The Signs They Left On Him

About This Talk

Issurei Biah 15 sets out the law of blemished lineage and of the people whose lineage cannot be established. A mamzer is the offspring of the incestuous and adulterous unions listed at the opening of the treatise, with niddah excepted, since that child is blemished but not a mamzer; force, consent, knowledge and ignorance affect only the liability of the adults and never the child's status, and the prohibition is everlasting. The Rambam confines the lashes to a union within marriage, holding that consecration followed by relations is required, against the Ra'avad, the Ramban and Rav Moshe HaCohen, who hold relations alone sufficient. A man who remarries his divorcee after she married another has transgressed, yet the offspring are acceptable. Status follows the mother wherever a gentile, a servant, a maidservant or a gentile woman is the parent, so the child of a gentile or a servant with a Jewish woman is acceptable whether she was married or unmarried, forced or willing, and the Sages accordingly permitted a mamzer to marry a maidservant so that he might free his children and purify their lineage, while marriage to a convert leaves the children mamzerim because the congregation of converts is not called God's congregation. Three grades of status follow: definite, doubtful where a consecration or divorce may not have taken effect, and by Rabbinic decree, as where a woman wrongly told her husband had died remarried and the Sages gave her void second marriage standing for this one consequence. Scriptural law would permit a doubtful mamzer to marry into Israel, since the verse bars one whose status is certain, but the Sages raised the standard, so that certainty may marry certainty while a doubtful mamzer, a shituki and an asufi may marry neither native-born Jewesses nor female mamzerim, may not marry one another, must be separated by a formal bill of divorce if they do, and have only converts left to them. The chapter then limits every route to a worse status: the mother is questioned and believed when she says the father was of acceptable lineage even where most of the city is not, but her word never disqualifies, so a child whose mother was never questioned is a shituki of doubtful status and one whose mother names a disqualified father is only doubtful even when that man agrees; a father's word that his son is a mamzer is accepted from the verse that he shall recognize the firstborn but stops once that son has children; a married woman cannot render her child illegitimate, and one who says she was with a gentile or a servant renders him acceptable; a circulating rumor of adultery does not touch her children because her husband is most often with her; the Rambam reasons in his own voice that doubt alone creates no ervah, since otherwise the Torah's warning against desecrating a daughter would guard against nothing and every orphan would be unable to marry; a foundling in a gentile city is a doubtful gentile whose doubt is split by subject, so that it remains a mitzvah to sustain his life and to dig him out of a collapse on the Sabbath; a child found circumcised, bundled, salted, with eye-paint and an amulet, under a dense tree near the city or in a synagogue beside the public domain is not an asufi at all, since the parents were protecting him from death; parents may not reclaim a child once he has been categorized as an asufi, except in years of famine; and a midwife is believed about a lineage never established until one person objects that she testifies falsely.