Solomon and the mysterious case of two mothers and their babies

The story goes that during the reign of King Solomon, there were two mothers who gave birth to baby boys at more or less the same time. One baby died, while the other survived, and the mother of the deceased child stealthily exchanged babies, claiming the surviving one as her own. Nobody could tell which baby belonged to which mother, so the king was appealed to for his judgement.

There is a magnificent depiction of the whole drama in the form of an etching by the engraver Gustave Dore, showing king Solomon instructing his swordsman to bisect the child (ne’do-gedacht!) and give half to each mother. We see the true mother clutching at the king’s robes, while the false mother stands by in a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ posture. King Solomon, brimming with saychel, knows that only the true mother would want the baby to be spared at all costs, so he promptly has the child returned to its rightful parent.

King Solomon was undoubtedly a wise fellow, as the Solomon Test proves, so I am curious to know how he would have intervened in another mix-up of babies which occurred more than twenty centuries later, in a Johannesburg Maternity home. The story goes like this:

Two ladies, both classified as ‘elderly primigravidae’ (that is to say, having their first child over the age of forty), gave birth to little boys on the same day. To forestall any anxiety on your part, I hasten to add that there was a much more felicitous outcome to this mix-up than in the case of Mother A versus mother B in the court of king Solomon. In the modern-day example, the two little boychiks who arrived were both bonny infants who grew into healthy Jewish doctors, much loved, not only by their mothers and fathers, but by the rest of their mishpoches.

Nevertheless, at the time of the mix-up, a state of hysteria gripped the Frangwen Nursing Home, where both ladies shared a room. To appreciate the crisis, you should know that the two ladies had similar-sounding names. One was Mrs Berelowitz and the other Mrs Boruchowitz. Normally, this would not have been a problem, but one of the nurses, whose responsibility it was to write the babies’ names on a strip of tape wrapped round their tiny wrists, labelled the one as ‘Baby Ber’ and the other as ‘Baby Bor’.

Maybe the nurse couldn’t be bothered to inscribe their full surnames on the tape, or maybe she had a touch of dyslexia, but the end result was that the ‘e’ and the ‘o’ were virtually indistinguishable. This meant that the two little monarchs, having been briefly whisked away to be topped and tailed, were returned with no clear guidance as to which baby belonged to which mother.

You would think that a mother would recognise her own child, but this is to underestimate the blind panic which overtook Mrs Berelowitz, whose senses had been dulled by the anaesthetics and analgesics which she had been given. For her part, Mrs Boruchowitz had no hesitation in recognising the father’s large ears and angry pouting expression in the features of her little darling, but this did nothing to calm Mrs Berelowitz.

Eventually, the renowned obstetrician, Dr Seymour Gluckman, who had delivered both babies and whose Hebrew name, incidentally, was Shlomo, was recalled from his well-deserved shlof in order to adjudicate. There had been no mistake. The right baby had been returned to Mrs Berelowitz.

To counter the myth that anyone called Solomon is a chochem, I must mention another Solomon of my acquaintance, the late Solly Bernstein, who was not only a dandy, but a nar and a shlechte to boot. Which all goes to show that you can’t tell anything from a name.