Milk relationship

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The milk relationship or breastfeeding relationship is a concept that is particularly widespread in Judaism and Islam , according to which the breastfeeding of infants and small children creates a relationship similar to that of blood relationship between the people involved . Milk siblings arise when different women form breastfeeding communities or a wet nurse breastfeeds the child.

Judaism

The idea that a family relationship arises through breast milk can already be documented biblically. In Biblical Hebrew , kinship is usually represented by seeds ( Hebrew זֶרַע) or "bones and flesh" ( Hebrew עֶצֶם וַבָּשָּׂר) manufactured. However, the common motif in the oriental environment, according to which human kings were often depicted as sucking on the breasts of a goddess in order to demonstrate their royal legitimacy (for example the Assyrian king Aššur-bāni-apli ), was found in the prophetic writings of the ancients Will picked up and reinterpreted. In Isa 49.23  EU it is announced that Zion will be suckled by queens in order to receive royal status herself, which is taken up again as an announcement of the future glory of Zion in Isa 60.16  EU . And in Isa 66:11  EU it is the exiles themselves who suck on the breast of Jerusalem in order to regain their identity as Israelites. Accordingly, family relationships are established through breast milk. This idea is concretized in Hld 8.1  EU . Here the lover wishes that her lover would have been suckled by her mother, so that as a milk brother she would not be subject to the usual restrictions regarding public contact between man and woman (comparable to the Muslim ideas ). According to the Old Testament idea, breastfeeding constitutes a kinship relationship between wet nurse and child and thus also a kinship relationship between the children who were breastfed by the same wet nurse. Nevertheless, there is no picture of the care of a wet nurse in the Old Testament , which suggests that wet nurses only played a minor role in Judaism. Mayer Irwin Gruber even shows, based on the number of children handed down in the Old Testament, that women in the Old Testament usually breastfed their children themselves for three years and were therefore unable to bear further children during that time ( limited contraceptive effect of breastfeeding ).

While the use of wet nurses was not rejected in the Old Testament and in the Greek environment, their employment was unusual in rabbinic Judaism . The Mishnah defines suckling a child in mKet 5.5 as a rule obligation for a Jewish wife, which only does not have to be fulfilled if the wife brings at least two slaves into the marriage. This arrangement is developed in the Babylonian Talmud to the effect that suckling a child generates a relationship between the child and mother or nurse. However, the milk relationship and the related legal consequences are not discussed further, probably because the use of wet nurses was tied closely to economic requirements and milk relationship was therefore a rare upper class phenomenon.

Islam

In Islam , the same marriage prohibitions apply to milk relatives as to biological relatives (milk relatives are also considered mahram ). The Quran contains in the 4th sura an-Nisā ' ("The women") in verse  23 ( 4:23 ) - addressed to men - the express prohibition to marry nursing mothers or nursing sisters:

"You are forbidden (to marry) [...] your nursing mothers, your nursing sisters, [...]"

- Translation: Rudi Paret (1966)

The complete equation of milk relatives and blood relatives is established by a traditional prophetic word ( hadith ): "Breastfeeding makes forbidden the same thing that also makes birth forbidden" (Ar-Riḍāʿa tuḥarrimu mā tuḥarrimu l-wilāda) .

Milk relatives are therefore not subject to the same restrictions in social interaction as people who are strangers to one another. Women have no obligation to cover up ( hijab ) for men who are related to milk . The Prophet Mohammed himself is said to have recommended breastfeeding a woman who wanted such a casual deal with her former and now adult adoptive son . This tradition has been taken by many Muslim scholars in the past as evidence that it is permissible to breastfeed adult men. On the question of how often a woman must have breastfed a male child (or an adult man) in order to establish a milk relationship, however, opinions differed. While the Shafi'i and Zahiris referring to traditions of Aisha taught that for five Still sessions were necessary, said the Maliki and Hanafi , a single session Still sufficient.

Even today, the breastfeeding of adult men is recommended by individual Muslim scholars as a means of circumventing the requirement of veiling. For example, the head of the faculty for hadith studies at al-Azhar University in Cairo, ʿIzzat ʿAtīya, declared in a legal advice ( fatwa ) in 2007 that adult breastfeeding was allowed so that unrelated men and women could be in the same room together allowed to. Specifically, female employees of a company are allowed to “breastfeed” their male colleagues a few times for this purpose.

The Saudi scholar ʿAbd al-Muhsin al-ʿUbaikān, an adviser at the court of King Abdullah ibn Abd al-Aziz , made a similar statement in a fatwa in 2010 . He explained that with the concept of the milk relationship, Islam provided a means to circumvent the generally applicable prohibition of the mixing of the sexes, and in this context recommended the establishment of breastfeeding relationships between the people involved.

The opinions of the two scholars aroused great outrage both in their countries and internationally.

Oriental Christianity

Since the idea that mother's milk constitutes kinship ties existed not only in Judaism but also in the non-Jewish ancient Mediterranean, it was also taken up in Christianity. In the Roman area, however, due to its proximity to adoption, this concept was already replaced in antiquity by a concept of spiritual kinship with an existing sponsorship , which, for example, has an impact on marriage law. So marriages between godparents and godchildren were forbidden in the Roman Catholic Church until 1983 (can. 1079 CIC / 1917 ) and are still forbidden in the United Churches today (can. 811 CCEO ).

In the oriental churches, on the other hand, relationship with milk continues to be an obstacle to marriage. In the Syrian Orthodox Church , according to the nomocanon of Barhebräus (13th century), the rule is that two children who have been breastfed by the same nurse are not allowed to marry, whereby the relationship between milk siblings is treated in the same way as the relationship between natural siblings and the impediment to marriage thus also extends to the relatives. In the Coptic Church , according to Ibn al-ʿAssāl (13th century) , the provision applies equally; Ibn Sabāʿ (13th century) does not address this extension, so that the obstacle to marriage only seems to apply to the affected dairy siblings. In the Armenian Church , the milk relationship only represents an obstacle to marriage for the milk siblings concerned. However, it is controversial whether these sources of oriental church law take up original Christian ideas or were influenced by Muslims.

See also

  • Westermarck effect (unrelated children growing up together do not find each other sexually attractive)

literature

  • Cynthia Chapman: “Oh that you were like a brother to me, one who had nursed at my mother's breasts”. Breast Milk as a Kinship-Forging Substance. In: Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (JHS). Volume 12, No. 7, 2012, pp. 1–41 (English; PDF, 620 kB, 42 pages at jhsonline.org).
  • Jean Dauvillier, Carlo de Clercq: Le Mariage en Droit Canonique Oriental. Librairie du Recueil Sirey, Paris 1936 (French).
  • Avner Giladi: Breast-Feeding in Medieval Islamic Thought. A Preliminary Study of Legal and Medical Writings. In Journal of Family History. Volume 23, 1998, pp. 107-123 (English).
  • Avner Giladi: Infants, Parents and Wet Nurses. Medieval Islamic views on Breast-feeding and their social implications. Brill, Leiden 1999 (English).
  • Mayer Irwin Gruber: Breast-Feeding Practices in Biblical Israel and in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. In: Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. Volume 19, 1989, pp. 61–83 (English; PDF; 2.1 MB, 23 pages on web.archive.org).
  • Peter Parkes: Milk Kinship in Islam. Substance, structure, history. In Social Anthropology. Volume 13, No. 3, 2005, pp. 307-329 (English).
  • J. Schacht, J. Burton: Raḍāʿ. 1. Legal aspects. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 8, pp. 361a-362b (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Cynthia Chapman: “Oh that you were like a brother to me, one who had nursed at my mother's breasts”. Breast Milk as a Kinship-Forging Substance. In: Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (JHS). Volume 12, No. 7, 2012, pp. 1–41 (English; PDF, 620 kB, 42 pages at jhsonline.org).
  2. ↑ a b Theodor Hopfner, Theodor Klauser: Amme. In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum (RAC) 1, Anton Hiersemann Verlag, Stuttgart 1950, Sp. 384.
  3. ↑ Mayer Irwin Gruber: Breast-Feeding Practices in Biblical Israel and in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. ( Memento of December 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.1 MB) In: Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society (JANES) 19 (1989), p. 63.
  4. ↑ Mayer Irwin Gruber: Breast-Feeding Practices in Biblical Israel and in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. In: Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. Volume 19, 1989, pp. 61–83, here pp. 74/75 (English; PDF; 2.1 MB, 23 pages on web.archive.org).
  5. ↑ Rudi Paret : Koran Sura 4: Women. In: koransuren.de. German Koran translation, archived from the original on March 14, 2016 ; Retrieved on January 30, 2019 (Paret, 1901–1983, was a German philologist and scholar of Islam; he was responsible for the translation of the Koran into German, which is authoritative in scientific circles; the website offers a comparison between 4 translations). See also: Kurt Rudolph : The Koran - Chapter 4 - Fourth Surah: Women. In: Project Gutenberg-DE . Retrieved January 30, 2019 (Source: Reclam Verlag 1970).
  6. ↑ Compare Ibn Rajab : Ǧāmiʿ al-ʿulūm wa'l-ḥikam fī šarḥ ḫamsīna ḥadīṯan min Ǧawāmiʿ al-kalim. Manšūrāt Dār an-Naṣr, Damascus around 1980, p. 385.
  7. ↑ Compare Schacht / Burton 361b – 362a.
  8. ↑ Message: Breastfeeding fatwa causes stir. In: BBC News . May 22, 2007, accessed on January 30, 2019 (English): "Dr Izzat Atiya [...] said that if a woman fed a male colleague" directly from her breast "at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. "
  9. ↑ message: Fatwa fight rages between Saudi clerics. In: al-Arabiya . July 1, 2010, archived from the original on August 28, 2012 ; accessed on January 30, 2019 (English): "Obeikan said an adult man is considered a woman's son if she breastfeeds him. So, if gender mixing is to be allowed in Islam women should breastfeed men to create a family-like environment and minimize chances of unauthorized sexual relations. The issue of adult breastfeeding, loosely based on a story from the early Islamic era, has infuriated both conservatives and liberals alike and was also condemned by women rights activists. The fatwa was also seen as a way of getting around the ban on mixing of unrelated men and women. "
  10. ↑ Peter Parkes: Milk kinship in Islam. Substance, structure, history. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH) 13 (2005), p. 320.
  11. ^ Nomocanon Gregorii Barhebraei VIII, 3
  12. ^ Fetha Negest XXIV, II, 3.
  13. ↑ Al-ğawhratu an-nafīsatu fī ʿulūm al-kanīsati 41.
  14. ↑ Mxit'ar GOS 92nd
  15. ↑ Peter Parkes: Milk kinship in Islam. Substance, structure, history. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH). No. 13, 2005, pp. 307–329 (assumes Muslim influence).
  16. ↑ Michael Mitterauer : Christianity and endogamy. In: Continuity and Change (CON). No. 6, 1991, pp. 295-333. (excludes a Muslim influence).