Maimonides codified this precept:"A physical disqualification for marriage applies only when it is not of natural causes(literally,"by the hand of Heaven")...but if he were born in this way or became ill, he is fit to enter the Congregation because it was by the hand of Heaven". Therefore, the congenital eunuch is not excluded from marriage."
There is a Talmudic attempt to discover the etiology of the congenital eunuch disorder:"What are the causes?(During her pregnancy) the child's mother baked at noon and drank strong(or diluted) beer." The reasoning here seems to be that the heat of the oven combined with the heat of high noon and drinking beer might have affected the generative organs of the embryo.
Various medical questions regarding the congenital eunuch are left unresolved in the 7a/mud. May he indeed be healed. What is the meaning of the above mentioned"capability of procreation"? Does it refer to his sterility, his impotence, or both? We shall explore these questions in the relation to the following case discussed in the responsa literature of the nineteenth century which became a cause célébre."
THE SON OF A EUNUCH
A seris hamah, named Abraham Nahum, was born in 1838 in a village near Ismir(Smyrna), Turkey. When he grew up, his skin was smooth like that of a woman and he had no trace of a beard. No objection was raised when he married a young Jewish girl in his late adolescence because he was not unlike his peers who had fathered children.'* Since he was only a bahur, an adolescent, no one was suspicious.
Two years later, his wife admitted having had adulterous relations with her husband's brother, Meir Nahum, and with other men. The local bet-din, assumed that Abraham was a saris without verifying his condition and forced him to divorce his wife. They declared her son Jacob a mamzer, because he was presumed to be the issue of adultery and, perhaps, of incest as well. Abraham Nahum took a second wife, and he died a few years later. Jacob was warned by the Jewish community that he could not marry in their midst.
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