Pratima Gopalakrishnan (Duke University)
This panel approaches local religious practice as a window into the multiplicity of lived experiences beyond the binary of “resistance” to or “assimilation” into an imperial center. This paper takes up that invitation by focusing on the practice of birth work as a site of interaction between Jews and non-Jews in late ancient Roman Palestine,
I use the term “birth work” to refer to various aspects of care for a person before, during, and after they give birth. This paper focuses in particular on maternal and non-maternal breastfeeding. This labor was performed not only by the person who gave birth but also often by hired and enslaved wet nurses. Complex economic and competing moral discourses governed the performance of this work. Not only was breastfeeding a matter of life and death in societies with high rates of both childbirth and infant mortality, but breastmilk itself was considered a channel for the transmission of virtue and cultural identity.
Rabbinic Jewish texts produced in late ancient Roman Palestine contain extensive discussions of breastfeeding, which these texts understand as consisting of both economic and affective dimensions. Rabbinic Jewish texts have remained underappreciated among ancient historians for several reasons. First, the overt legibility of this corpus as religious has placed it beyond the purview of most ancient historians. The texts are also written in Aramaic and Hebrew – two languages that are not traditionally prioritized in departments of classical studies. Finally, as the product of a scholastic movement, the texts that make up the rabbinic corpus are best understood as written records of the rabbis’ mostly oral processes of teaching, learning, and debating. The texts therefore present particular challenges as historical sources for late ancient Jewish society. Nevertheless, the classical rabbinic corpus offers the unique vantage point of a provincial subelite living in the eastern half of the Roman empire. The rabbis, moreover, approach daily life in all its minutiae with an urgency that is unparalleled in most literary corpora.
In this presentation, I focus on rabbinic discussions of breastfeeding, both maternal and non-maternal. The rabbis understand wet nursing (alongside midwifery) as a form of quotidian interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish women. I situate breastfeeding alongside other rabbinic discussions of domestic and commercial interactions between Jews and non-Jews. I then argue that rabbinic Jewish texts about wet nursing regulate intercommunal boundaries by formalizing the function of a wage in the performance of birth work. They do so in part by defining breastfeeding as wage-worthy, even when it is performed by the mother herself.
This presentation focuses on birth work as a deliberate alternative to grand narratives of how Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean navigated Roman imperial rule. I suggest that reframing the study of local religious history around these sorts of quotidian interactions can subvert the tendency to reify imperial power as the center.