instance, tales about how to predict the sex of a baby, about the importance of satis-
fying pregnancy cravings, and about foods that encourage milk flow.

Once I sat down and collated the material collected in these interviews,
my next step was to search for source material on the origins, historical development,
and dissemination of what I had heard. For centuries, the mysteries and suffering of
childbearing have been interpreted by Jews within the framework of religion and
mysticism, and the literature is considerable.

First and foremost, the Bible, the Talmud, the later Codes of Jewish Law,
and the huge body of rabbinic commentaries and responsa set down Jewish laws and
recorded traditions concerning conception, pregnancy, birth, and the postnatal pe-
riod. These texts, which constitute the framework for all aspects of Jewish life, pro-
vide a practical guide for bringing a child into the world. Their minute and meticu-
lous details are part of a vast system of prescribed forms of conduct: their attention to
these details is one way in which Jews acknowledge their relationship with God.
Judaism considers the intimate act of conceiving a child and bringing that child into
the world as a process involving God. To experience the holiness within this process
requires paying attention to detail in one's daily conduct. The laws and traditions of
this literature are familiar to Orthodox Jews. Although an in-depth examination of
these texts is not the primary focus of this study, they dictate the religious significance
that childbearing has for Jews and are therefore of primary relevance.

Another Jewish source, devotional literature, spans the whole of Jewish
history because prayer is the way in which people communicate with God. In bibli-
cal times, prayers were often spontaneous expressions of fears, hopes, feelings, and
desires. In the Bible, Isaac and Hannah both pray to God for the divine blessing of a
son. By talmudic times (second to sixth centuries), prayer had become congrega-
tional, mandated at fixed times of the day, week, month, and year. Private prayers
could be inserted into the petitionary benedictions (of the Amidah) recited every
weekday except for Sabbath and festivals. A group prayer, or a prayer for someone
else, was considered more effective than a personal petition, and the atmosphere in
the synagogue, where everyone prayed together, was conducive to the concentration
necessary to commune with God. Thus, a husband's supplications for his wife, recited
in synagogue and supported by the presence of the congregation, was thought to
be much more effective than a woman's praying on her own. In the gaonic period
(sixth to eleventh centuries), in Babylonia, prayers for the postnatal rituals were for-
malized. In medieval times, especially in Provence, Spain, and Germany, a new depth
of meaning, a mystical dimension, was infused into prayer and soon spread to Jewish
communities almost worldwide. This change came about as medieval intellectuals
interested themselves in the earlier Jewish mystical literature and developed philo-
sophical concepts of God. In the sixteenth century, private prayers for childbearing
were formulated, using the standard format of Jewish prayer. These prayers were writ-
ten in the vernacular as well as in Hebrew, making them accessible to everyone,
including women, and "men who were like women" in that they could not read

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