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 infanticidal women.102 Thus, the murdering mother became a pathology, no longer a social, religious, or legal problem; she was now an anatomical enigma.
SAVAGE MOTHERS
But to return to Glikl’s time, it appears that early modern Europeans viewed the act of infanticide not as pathological, but rather as somehow natural (though not necessarily adequate) behavior.103 It is therefore not surprising that many early modern authors tended, like Glikl herself, to attribute infanticidal tendencies to precisely those persons they considered to be most “natural,” non-Europeans, or savages. The rumor that parenting norms outside Europe were somewhat lax appeared in some of the earliest reports describing the New World. Already in his first report on the American natives, Columbus explained that these men and women exhibit very loose family ties. According to his account, whenever the Spanish attempted to approach the natives, they fled so quickly that fathers forsook their children.104 Reports of somewhat “unconventional” parental relations also appeared in the first detailed Jewish report on the “discovery” of America—Abraham Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam. In his book, Farrisol argued that it is the custom of American mothers to have sexual relations with their sons. He added that these people “have no governor or lord, no religion or gods, but they behave according to nature alone.”105 The savage family and its loose ties continued to excite European imagination generations later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories of child murder were a prominent motif in scientific or travel literature, as well as in the fiction and philosophy of the period. They appeared in such popular and esteemed texts as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which certain Amerindian peoples are said to be fond of eating their children’s flesh; or in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Europeans are reminded of their own infanticidal past.106 The British navigator James Cook reported to his numerous readers that child murder rituals were still practiced in Tahiti and constituted the main means of combating the high birthrate on the island.107 Jews were also accused of infanticide, most famously by Voltaire, who used the Deuteronomic passages cited in the epigraph to this chapter to portray the Israelites as a savage people whose descendants would never be able to integrate into Europe.108 Savage infanticide was such a popular trope in early modern European thought that even primitivist thinkers were obliged to confront it, lest it taint their own depictions of the “noble savage.” In his popular 1777 Les Incas, for instance, French playwright Jean-François Marmontel explained that the Incas had recently discontinued the barbaric custom of sacrificing their children.109
Some writers attempted to