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I have a close friend who was born on the island of Djerba off of the
Tunisian coast. She told me that when she was born the labor went so fast
that the Jewish midwife was unable to get there in time so a Muslim Arab
holiday the Muslim midwife and the midwifeʼs entire family would come and
see what new clothes my friendʼs mother had made for her. In short, the
Muslim midwife saw my friend as her own daughter, wanting to take pride
in how she was growing up. My friend also told me of another advantage
that anybody who messed with her would also have to mess with them.
While in this story most everyone came out happy, and I am sure that
Jewish and Gentile. From this mishnah we see that an Israelite woman
In the Tosefta, Bavli, and Yerushalmi (page 4) the reason given for the
woman is that the Jewish woman would be delivering a child into idolatry.
formulating the reason for the prohibition slightly differently. The Bavli
elaborates (line 3) and says that this is prohibited because the non-Jewish
midwife may press “her hand on the [infantʼs] temples and kill it without
being observed” while in the Yerushalmi there is fear that the fetus may be
crushed.
baby is the first of three such descriptions found in the Bavli which portray
that a non-Jewish midwife may crush the skull of a Jewish baby. In this
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story a Gentile midwife is taunted by a neighbor for helping Jewish women
give birth. Her response was “ʻMay as many evils befall that woman, as I
have dropped [Jewish children] like lumps of wood into the river.ʼ The next
description can be found in line 7 of the Bavli and it describes the scenario
Jewish baby.
I would like to make the claim that these depictions of Gentile women
"Babies are not yet employed in the service of the gods, and cannot
yet have failed at it (sinned); in the absence of original sin, their innocence
ordained order: by killing off innocent beings she interferes with the use of
potentially useful humans from reaching maturity she overrules the cosmic
order in which the gods need man just as much as he needs them.
sometimes she might even yank “out the pregnant womanʼs baby.”
It was at some time during the first millenium BCE that Lilith may have
Aramaic magic bowels. As you can see from the selections on page 6, in
some of the magic bowls Lilith is described as a killer of children “who fills
deep places, strikes, smites, casts down, strangles, kills, and casts down
boys and girls, male and female foetuses.” She was known both as a
Babylonia is the relationship between the religious and magic beliefs that
are found in the magic bowls and the world of the Talmudic rabbis. If I am
correct that there is a connection between the Lilith of the magic bowls and
the description of Gentile women found in Bavli AZ, then this is evidence of
an intersection between the world of the Talmud and more popular religious
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practices and beliefs that we have evidence of from the bowls.
not at the hands of strangers, then at the hands of their own parents. In
Bavli Ketubbot 60b (page 8), we read about the prohibition of a widow to
remarry before twenty-four months have passed unless she either gives the
baby to a nursemaid, stops nursing her child, or the child dies. An opinion
is brought in the Gemara that even if the child dies she is still prohibited to
remarry because perhaps she killed her own child in order to facilitate her
remarriage. The anonymous Talmud says that “there was once a case and
she choked it,” with the response being that this isnʼt a valid example
because she was mentally unstable, and “our women donʼt strangle their
children.” Additionally one can find in the 7th/8th century work Maʼasim
Livnei Eretz Yisrael (also on page 8) that even if the child dies the woman
must wait a full twenty-four months until she can remarry because there is
a fear “that sometimes the woman chokes her child intentionally in order to
get remarried sooner.” From these two sources, and there are a number of
While the 1st BCE Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that Jews and
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Egyptians didnʼt abandon children and both Philo and Josephus explicitly
described as blood-thirsty baby killers and repeated claims are made that
our women donʼt kill their own children, a boundary is being drawn. They
canʼt be trusted with our children, and even some of our own may be
history in both Ancient Mesopotamia and Babylonia, and the Talmud may
have in fact been drawing from this body of images when it wanted to
describe the dangers of childbirth and those that a young baby faced, with
and nursemaids as those seeking to kill Jewish babies, whether while still