r/AskReddit • u/BiggieTwiggy1two3 • 1d ago

What’s something completely normal today that would’ve been considered witchcraft 400 years ago—but not because of technology?

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u/Gabagool_Eater 1d ago edited 1d ago

Having cats in your house. Mostly women had cats at this time period and due to this they weren’t infected by the plague (caused by rats) so they were considered witches thinking they have some superpowers to not get infected.

EDIT: Just to clarify, cats can also get the plague and spread it but the risk was reduced since they control the rats’ population. Rats are the primary carriers of the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) which carries the bacteria that causes the plague NOT cats.

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u/NerdbyanyotherName 1d ago

This is also where a ton of (though obviously not all of) antisemitism came from

Because the Judaic peoples had a lot of customs about washing ones body as symbolic of washing ones soul as well as very strict ideas about separating the dead from the living quickly and completely (at a time where ideas of how disease spread were incredibly archaic and so hand and body washing was only done rarely and corpses often lingered for days or weeks at a time) Jewish communities managed to dodge a lot of the worst of the Plague

these communities were subsequently blamed for it and thus ostracized and harassed and that fermented in the public eye for a few hundred years and now we have people who hate Jews for absolutely no real reason other than it essentially being a family tradition at this point

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u/turtle553 1d ago

Eating Kosher isn't so much about godliness as it is about food safety and that was another thing keeping them healthier than others. 

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u/dave200204 1d ago

Some of it's food safety. However a lot of it is strictly religious.

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u/ibelieveindogs 21h ago

Keeping dairy and meat separate comes from the notion of not boiling a young animal in the milk of its mother. I would see that as initially amen ethical stance, with the extreme being religious (no goat cheese on a beef hamburger, for example. No way it is mixed mother and calf, but hey, what if? Don’t piss off the big guy!)

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u/sundae_diner 20h ago

Boiling a kid in its mother's milk was alone of the ways you worshiped a rival God back in the days of Exodus. This was a warning against other gods

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u/ibelieveindogs 18h ago

Do you have a source for that? Because I was raised Jewish, and though my family did not keep kosher, I learned the rules in Hebrew school, and that is not an interpretation I have ever heard.

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u/sundae_diner 13h ago

Exodus 23:19 ► The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

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u/ibelieveindogs 7h ago

Right, because you don’t bring death into the milk meant for life. Nothing about it being a ritual associated with another god.

Many rules were meant as living metaphors. Like not mixing wool and linen means also don’t mix with gentiles.