Mother’s Milk: Child-Rearing and the Production of Jewish Culture

All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

– Mark Twain

The present essay engages with the age-old question: What accounts for the persistence of Judaism through the ages? Despite significant variations, how were Jewish cultural elements produced and sustained over the millennia? Common approaches to this question have emphasized the potent sway of biblical norms and narrative, the role of rabbinic dicta and governance, or the existence of national or even racial traits. This essay introduces a stage of human experience that is largely absent from these deliberations: the earliest phases of child-rearing. Efforts to account for the production of Jewish culture rarely include child-rearing, though its inclusion would strengthen the near consensus that the transmission of Jewish culture is not fully accounted for by the channels of rabbinic and literary productivity.¹ This paper argues that some of the most enduring aspects of Jewish culture are produced in the context of early family relations, particularly in the context of maternal care.

Efforts to recover maternal visibility are well underway in a variety of disciplines in Jewish studies. Perhaps most notable are the set of essays in the recently published volume Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, in which the editors and contributing authors explore the centrality of the mother in an array of Jewish cultural phenomena.² This volume lays out the rich and multifaceted parameters of this emerging field of Jewish cultural studies and establishes the central place of motherhood in “the narration of Jewishness.”³ We inhabit a new juncture in feminist Jewish studies, one in which maternal processes are receiving sustained, critical attention. Decades of social-historical research laid the groundwork for this turn toward maternity, as such studies moved the domestic sphere from the margins of cultural history to its very center. The taboo of maternity as a scholarly subject, therefore, has worn thin, making room for more critical considerations.⁴ This paper participates in this scholarly recovery with an exploration of the role of maternal care in the production of Jewish norms and postures.

The significance of child-rearing in human development is well known. Theorists spanning the world of psychology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology have long acknowledged the importance of the learning that takes place in the earliest phases of human life.⁵ Unlike animals, which are born with many of their faculties in full swing, human beings must learn even their most basic operations, and this learning takes place in the social-maternal context. Furthermore, this learning does not take place in a neutral mode. Child-rearing takes place in highly stylized and culturally specific ways. As Clifford Geertz noted a half-century ago, all human beings are finished through culture: “not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it.”⁶ This observation is particularly relevant to the present discussion. The learning that takes place in the first months and years of life is universal in its significance but particular in its actualization. Consider that speech, arguably the most culturally differentiated of all human faculties, is acquired in the context of early childcare.⁷ Nor is language the only particular element in the act of early child-rearing. Child-rearing consists of the reproduction of an entire repertoire of dispositions, behaviors, and postures in the person of the child.

This repertoire is well captured in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: the schema of “perception, thought and action” that are internalized by the individual and that guarantee the stability of broader social formations.⁸ For Bourdieu, the inculcation of habitus ensures the constancy of practices as well as the transmission of past experiences “more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.”⁹ He did not emphasize maternal care in his writings, yet his comments assume the acquisition of habitus early in life. The intensive social engagement that is necessary for an infant to survive is the process by which the cultivation of habitus—or to use Geertz’s term, the cultural “finishing” of the human...