Ancient infaticide - Hellenistic and Jewish worlds

So many of the values all the western culture, as we know it, are based on Jewish law and history and social norms. It should not be surprising as Christianity was originally a branch of Judaism and even after the connection was severed by early church it was not before absorbing lots of Jewish culture.

Biblie is Jewish sacred book - God's word - and although for centuries Christian churches were trying to hide this connection they couldn't destroy essentials of Christianity and those are in Judaism. And no matter how much the hellenistic values were added into it after Christianity became official Roman religion the essence was already there. Centuries passed before we started going back to source but the source is and always was there.

One of the very self-evident examples is Western culture's approach to infanticide.

We take it for granted (at least most of us) that babies are precious, we should protect them, care for them. We feel angered reading about throwing away newborns for certain death or disposing through abortion from female foetuses or killing babies because they are girls or because they have been born against "one child policy" or for any other reason. I do not intend to start discussion on abortion here but I am sure most of us feel offended at least by pictures of baby girls lying in severs in China (for example).

But where does our reverence for life from the birth (or sometimes earlier but let's stick to this) come from? Why do we recognise right to live (so obvious nowadays) of human being? How did it start?

Well, it started with Jews.... In anticity in Europe hellenistic world was all in favour - philosophically and practically - of disposing of unwanted children. Unwanted for various reasons. If the baby in Greece or specially in Rome was born tiny, weak, demaged, ill or just a girl instead of awaited boy it was left to die. It was - according to Roman law - family father's prerogative to decide if the baby is to be kept or to be disposed off. Yet the social values of the society ruled in favour of getting rid of the unwanted babies. Let me give you few examples:

Roman citizen, Hilarion, wrote in a letter to his pregnant wife to Rome in 1 CE: “Know that I am still in Alexandria. And do not worry if they all come back and I remain in Alexandria. I ask and beg of you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I will send it up to you. If you deliver a child [before I get home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it…” 


Aristotele in his Politics writes: “There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state.” (Politics VII.16)

Children with even minor defects were abandoned in woods, thrown into rivers or down the wells. Archeology gives us quite few examples e.g. in Athens when the well from the time of Polis with remains of 175 newborns was found not so long ago.

Another practice - if the unwanted babies were left alive - was maiming them to allow them to beg more efficiently, their legs or arms or eyes were removed and those that survived made better beggers. It was morally justifable for Romans. Here is what Seneca writes about such practices:

 “Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulder pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries may excite laughter ... Let us go to the origin of those ills—a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks—a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children ... What wrong has been done to the Republic? On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out?”



So  where do we take our reverence for life and for not hurting babies from? Well, listen what Tacit had to say about Jewish customs:

In his major work, the Histories, Tacitus attacks the Jews as "wicked," stubborn," and "lascivious."  Turning his attention to the Jewish religion, he notes that:

Among the Jews all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral.
  
Tacitus then lists a number of these Jewish moral perversions.  Among the beliefs he found particularly "sinister and revolting" was the fact that, for Jews, "it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child."

So for one of the most famous Roman historians one of the main sins of Jews was their reverence for life. Jews were keeping all babies who made it into this world. True enough, infant mortality was horrendous, both among Romans and among Jews, but there was no purposful killing of babies who seemed not fit. On the contrary, they were taken care of (as were all baby girls, while to the Romans disposing of them, even healthy ones, was "natural"; it was explicite stated by Roman law in early Republic and did not change until very late empire when Christianity took over). Torah had forbidden killing and life was regarded as God's gift, blessing, it would have been madness and sin to dispose of such a gift, it would mean rejection of blessing.

And, as Roman philosopher and senator, Deo Cassius, has written expressing his disapproval “The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life. In particular ... they do not honor any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence to only one God.” So they could NOT go against this God's given law even if it meant going agains the dominant culture to the extent of clashing with it in the most bloody way.

BTW the excess of young male adults, who could not grow families (as there were not enough women) was one of the reasons responsibles for Roman wars and expansion. They had to push them out of Rome to avoid revolt and thus the empire has started.


So, our reverence for individual life, recognition of individuality that in time gave way to ban on slavery and on torture and was the origin of recognition of individual rights as "natural" all that is taken from Judaism. We think about it as a part of western culture pointing that in many other cultures it was family or clan that mattered and not individual. We think with pride about individual approach, reverence for life, human rights. Yes, it is something to look at with pride but only as long as we will remember when do those values origin from.

 Let me remind the quote from John Adams, the 2nd president of the USA and one of the fathers of American constitution:
“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation ... fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.”