Androgynos

The word is Greek, not Hebrew. It joins anēr, man, to gynē, woman, and Moses Gaster, writing the Jewish Encyclopedia article, took the Greek form as evidence that the notion arrived from Hellenic sources rather than growing inside the tradition. The alternative Greek term, hermaphrodite, never occurs in rabbinic writing at all.

How the rabbinic categories are distinguished

The androgynos is one of a set, and the set is what makes the category legible. My Jewish Learning counts seven designations in the Talmud and is careful about what they are: the rabbis were not using gender in the modern sense of something separable from the body, and each of the seven is marked out by a physical fact rather than by anything a person says about themselves.

The two saris categories are sometimes rendered as Eunuch, and what matters to the rabbis about them and about the aylonit is a presumption of infertility, which throws up its own legal questions. Mishnah Niddah 5:9 sets the test for the aylonit at the age of twenty without the appearance of two pubic hairs, and rules that such a woman may marry but that if her husband dies childless his brother is not obliged to marry her under the law of levirate marriage. Rabbi Yose, who found the androgynos undecidable, said the Tumtum was the easier of the two to place.

What the word meant before the rabbis used it

In ordinary ancient Greek the word first described effeminate men, and Herodotus applies it to a Scythian fortune teller. Plato put it to a new use in the Symposium, where Aristophanes tells of three original kinds of round, four-limbed, two-faced beings, male, female and the union of the two, who were split by Zeus and have been looking for their halves ever since. Only the halves of the andrógynoi seek the opposite sex, which is what the myth exists to explain. The three kinds are given three origins, the men from the Sun, the women from the Earth and the andrógynoi from the Moon, and Aristophanes is not flattering about the last of them, calling their descendants lascivious and adulterous. He also remarks that in his own day androgynos was used only as an insult, meaning an effeminate man or a coward, so the pejorative sense and the philosophical one were already running side by side.

Gaster read the same passage as evidence of a longer route. Plato, he thought, knew the East better than he is given credit for, and the principle of a sexually generated world is not Greek but Indian in origin; the Greek Hermaphroditus of the statues and gems, by contrast, stayed in the West and was unknown to Jewish writers. The figure the rabbinic material actually resembles, on his reading, is the bisexual primeval man of eastern tradition.

How the myth and the ruling stayed apart

Rabbinic literature keeps the mythical figure and the legal one apart, in the aggadah and the halakhah respectively. Genesis Rabbah 8:1 records Rabbi Yirmeya ben Elazar holding that the first human was created an androgynos, reading the verse in Genesis that says male and female He created them, while Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani holds instead that the first human was double-faced and was sawn apart, reading a verse in Psalms about being formed behind and before. The version at Eruvin 19a gives Yirmeya's teaching in terms of two faces rather than two sets of organs, and in the Talmud it is Shmuel's reading that prevails; Gaster traced the double-faced Adam through Eruvin and Berakhot and noted that in the halakhic material only androgynos is used and never the double-faced term.

The resemblance to Plato was noticed early and used against the Jews. Church fathers wrote to refute what Augustine treated as a Jewish fable, and Strabo classed the idea among the damnatae Judaeorum fabulae; Sixtus Senensis gave it a chapter of the Bibliotheca Sacra in a Cologne edition of 1586. Eusebius argued the influence had run the other way, from Genesis to Plato, which Wikipedia records as a misunderstanding. The strangest afterlife of the passage is chemical: Guillaume Menens read Adam androgynus alchemically in a volume of the Theatrum chemicum dated 1660.

Why the androgynos was a legal problem

Halakhah was built for a population of men and women, and applying it to someone in neither class required a ruling on every point. The Mishnah works through them. Like a man, an androgynos dresses as a man, is obligated in all the commandments, marries women, and transmits impurity through white emissions. Like a woman, an androgynos does not share in an inheritance as sons do, does not eat the sacrifices reserved for men, and transmits impurity through red discharge. Like anybody at all, one who strikes or curses an androgynos is liable, and one who kills an androgynos is a murderer. Unlike either, an androgynos is not liable for entering the Temple in a state of impurity.

The category also appears at Chagigah 1:1 on the list of those exempt from appearing at the Temple for the three pilgrimage festivals, alongside the tumtum, women, unemancipated slaves, minors, the deaf, the lame, the blind, the sick and the old. The exemption is not a statement about gender: what the list has in common is that the obligation falls on free adult men in a condition to make the journey. My Jewish Learning notes that the rabbis handled analogous problems elsewhere without difficulty, classing the koi as an animal between wild and domesticated and the etrog as something between a fruit and a vegetable, on the understanding that most categories describe the world imperfectly. The term appears thirty-two times in the Mishnah and two hundred and eighty-three times in the Talmud, and the great majority of those passages are rulings.

The androgynos was not only a Jewish problem. Gaster points out that the figure is a commonplace of classical writing, named by Pliny in the Historia Naturalis and by Gellius in the Noctes Atticae, and given particular attention by the ancient writers on physiognomy, whose treatments were collected by Foerster and printed at Leipzig in 1893. The later halakhic literature kept working on it too, through Isaac Lampronti's encyclopaedia Pahad Yitzhak among others.

How the Greek myth travelled after antiquity

The philosophical strand had a long second life that had nothing to do with halakhah. Marsilio Ficino's Latin Symposium and his commentary De amore brought Aristophanes' speech back into western European reading for the first time since antiquity, and Ficino avoided the word androgyn and read the three kinds as three sorts of soul, tying the splitting of the ball-people to the Fall and their reunion to love. Judah Leon Abravanel tied the myth to Genesis again in Dialoghi d'amore in 1535, matching the lunar origin of the andrógynoi to a soul mixing a masculine intellect from the Sun with a feminine physicality from the Earth.

The court took it up next. Marguerite de Navarre worked the theme of the missing half into her poem Les prisons and her story collection the Heptaméron, and the poet she promoted, Antoine Héroet, published L'Androgyne de Platon in 1542, which ran to fifteen editions by 1568 and made the idea courtly, so much so that by the middle of that century French speakers were calling a spouse their half. Wikipedia records the use the nobility put it to, which was to explain their own changeable attachments as a search for the other half. Bonaventure des Périers took up the punishment of the ball-people in Blason du nombril in 1550 and thought Zeus had gone too far; Pietro Bembo used the figure in Gli Asolani to argue that love is not principally a form of suffering.

The English adjective arrives on the same current. Etymonline dates androgyne to the mid twelfth century from Medieval Latin, androgynal to the 1640s, and androgynous to the 1620s in the sense of womanish, said of a man, with the sense of having both sexes following in the 1650s. The Greek adjective had also been used of baths open to men and women alike, which is the plainest of its senses and the one that vanished.

Why the modern reading is contested

My Jewish Learning presents the rabbinic categories as seven gender designations and notes that queer Jews and allies have in recent decades reread them as a space for nonbinary Jews in the tradition. It is careful about what the rabbis were doing: they were not using gender in the modern sense of a construct distinct from sex, and the seven categories are distinguished by physical facts. The article's own framing is that the reclamation is a project undertaken now, on material that does something else. What the sources agree on is narrower: the tradition knew that not everybody fitted the two classes its law was written for, and it wrote the exceptions down in detail.