Q&A: Secondary Forbidden Relatives
Secondary Forbidden Relatives
Question
Hello and blessings,
I have three questions on the same topic:
1. Does the category of “secondary forbidden relatives” apply only to men with the women in the wife’s family, or also to women with the men in the husband’s family?
2. Does a union with a “secondary forbidden relative” produce mamzerim?
3. In contemporary language, can all the endless details be summarized simply like this: “A prohibition on sexual relations within the family, whether biological or created by marriage (even if the marriage has ended), up to the level of cousins, except for a niece (but not a nephew), siblings without a blood relationship, and in the case of widowhood only (not divorce), also a brother-in-law or sister-in-law”? (Of course this does not distinguish between the different levels of prohibition, only the practical bottom line.)
Thank you very much!
Answer
1. I’m not sure I understood the question. Are you asking about a woman who is forbidden to men from her husband’s family, or about a man in relation to the women of his own family? In general, I think it is symmetrical, even though the usual discourse always puts the man at the center. If so, his father’s wife, the wife of his grandson, and his great-granddaughters are forbidden to him under the law of secondary forbidden relatives. That is from the man’s own family.
2. Rabbinic mamzerim, in Maimonides (Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 15:10) and in the Talmud, exist only in the case of a woman who heard that her husband had died and then married another.
3. That’s beyond me. But that definition does not seem exhaustive to me. There are secondary forbidden relatives who are infinitely many generations removed from me (my great-great-great-grandmother.