Saris

Obligation in this system is gendered, which is what makes such a category necessary in the first place. Commandments, inheritance, marriage and ritual duty are assigned by sex, so somebody the two ordinary classes do not describe has to be placed before the law can operate at all. My Jewish Learning, whose account of the rabbinic designations was written with a contribution from Rabbi David Seidenberg, is careful about what that placing is: the rabbis were not using gender in the modern sense of a construct held apart from the body, and each designation they drew is marked out by a physical fact.

Why the saris is split by cause

The literature separates two kinds. A person who does not go through male puberty naturally is a saris hamah; a person in the same position through human intervention, whether deliberate or accidental, is a saris adam. The distinction carries different marriage law, and the sources treat the two as different legal cases rather than as one condition arrived at by two roads.

Wikipedia's article adds a point about practice: castration was known in the cultures around ancient Israel, and the ancient Hebrews did not practise it. The saris adam enters the halakhic literature largely as a person to whom something was done, often elsewhere, and not as the product of a Jewish institution. That is one reason the English word eunuch sits badly on the term. It carries courts, household offices and a job description with it, and the Hebrew word carries a status the law has to work out.

The third route is developmental and is fixed by an age. A person assigned male at birth who has not reached sexual maturity by twenty, the sign for which the sources give as bringing forth two pubic hairs, counts as a saris on that basis alone. The test is physical, checkable and blunt. Nothing dates any of it: the Mishnah carries the term, Isaiah carries it, and no source traced for this entry fixes a year for either.

Why the saris is grouped with the aylonit

The aylonit is identified female at birth and develops no secondary female characteristics at puberty, and the two terms travel together through the literature. What the rabbis found significant about both, on My Jewish Learning's reading, is a presumption of infertility and the legal complications that follow from it, rather than appearance in itself.

Mishnah Niddah 5:9 shows the machinery working. A woman of twenty who has not grown two pubic hairs brings proof of her age, and from that point holds the status of an aylonit. She may still marry. If her husband dies childless, his brother is not obliged to marry her under the law of levirate marriage, and she neither performs halitzah nor enters that marriage, because no child was expected of the union to begin with. The ruling settles what the law can require of a household.

The saris occupies the same position from the other side. Neither term describes what a person takes themselves to be, and neither is a word anybody in the sources uses of themselves. Tumtum and Androgynos, the designations usually listed beside them, are drawn the same way, from what an examination can and cannot establish.

How marriage rulings treat a saris adam

Marriage is where the split between the two kinds does its heaviest work. A saris hamah may marry without restriction. A saris adam may not marry a Jewish woman, and the reasoning Wikipedia reports from the sources attaches to the wife: the concern recorded is that she may commit adultery as a consequence of his infertility. A saris adam already married when he was castrated is required to divorce.

Set beside the aylonit, who may marry although childlessness is expected of the match, the two rulings do not line up. Infertility disqualifies in one direction and not in the other, and the reason given for the harder ruling is an expectation about somebody else's conduct.

The term belongs with the categories a legal system draws rather than with anything a person claims. Two people in identical physical condition are placed differently according to how they arrived there, which is a question no account of identity would think to ask. The Hebrew word is the same in both cases; the ruling is not.

What Isaiah promises the saris

The word is not confined to the legal material. Isaiah 56 addresses the saris directly, and it is the one passage in the sources for this entry where the category is spoken to rather than ruled on. The prophet tells the saris not to say "I am a withered tree", and promises those who keep the sabbaths "an everlasting name that shall not perish".

Wikipedia files the passage under a heading for references in the holy texts and gives no other. The condition attached to the promise is keeping the sabbaths, which is something a saris can do, in place of a lineage, which is the thing the law assumes he cannot supply.

The promise takes its force from exactly the disability the halakhah records. A house without descendants was the standard image of a name coming to an end, and the passage answers that image with a name of another kind. The legal literature and the prophetic passage are doing opposite things with the same word, one working out obligations and the other addressing a person, and both are part of what the term carries.

Which other things the name saris carries

Saris is also a European surname, and the two words have nothing to do with each other. Geneanet, drawing on the second edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names published in 2022, gives the Dutch surname as a short form of the personal name Sesaris, from the Latin Caesarius, a Christian saint's name, and files the neighbouring Sarisky as a Slovak and Czech habitational name for somebody from Šariš in eastern Slovakia. Its database holds records for close to nine thousand people carrying the name.

Baby-name pages add a third reading. One such page glosses Saris as Hebrew in origin, derived from sar, prince or chief, associates it with Sarah, and makes no mention of the rabbinic category at all. That derivation is not the one the halakhic sources use, and nothing connects it to them. The result is a search term that returns a legal status, a Dutch family name and a name-meaning page in the same handful of results, which is the ordinary fate of a short transliterated word.

Nobody has counted people in this category, and nobody could: it is a ruling about a person, and no one registers under it. The Eunuch entry covers the wider history the English translation drags in, and the seven rabbinic designations are set out in full on the Tumtum page.