the Crusade, go to great lengths to describe the parents, and especially the
mothers, who chose to take their children’s lives rather than allow them to be
captured by the Crusaders.^128
Although I do not argue that the abandonment of a child in order to enter
a convent and the killing of a child can be equated, Jews and Christians used
the same models to justify their behavior. Jews during the First Crusade al-
luded to the sacrifice of Isaac as a model for their deeds,^129 and there are some
hints at a tradition that extols the killing of the daughter of Jephte as well.^130
In addition, the story of the mother and her seven sons was an extremely pop-
ular one in medieval Jewish literature. The narratives of parents, many of them
mothers, who chose to kill their children emphasize the tremendous sacrifice
of the parents who insisted on their children’s death.^131 The mother in Sefer
Yossipon, the popular medieval account of the mother and her seven sons, calls
upon what was understood as the essence of motherhood in order to encour-
age her son’s death (figure 9). She says:
My son, forsake all this! For I bore you in my belly for nine months and nursed
you for three years. And after I nursed you... I sustained you with food until this
very day and taught you the fear of the Lord. And now, my son, look up to the
heavens and see the earth and the sea with your brothers.... Go, my son, and
cleave onto your brothers, and may you enjoy the lot of their glory. And I shall
come with you there and rejoice with you as on your wedding day and partake of
the rewards of your righteousness with you.^132The medieval text introduces certain elements not present in the narrative in
2 and 4 Maccabees. In 2 Maccabees, the mother speaks “in the spirit of a man”
and “in the language of the fathers.” She claims that she “does not know how
they entered her womb” and emphasizes her pregnancy, but these details em-
phasize her reversal of roles in this scene in which she acts with ‘man-like
courage.’ ”^133 In 4 Maccabees, the narrator emphasizes that were the mother
to act like a mother, “if the woman had been weak in spirit—being, as she was,
a mother—she would have complained and lamented ‘in vain my sons did I
endure those many travails for you.’”^134 In the medieval text, she claims her
rights as a mother who bore the children in pain, fed them and nursed them,
and with this power commands them to die rather than save themselves.
The shared models—both the biblical stories and the figure of the mother
and her seven sons—were central to Christian and Jewish traditions in the
Middle Ages. The expectation that women would devote themselves to their
children is what made their decision to devote themselves to God and as a re-
sult sacrifice their children whether by abandonment or death all the more
admirable.^135
In light of this, one can see the choices made by Christian and Jewish par-
ents as reflecting similar value systems, although those values were part of two
traditions that were often in conflict.^136 Devotion to God was expressed by giv-