Chapter Five
PARENTS AND CHILDREN:
COMPETING VALUES
That is why a person is called a miniature world: because he
resembles the whole world and in his wisdom he can rule
and know all things created by his wisdom, “because she was
the mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20) to provide for them
and lead them in wisdom as a mother for her child.
—R. Judah H·asid, MS Oxford Bodl. Opp. 540The previous chapter discussed some of the social consequences of breast-
feeding and sketched an outline of the division of labor and child-care re-
sponsibilities between men and women in medieval Jewish society. The ex-
ample of breast-feeding, along with other examples discussed throughout the
book, demonstrates the cultural understandings of biological attributes. We
saw how Jewish-Christian relations, as well as hierarchies within the family and
the community, were shaped by ideology and by the constraints of everyday life
in the medieval cities. When discussing Jewish women, we saw how societies’
values and needs bound women to their children and determined their re-
sponsibilities. Underlying these discussions, we found that these practices were
oftentimes the result of competing interests within society; these competing in-
terests led to legal and practical decisions that were, in some cases, at odds with
religious beliefs or with earlier legal practices.
The nutrition of children and the social construction of breast-feeding are
just two components of medieval understandings of parenthood. This chapter
will focus more broadly on the social conceptions of parenting and especially
on motherhood in medieval Ashkenaz. Understandings of gender and family
as well as practical needs and religious precepts all combined to shape the me-
dieval understandings of parenthood and the division of child-care responsi-
bilities between men and women in Jewish society. The first part of the chap-
ter will discuss theories of parenting in Jewish society, and the division of labor
and the nature of parent-child relationships that resulted from these under-
standings. These will be compared and contrasted with contemporary Chris-
tian writings on these topics. The second part of the chapter will show how
these theories were translated into reality, in a realm of competing interests
within the family and the community.