“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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hebrew Union College annual
Main Author: Rosenblum, Jordan 1979- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Published: HUC 2016
In: Hebrew Union College annual
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Rabbinic literature / Thorax / Milk / Mother / Child
RelBib Classification:BH Judaism
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Description
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.
Contains:Enthalten in: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Hebrew Union College annual
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.15650/hebruniocollannu.87.2016.0145