“Blessings of the breasts”: breastfeeding in rabbinic literature
Breast milk is an ideal beverage for rabbinic inquiry. The only quaffable bodily fluid, it is available only for a limited period of time; yet, during that brief period, it is vital to an infant's life. Further, both the producer and consumer of milk are interstitial, since women/mothers and mi...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2016
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| In: |
Hebrew Union College annual
Year: 2016, Volume: 87, Pages: 145-177 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Rabbinic literature
/ Breast
/ Milk
/ Mother
/ Child
|
| IxTheo Classification: | BH Judaism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Breast milk is an ideal beverage for rabbinic inquiry. The only quaffable bodily fluid, it is available only for a limited period of time; yet, during that brief period, it is vital to an infant's life. Further, both the producer and consumer of milk are interstitial, since women/mothers and minors/infants do not fit in the normative rabbinic category of Jewish adult man. Given these observations, it is startling: (1) how little scholars have written about breastfeeding in rabbinic literature; and (2) how much of this sparse scholarship treats these texts as if they are straightforward descriptions of lived practice. This article addresses both of these issues. Throughout, I argue that the rabbis use breast milk as a vehicle for scholastic inquiry into a number of central legal matters. |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Hebrew Union College annual
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.15650/hebruniocollannu.87.2016.0145 |