The Jewish child : its history, folklore, biology, & sociology / by W.M. Feldman ; with an introduction by Sir James Crichton-Browne.
- William Moses Feldman
- Date:
- 1917
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: The Jewish child : its history, folklore, biology, & sociology / by W.M. Feldman ; with an introduction by Sir James Crichton-Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.
47/492 page 15
![I.] Introduction 15 3. Astral Influences—e.g., one born under Jupiter will be righteous and benevolent^ (see, further, p. 164 et seq.), 4. Circumstances in Connection with the Begetting of the Child.—A woman, says the Talmud, who dur¬ ing sexual congress thinks of some other man is like a canvas upon which an artist has painted the picture of a king. When he was about to paint the face, the king died, and another was declared ruler. The artist was then in a quandary: should he complete his picture to represent the dead or the new monarch ? So it is in her case. God had already created the embryo in the form of its father, and when she thought of the other man the colours became mixed.^ For reasons of that nature marriage was discouraged between a divorced man and a divorcée, for in such a union there are four different thoughts on the marriage-bed.^ This may be an allusion to the phenomenon of telegony (which is still believed by some biologists), according to which a female who had been in the past impregnated by a particular male may, when impregnated long afterwards by another male, give birth to an offspring resembling the first male (see further p. 40). Children begotten during the day will be red.^ Those begotten by candlelight will be epileptic.^ It is said that a woman was once asked why her children were so beautiful, and she answered because her husband was exceedingly modest in his relations with her, which he did not carry out either at the beginning of the night or in the early morning, but in the middle of the night.® Coitus after a debilitating operation like venesection ^ Sabbath 156a. ^ Jer. Taanith, Lev. R. xxiii. ® Pessachim 112a; compare Goethe, Wahlverwandtschaft, part i., ch. 2. ^ Berachoth 596. ® Pessachim 1126 and Kallah R. i. ® Nedarim 206.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18023022_0048.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
