ABSTRACT
Physical violence employed by parents against their children has been dealt with recently by many professions within the scientific community. If in the past the prevalent assumption was that parents universally strive for their children’s benefit, scholars have shown that this assumption is not always applicable, and that it is not unknown for parents to conduct themselves brutally towards their offspring. Modern researchers studying this phenomenon provide various kinds of answers to this question: psychiatrists assume that the phenomenon, especially extreme cases of violence against children, stems mainly from the parents being mentally disturbed. Jewish sources provide numerous examples of parental violence against children for the aforementioned reasons. Jewish parents and teachers were not very different in this respect from their gentile neighbours. The corporal punishment administered was on occasion so severe and frightening that it ended in family tragedy.
