Were witches infertile mentally ill women?

• AI News Team
• February 15, 2026

​Published on February 15, 2026 1:20 PM GMTMy aunt’s family are ultra orthodox Jews, and I used to stay with them occasionally in Bayit Vegan for Shabbat.
Once I went for a walk with my cousins. Families there sometimes have dozens of children squashed into tiny apartments, and with the streets closed for Shabbat, the road becomes their playground. Hundreds of children thronging everywhere, zooming down the hill on tricycles, skipping rope or playing catch.
Suddenly we see an old unkempt woman screaming at the kids. Not that she’s trying to sleep or to keep off her lawn, but that Hitler should have killed them all, and other similarly vile curses. The children mostly seemed to ignore her, but I was shocked!
My cousin explained: she was the wife of a Rabbi who had never had children. At some point she snapped and started to grab pushchairs off mothers in the street and happily push them along till the petrified mother grabbed it back off her.
Eventually she stopped even trying this and just used to spend her hours screaming and cursing the neighbourhood children. By now the kids were so used to it they faded into the background.
The cultural milieu in Bayit Vegan is probably not so different from a medieval village culture in terms of gender roles and the strong pressure to have large families. It seems likely that mentally ill infertile women in such villages would have manifested their illness in a similar manner.
In today’s enlightened age we recognise such people as mentally ill. But imagine yourself as a villager in a medieval village, and you hear about an old woman snatching babies off their mothers and cursing children. The natural term that comes to mind is a witch, and the natural thing to do when a child goes missing is to search their property and burn them at the stake. Indeed, many times you might find the missing child in the witches house, further confirming your beliefs she was a witch.
I doubt this is the whole story, but this fits well enough that I think there is a very strong chance that this is a large part of the origin of the memetic complex of medieval witches.
Discuss ​Read More