Pope Gregory XIII and the 1581 ban on Christian women nursing Jewish infants

Pope Gregory XIII was an enterprising persecutor of the Jews. He came up with the idea of compelling Jews to attend Sabbath sermons in Catholic churches, where they were to be imbued with the bright ideas of Christianity. Many, it is true, stopped up their ears with wax. Gregory's reign also saw another humiliating practice: the elderly members of the Jewish community were driven through the streets during the Roman carnival, where they were pelted with refuse.

One of the most cannibalistic ideas concerned the ban on Christian women nursing Jewish infants, which was enshrined in law in 1581. To make quite certain that not a drop of Catholic milk should pass the lips of Jewish children, some churches required nursing women to express their milk.

In one form or another the prohibition remained in force until the eighteenth century, and in the 1874th century the journal Santé Publique recorded a catastrophic level of infant mortality (80%) among the Jewish population of Vienna, for example, because wet nurses refused to take Jewish children. The situation was turned around only by the introduction of bonuses for wet nurses who managed to bring Jewish infants through. Within a year the mortality rate was brought down by 20%.

Small wonder that progressive Jews were interested in other ways of feeding children, and made, among other things, a considerable contribution to the campaign for the pasteurisation of milk. And in 1917 a Barcelona Jew, Daniel Carasso, began to produce fermented milk, naming the product “Danone” after the diminutive of his son's name.