Mamzer
Mamzer status (ממזרות, mamzerut) is not synonymous with the traditional western definition of illegitimacy, since it does not include children born to unmarried mothers.
[2] According to Strong's Concordance: "from an unused root meaning 'to alienate'; a mongrel, i. e., born of a Jewish father and a heathen mother".
[3] The Talmud explains the term homiletically as consisting of the words mum (defect) and zar (strange/alien), a euphemism for an illicit union in the person's lineage.
According to the Mishnah, a mamzer is the offspring of a biblically forbidden union for which his progenitors are liable to extirpation at the hands of heaven.
[10] An exception to this rule is when a Jewish man cohabits with a menstruant woman: Although he is liable thereby to extirpation, the child born from such union is not a mamzer.
Any child born to a married woman, even if she is known to have been unfaithful, is presumed to be her husband's, unless she is so promiscuous that such a presumption becomes unsupportable,[14] or if she enters a public relationship with another man.
[15] A child born within 12 months of a woman's most recent meeting with her husband is presumed to be legitimate, since Jewish law believes that in rare cases, a pregnancy can last that long.
Although the biblical passage includes in this up to the tenth generation of the descendants of a mamzer, classical rabbis interpreted this as an idiom meaning "forever".
[26] Rabbis in the Talmud, and those in the Middle Ages, saw fit to spell out that, aside from in questions of marriage, a mamzer should be treated as an ordinary Jew.
An example is a contemporary responsum by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, establishing the impossibility to prove mamzer status in a case where the evidence might appear to be clear-cut.
[35][36] The case involved the daughter of an aguna who had been married by a Haredi rabbi to a husband who subsequently converted to Christianity and refused to participate in a Jewish divorce.
Applying an ancient rule that when a husband and wife are known to be alone together behind a closed door, the law presumes sexual intercourse may well have taken place, Rabbi Yosef concluded that it was possible that the former husband was the daughter's father, and hence, Jewish law, which very strongly construes all evidence in favour of birth within marriage, had to presume that he was.
Rabbi Yosef said, "The ruling therefore must be that there is very great reason to permit this woman to marry and enter the congregation of God, and as it appears to me have I written.
Israeli law tries to prevent the conferring of mamzer status by refusing to allow men other than the husband or recent ex-husband from registering as a child's father without a court order.
[26] In Zechariah 9:6, "mamzer" is referenced similar to that of the nations of Ammon, Moab, Edom, Egypt, Tyre, Zidon, Ashkelon, Gaza, Philistia, etc.
[40] In the modern State of Israel, the law concerning matters of marriage, divorce, and personal status, is partially under the jurisdiction of religious courts.
[41] Israeli religious courts resolve mamzer status by generally ruling that the child was born within the marriage, despite the existence of evidence to the contrary.
[42] Nonetheless, the existence of the category of Mamzer, and the marital impediments inherent to it, is one of the arguments frequently used by Israeli secularists in calling for separation of religion and state, and for the institution of civil marriage.
A similar explanation is offered also for the same nickname as used by another prince from Occitania: Arnaud Manzer [fr], a 10th-century count of Angoulême who also was a bastard.
