Thus, the rabbinical court revealed the double doubtfulness of his status as a congenital eunuch. As a result of these doubts, which were butressed by other arguments supported by relevant halakhic precedents, R. Palach and his bet din declared that the presumed congenital eunuch, Abraham Nahum, was the father of Jacob! The rabbinic judges propounded an alternative solution that Jacob's mother might have become pregnant from a gentile when she was sleeping around during the first years of her marriage to Abraham.'® In either event, Jacob and his sons were completely cleansed of the taint of mamzerut.
At first sight it would seem that the rabbinic court's attribution of the fatherhood of Jacob to a seris hamah is another instance of the use of a legal fiction in order to save children from declared mamzerim. There are a number of such precedents of the use of this technique to help such unfortunate persons:
The Talmud relates that Rabba Tosfaah, a seventh generation Babylonian Amora, promulgated the legal fiction that a fetus may remain in its mother's womb for twelve months. Therefore, if a woman gave birth within a year of her husband's departure, we may attribute the paternity of the child to her spouse.
Decisors of the 19th and 20th centuries used the legal fiction of reassigning paternity in a manner similar to that of R. Palache in the case of Abraham Nahum. The respondent, usually supported by a bet din, decided that the husband of the mother(or a gentile) is the father of the child, whose legitimacy is thereby established. This halakhic technique was employed retroactively in purifying four generations of mamzerim on the island of Corfu by Chief Rabbi Elyashar and, in a similar fashion, by other scholars such as Rabbi Jacob Moshe Toledano of Alexandria.”
As we have noted, the 7almud neither records a specific definition of the congenital eunuch nor presents an explicit description of the abnormality of his genitalia. It does, however, ascribe to him certain secondary characteristics some of which are explicable by modern medical science. A