar as they were concerned with pre-
marital and extramarital sexual relations and the handling of the unwanted re-
sults of such relations, Jews strongly resembled their Gentile neighbors.^107 We
know that Jewish sources refer to the obligation of midwives to testify about the
infant’s parentage. The assumption was that if the infant was illegitimate, the
parturient would disclose the father’s name during labor.^108 The sources also