Reuter Lecture 2022: A Wet-nurse Controversy: Jews, Christians, and later Medieval ‘Racism’ Event

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"A Wet-nurse Controversy: Jews, Christians, and later Medieval ‘Racism’"

 

Professor Resnick will look at the controversies triggered by the employment of Christian wet-nurses by Jews in the Middle Ages. Medieval Jews employed Christian wet-nurses despite repeated ecclesiastical condemnations, which typically did not prevail over social and economic interests. But in Etsi Judeos (July 15, 1205) Pope Innocent III, who complained loudly that Jews are unscrupulous usurers, thieves, blasphemers, and secret murderers of Christians, included an unsubstantiated rumour that has generated much scholarly debate: that “on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection (Easter),” after they have received the Eucharist, “the Jews make these women pour their milk into the latrine for three days before they again give suck to the children.” The controversy over wet-nurses did not end there, however. Churchmen will also prohibit Christians from employing Jewish wet nurses, to preserve Christian infants from the ‘stain’ of Jewish moral and physical depravity, turning to later medieval medicine and natural philosophy to affirm the racial inferiority of Jewish blood.