Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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Figure 6. William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751. Courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

      The twenty-four-month bar presupposes that a mother’s love for her children is, at least to some extent, a function of time. As explained by English satirist Bernard Mandeville in 1732: “Even when Children first are Born the Mother’s Love is but weak, and increases with the Sensibility of the Child, and grows up to a prodigious height, when by signs it begins to express his Sorrows and Joys.”⁸⁶ Glikl would probably have agreed, as attested to by her casual mention of the death of her two-week-old son.⁸⁷ But there were also those who doubted a remarried mother’s devotion toward her adult children. The Jewish moralist Ẓvi Hirsch Kaidanover complained in his hugely popular 1705 Kav ha-yoshar that remarried mothers tend to leave their sons “ragged and bare-footed. Devoid of their father’s wealth, they … sit between the oven and the stove, and watch their mother enjoy meat, wine and other delicacies.”⁸⁸

      A sharp critic of maternal abandonment was the English novelist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe. In his 1722 Moll Flanders, Defoe had his heroine explain that abandonment of children is, in essence, “only a contrived method for murder; that is to say, a-killing [of] children with safety.”⁸⁹ Moll had a point; studies on the fate of children in eighteenth-century foundling homes show appallingly high mortality rates.⁹⁰ Of course, this did not prevent Moll herself from abandoning, after the death of her husband, two of her own children, who were, she explains, “taken happily off my Hands by my Husband’s Father and Mother, and that by the way was all they got by Mrs Betty.”⁹¹ Glikl would probably not have judged Moll’s behavior in this particular matter too harshly. In her memoirs, she discusses a granddaughter of hers, daughter of her deceased son Zanvil, who “should be about 13 years old and is apparently a very gifted person.” That Glikl does not know the exact age of the girl, and has to rely on second-hand reports of her talents, suggests that that she did not keep in touch with her. Glikl additionally relates that the girl’s mother remarried and left her in the custody of her maternal grandfather. Interestingly, Glikl’s reportage of her daughter-in-law’s behavior is uncritical, and in the very same paragraph in which she relates the situation of her granddaughter she refers to her mother as “this good young person” [דאש גוטי יונגי מענש] (G. Tur., 558–59), regardless of her having abandoned her daughter after remarriage.⁹²

      This absence of critical undertones may be startling to the modern reader; however, stories of parents, most often mothers, who abandoned, sacrificed, or even murdered their children to better their own situation appeared relatively frequently throughout the eighteenth century, often without any discernible judgmental tone. The Jewish memoirist Dov of Bolichov told of a Mrs. Reisel who refused to pay ransom for her son and allowed him to be slain under her window, all the while screaming, “Mame, Mame, open up and give ransom for my soul!”⁹³ Salomon Maimon was abandoned by his family when they were pursued by Christian assailants, as was his father before him. Both were miraculously delivered.⁹⁴ Another story, this time by a Christian writer, told of a “Negro Woman” who smothered her infant to death during a raid so as not to be discovered. A second woman, a European by the name of Mrs. Clendenin, managed to escape the assailants but left her baby to be ruthlessly slain by them.⁹⁵ Interestingly, early versions of the story portrayed Mrs. Clendenin’s behavior as brave or heroic, but in a later version, which appeared in Samuel G. Drake’s 1839 anthology of captivity narratives, the following passage was inserted into the original text: “This ends the remarkable, though short captivity of a woman, more to be admired for her courage than some other qualities not less desirable in the female character [my emphasis].”⁹⁶

      Drake’s telling addition marks a change in Western attitudes toward maternity, which has been eloquently characterized by Wahrman as “a distinctive shift … from maternity as a general ideal, broadly prescriptive but allowing for individual deviations, to maternity as inextricably intertwined with the essence of femininity for each and every woman.”⁹⁷ Indeed, whereas early reports could often feature praise or appreciation for the murdering or abandoning parent, for instance in the cases of Mrs. Clendenin, in a Yiddish song commending Laser Abeles for the murder of his son, or in the Yiddish folktale of the father who killed his promiscuous daughter, later depictions of infanticide tended to portray the murdering mother as either a pathological figure, a stepmother, or—in some cases—as wishing to protect her infant from a life of slavery or utter poverty.⁹⁸ The change in prevailing attitudes toward murdering mothers received expression in diverse realms of European culture, including literature, art, and law.⁹⁹ One telling expression of the change may be found in the field of children’s stories. Folklore research over the past three decades has shown how some of our favorite fairytales today, which feature vicious and often murderous stepmothers, such as “Snow White” or “Hansel and Gretel,” originally featured biological mothers who aim to murder their own children.¹⁰⁰

      Similar changes in perceptions of maternity are found in early nineteenth-century Jewish literature, which features a wide range of loving and devoted mothers. Of particular interest are Baruch Shenfeld’s 1826 “Indian Songs,” in which a Native American mother is portrayed mourning her deceased son, and Joseph Perl’s moving depictions of the maternal devotion found in female birds. Of course, Shenfeld and Perl’s understanding of maternal devotion in “natural peoples” and animals stands in direct contrast to Glikl’s earlier stories of infanticidal birds and paedophagic East-Indians.¹⁰¹

      The changing attitudes toward maternity in general and murdering mothers in particular were supported also by science. In the early nineteenth century, phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim made a startling discovery: they found a unique area in the female human skull which, they explained, was responsible for women’s natural devotion to their children. In writing about this “discovery” in 1815, Spurzheim explained: “It is objected that love of children is the result of moral sentiments, of self-love, or of the desire of suckling, and not of a peculiar propensity. These causes, so commonly admitted, cannot produce love of offspring; for in many animals which love their progeny, these causes do not exist. No animal, below man, has any idea of duty or religious sentiment; birds do not give suck, yet they love their young.… Moreover, in mothers there is no proportion between moral or religious sentiments, and philoprogenitiveness. Consequently, we must admit a particular organ for this propensity.” Spurzheim proceeded to explain that, based on the examination of the skulls of twenty-five murderous mothers, he had discovered that this organ is either exceedingly small or entirely missing in the skulls of СКАЧАТЬ