Order Robert Spencer’s new book, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It: HERE.
As humanity descends once again into the madness of antisemitism, the Talmud once again has come in for particular abuse, with charges that its hatred of the unbelievers, and commands to destroy them, makes the Qur’an look like a love letter to non-Muslims. This is dangerous nonsense, as Antisemitism: History and Myth explains, but particularly in our absurd age, that doesn’t stop it from spreading.
While some of the charges against the Talmud are quite ancient, a new one has appeared in recent years: the Talmud, we’re told, provides justification for today’s fashionable gender madness by teaching that there are no fewer than eight genders. This is supposedly all part of the larger Jewish effort to subvert and destroy Gentile society.
This claim apparently originated among leftist Jews, although Jew-haters have eagerly picked it up. In November 2015, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published an article entitled “The 8 Genders of the Talmud,” which began by noting that “the Jewish obligation to observe commandments is traditionally divided along male/female lines: men pray three times daily, while women don’t have to; men put on tefillin, while women do not,” and then delivered the punch line: “But what if we told you that the foundation for all this was wrong? That Judaism recognized not two, but as many as eight genders?”
The article goes on to explain that “the Mishnah describes half a dozen categories that are between male and female, such as saris or ailonit—the terms refer to a non-reproductive version of the male or female body, respectively—and categories that refer to ambiguous or indeterminate gender.”
Then the claim is made: “these terms seem to provide the refreshing view that a binary view of gender in Judaism is relatively recent.”
This view has become popular in circles that find it affirming of their own choices. In October 2022, a Jewish writer went through the Talmud’s alleged teaching about eight genders and concluded that “the rabbis never question that a variety of different kinds of nonbinary bodies exist in the world. And for some rabbis, being born into a particular body is akin to saying that a person’s body was created by God. We see statements that assert that the born eunuch was created by the ‘hand of heaven.’”
This is, however, an example of reading into a text what one wishes to find there. The Talmud doesn’t actually delineate six or eight genders at all. Another writer who went through the Talmudic passages that are used to buttress the claim that the Talmud teaches eight genders found that the Talmud says nothing of the kind. One of the supposed eight genders tumtum, “lacking sexual characteristics,” is not a “distinct gender category,” but is actually “a doubt concerning whether the individual in question is a male or a female.” The other categories beyond male and female are likewise all males or females who have a deformity, have suffered an injury, or are otherwise unable to function normally as men or women.
This does not, however, create any new genders, and the author thus concludes:
Reading modern ideas into the Torah is nothing new and is often an integral part of how Torah is learned throughout the generations. What is particularly frustrating about this instance is not modern ideas about gender being read into the Talmud, but the thin textual support upon which these readings are based and then presented to unwitting readers of JTA and other publications as fact. The Talmud does in fact acknowledge diversity in sexual characteristics and even the inability of the gender binary to completely encompass the reality of human sexual function. The claim of 6 (or 8) Talmudic genders however, requires reading Talmudic sources extremely liberally (perhaps even dishonestly) to reach a predetermined conclusion and does a disservice to the actual conversation there is to be had about the Talmudic view of sex and gender.
The people who are spreading this claim about the Talmud, however, are not interested in having an “actual conversation.” All they want to do is vilify Jews, and the obvious insanity and destructiveness of the trans ideology, blamed once again upon the world’s scapegoat, will do a great deal to accomplish that.
