cepted in antiquity by Palestinian Jews, and Ta-Shma suggested that R. Tam’s
quoting of this reason is related to his revival of some of the Palestinian rul-
ings.^175 While this suggestion has a certain halakhic logic, one cannot ignore
the tremendous influence R. Tam’s ruling had on the daily lives of families. In
light of this, Ta-Shma further suggested that perhaps this strictness was linked
to a growing concern with infant abandonment in twelfth- and thirteenth-cen-
tury Europe. This issue will be investigated in the next chapter.
Breast-feeding and Medieval SocietyThis chapter has examined breast-feeding practices and regulations in two dif-
ferent contexts. The first context was that of medieval society at large. Here
we looked at the implications of wet nursing as part of the complex Jewish-
Christian relations in medieval Germany and northern France. Our study re-
vealed how the social construction of breast-feeding can throw new light on
gender and, especially, on social relationships. The daily exchanges between
Jewish and Christian women surely led to an intimate knowledge of each
other, even if these women were not always on friendly terms, and even if their
relationship was largely determined by their respective status as employer and
employee.^176 Such informal relationships, as both the church and Jewish law
were well aware, were crucial in defining the relationship between Jews and
Christians and represented complex forms of socialization of both mothers and
their children.
At the same time, these relationships had other, more hostile, aspects. On
the one hand, the Jews, as members of a minority society, bore certain fears
of the consequences of employing a Christian woman in or out of the house.
On the other hand, as employers, Jews could, at times, exploit and harass their
Christian employees, a situation feared by the church, and that did nothing to
increase goodwill between Jews and Christians. The particular juncture of
complex power relations and great intimacy made the employment of wet
nurses an important site of Jewish-Christian relations.
From a gender perspective, we saw how in medieval Ashkenaz, as in many
other societies, although mothers and their children were intensely involved
in the politics of breast-feeding, it was the fathers and other men who gener-
ally decided who should be breast-fed by whom and how and they usually con-
trolled the hiring of wet nurses. The restrictions on Jewish women that pre-
vented them from remarrying were unique to Jews in medieval Christian
society, since Christian law contained no such limitations.^177 The position of
men as those obligated to ensure their child’s well-being, and the consequent
commitment of their wives, divorcées, and widows to this purpose, produced
a complex situation in which women no longer protected by marital frame-
works were not free to contract new relationships. As we saw, a notable change