From Emery C. Abbey. The Sexual System and its Derangements. Buffalo NY 1875.
תורה היא, וללמדה אני צריך
Today we start an excursus into the sin of masturbation (or at least male masturbation), which will occupy the Talmud for the next couple of pages. Since the rabbis took this seriously enough to share their opinions of this intimate subject, the least we can do is study what they have to say.
After we familiarize ourselves with the Talmud and the epidemiology of masturbation, we will introduce the eighteenth-century anonymous book Onanaia. More than than any other text in the English speaking world, it made the practice both a moral sin and a medical danger, and we will consider whether its medical claims were correct. Finally, we will discuss the moral status of potential people, and see how, although perhaps at odds with some liberal moral intuitions, the worldview of the Talmud was internally consistent.
Let’s start with some of those talmudic texts.
נדה יג, א
מ"ש נשים ומאי שנא אנשים נשים לאו בנות הרגשה נינהו משובחות אנשים דבני הרגשה נינהו תקצץ
What is different about women and what is different about men [that women are praised for examining for bodily emissions while men are castigated for the same? The Talmud answers:] Women are not susceptible to sexual arousal by this action, and therefore when a woman is diligent to examine herself she is considered praiseworthy; whereas men, who are susceptible to sexual arousal [and may experience a seminal emission as a result of this contact, may not do so,] and the hand of a man who conducts frequent examinations for emissions should be severed…
רבי אליעזר אומר כל האוחז באמתו ומשתין כאילו מביא מבול לעולם…
Rabbi Eliezer says:With regard to a man who holds his penis and urinates,it is considered as though he is bringing a flood to the world, [as masturbation was one of the sins that led to the flood]…
דא"ר יוחנן כל המוציא שכבת זרע לבטלה חייב מיתה…
As Rabbi Yochanan says: Anyone who emits semen for naught is liable to receive the punishment of death at the hand of Heaven
רבי יצחק ורבי אמי אמרי כאילו שופך דמים...רב אסי אמר כאילו עובד עבודת כוכבים...…
Rabbi Yitzchak and Rabbi Ami say: One who emits semen for naught is considered as though he is a murderer…Rav Avi says he is considered to have worshipped idols…
נדה יג, ב
אמר רב המקשה עצמו לדעת יהא בנדוי..איכא דאמרי אמר רבי אמי כל המביא עצמו לידי הרהור אין מכניסין אותו במחיצתו של הקב"ה
...אמר ר' אלעזר מאי דכתיב (ישעיהו א, טו) ידיכם דמים מלאו אלו המנאפים ביד...ת"ש דתניא רבי טרפון אומר יד לאמה תקצץ ידו על טבורו
Rav says: One who intentionally causes himself an erection shall be ostracized...Some say that Rabbi Ami says: With regard to anyone who brings himself into a state of arousal, they do not bring him within the boundary of the Holy One, Blessed be He....
And Rabbi Elazar says, with regard to the severity of this transgression: What is the meaning of that which is written: “And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even when you make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15)? These are those men who commit adultery with the hand [by masturbating]...Come and hear, as it is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Tarfon says: If one’s hand goes to his penis, his hand should be severed upon his navel....
נדה טו, ב
אמר רבי שמעון בן יוחאי ארבעה דברים הקב"ה שונאן ואני איני אוהבן… והאוחז באמה ומשתין מים
…Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says: Four matters the Holy One, Blessed be He, hates, and I do not love them, and they are…one who holds his penis and urinates…
It is clear that not all these rabbis had the same set of concerns. Some equated masturbation with adultery, perhaps assuming it had a deleterious effect on the relationship between husband and wife. Others felt it prevented religious growth (“they do not bring him within the boundary of the Holy One,”) perhaps by prioritizing the physical over the spiritual. And some thought it to be in some way as morally heinous as the worst sin of all - murder. There is not space to consider what modern research has revealed about each of these, but it is the last category - masturbation as murder - that we will consider in some detail later.
Everyone Has Soup
The great Jewish comedian Jackie Mason had a line in his routine which went something like this: “Why do they show so much sex in movies? Because everyone is having sex. So what? Everyone has soup, and they never show that in movies.” He could have said the same thing about the topic of today’s page of Talmud.
Way back in 1974 the Journal of Sex Research reported that over 75% of male and female college students reported that they presently masturbated, although way more men (89%) than women (61%) did so. A 2008 paper from a much larger British general population found that
ninety-five percent of men and 71.2% of women reported that they had masturbated at some point in their lives. Seventy-three percent of men and 36.8% of women reported masturbating in the four weeks before their interview, while approximately half of the men (51.7%) and one in six women (17.8%) reported masturbating in the previous seven days. This gender difference in prevalence was highly statistically significant…
A 2010 paper (Sexual behaviors, relationships, and perceived health among adult men in the United States; Results from a National Probability Sample) asked over 2,500 men of all ages about the topic. It reported that
Masturbation was a significant component of the sexual repertoire for men across all age groups, with rates of solo masturbation in the past 90 days being consistently above 60% among men through age 59 years, and with rates at approximately 50% through age 69. Masturbation rates were highest among those in the 25–39 year age groups, peaking at 95.5% of men who described themselves as single and dating and being above 80% for all unmarried men in this age category. The lowest rate of masturbation was observed among married men over 70 years of age (26.89%)
“The result of self-abuse is always—mind you always—that the boy after a time becomes weak and nervous and shy, he gets headaches and probably palpitations of the heart, and if he still carries on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot. A very large proportion of our lunatics have made themselves mad by indulging in this vice although at one time they were sensible cheery boys like you and me.”
“ היינו דאמרי אינשי איהו בקרי ואתתי בבוציני
There is a popular folk saying: He uses pumpkins and his wife uses cucumbers...”
“האיתתיה בביציני פ’ האיש אם לא ימצא אשה לזנותה נוקב בקרא נקב קטן לזנות בו וכך האשה אם לא תמצא זכר נעשה מיקשואין מקים זכרות לזנות בו
”
“Man is not the only mammal to masturbate, it is common to most primates, dogs, cats, bulls, horses, shrews, rats, hamster, deer and even whales.”
Onanism and “Onania: The Heinous sin of self pollution”
As a proof text for its disapproval of the practice, the Talmud cites the story of Onan (Gen 38) the son of Judah. He refused to impregnate Tamar, his dead-brother’s widow in fulfillment of levirite marriage, choosing instead another option.
וַיֵּדַע אוֹנָן כִּי לֹּא לוֹ יִהְיֶה הַזָּרַע וְהָיָה אִם־בָּא אֶל־אֵשֶׁת אָחִיו וְשִׁחֵת אַרְצָה לְבִלְתִּי נְתָן־זֶרַע לְאָחִיו׃
But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother.
וַיֵּרַע בְּעֵינֵי ה’ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיָּמֶת גַּם־אֹתוֹ׃
What he did was displeasing to God, and He took his life also.
Frontispiece of the sixth edition, London 1722.
Most of the rabbinic commentaries interpret this act as coitus interruptus rather than masturbation, though there is some overlap of meaning in later rabbinic sources. But over the last couple of centuries onanism and masturbation have been used as synonyms. One of the reasons for that is a little book published anonymously in London around 1712. It had the meandering title Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual Pollution and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. As Thomas Laquer points out in his Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, this book “actually invented a new disease and a new highly specific, thoroughly modern and nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame and anxiety.” The book went through dozens of editions, and was “the first work to bring masturbation to the world’s attention.” But as Laquaer notes, that attention came with a legacy:
a medical tradition that held that excess of any kind was harmful; a link to the abject, the silly, the derisive from classical culture; an association with Christianity’s and Judaism’s revulsion towards birth control; a family tie, in some Jewish and many Christian texts, to sodomy and natural vice, a solid foundation in the long Christian tradition of suspicion of the flesh and its pleasure from which the Protestants and liberal Catholics who created modern masturbation wanted to distance themselves.
The book warned of both the physical and religious “afflictions” that “fall on those who are or have been guilty of the sinful practice of self-pollution.” Here are just a couple of sentences on the former:
In the first place, it manifestly hinders the growth, both in boys and girls, and few of either sex, that in in their youth commit this sin to excess for any considerable time, come ever to that robustness or strength, which they would have arrived to without it. In men as well as boys, the very first attempt of it has often occasioned a phimosis in some, and a paraphymosis in others; I shall not explain these terms any further, let it suffice the they are accidents which are very painful and troublesome, and may continue to be tormenting for some time, if not bring on ulcers and other worse symptoms…whoever wants to know the signification [sic] of those words, a surgeon will inform him…
It won’t come as a surprise that the book was full of what we recognize as quackery mixed with the hope of making some easy money. It encouraged readers to buy various potions and medicaments that “are to be had only at the said bookseller, at his shop…near Cheapside.” (To avoid counterfeits, we are told that the real stuff is “sealed up with a same coat of arms” as found in the book.) The wonderfully named Strengthening Tincture (also known, and I’m not making this up, as the Prolific Powder) not only corrected the “acrimony of the humors” but
prevented the falling of them down upon the glanduls [sic] in the urethera and parts contiguous, which cause Gonorrheas’ Gleetings, emissions of seed upon stool or in making water nocturnal pollutions, external redness outings of mucus or a moisture and the like in men…and in women on the glans in the vagina, causing the whites, bearing down, or relaxation of the womb, pain or weakness in the back and the like….
But wait…there’s more. The last paragraph of the book is so wonderful that I just have to share it with you in the original. Enjoy.
The popularity and influence of Onania cannot be overstated. By its tenth edition it had sold over 15,000 copies and was reprinted in 1724 in the American colonies, to be read by the Puritans who had settled there. “Just over two decades after its initial notice in a humble tract, the new sin and its neologism made their way into the first of the great eighteenth-century encyclopedias. “Onania” and “onanism” had become nouns worthy of the definition of so intellectually ambitious a work as Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia.” It was not until 1900 that germs replaced self-pollution as the cause of consumption and spinal tuberculosis. “Modern biological science did not give up on the sexual vice of modernity until well into the twentieth century, and even then, it maintained a foothold through the social sciences.”
The medical effects of Masturbation
The rabbis of the Talmud declared masturbation to be sinful. But is it medically harmful? In a 2007 review on the topic, Roy Levin of the University of Sheffield in England noted that
Human sexual activity has often been negatively promoted as causing disease, dysfunction and disruption. The literature is awash with articles on the pathologies of sex. However, in the last few years a number of studies have been published that reveal the effects of sexual arousal and orgasm induced either by coitus or masturbation on the health and well-being of both males and females in terms of their having maintenance functions and preventative (prophylactic) functions. There is evidence that coital orgasms give greater sexual satisfaction and more benefits than those from masturbation although the actual physical intensity of the orgasm may be greater in the latter. There are still many unknowns – how much influence has sexual activity in the better mortality statistics for married as opposed to single individuals, how important is the influence of diet on cancer of the reproductive tract especially the prostate, how does orgasm in males increase their white cell numbers and does it also occur in women, does exposure to pathogen-free normal ejaculates influence cervical cancer, is the stimulation of the periurethral glans crucial to obtain vaginally induced coital orgasms, does sexual abstinence strengthen or weaken relationships, and how does coitus influence the regularity and ovulatory menstrual cycles – these being just some of the questions waiting to be answered.
In other words, it’s complicated. But here are some of his conclusions:
(i) The magnitude of the prolactin released following coital orgasm appears to be greater than that released by masturbatory orgasms in both males and females, but it’s not certain if this is this case, and even if it is, the physiological significance is not yet clear.
(ii) Masturbation (and nocturnal emissions) might be mechanisms to ensure the maintenance of a fertile ejaculate independent of the proclivities of female acceptance for coitus, since there is evidence that if ejaculation is not experienced for a period as short as 5 – 18 days both the quality and quantity of the spermatozoa decrease.
(iii) Masturbation-induced arousal increases the absolute number of leukocytes, especially natural killer cells involved in attacking infected cells, but the T-cell (involved in cell-mediated immune responses) and B-cell (involved in humoral mediated responses) populations remained unaffected. Sexual arousal and orgasm appears to enhance some functions of the immune system rather than depressing it. (As yet a similar study has not been undertaken in females.)
(iv) A 2004 study examined the relationship between the number of ejaculations and prostate cancer in 29,342 U.S. men aged 46 to 81 years. Most categories of ejaculation frequency were unrelated to the risk of prostate cancer but high ejaculation frequency was related to a decreased risk of total prostate cancer. The mechanism of the possible protection that ejaculations may have is unknown, but one suggestion was that chronic contact of the glandular cells with their luminal secretions may be conducive to carcinogenesis. A 1988 study concluded that men who developed prostate cancer had lower rates of penile vaginal coitus at age less than 50 years than age-matched controls and also had a greater frequency of masturbation.
A more recent review of a possible link between masturbation and prostate cancer identified sixteen studies on the topic. Seven reported a protective effect linked to masturbation or higher incidence of ejaculation per month and the risk of prostate cancer. Three articles suggested a causal effect by reporting a moderate or higher correlation between masturbation and cancer. Six articles reported no significant relations (protective or causal) between masturbation and prostate cancer risk. No significant trends with respect to population location or study methodology were found. So for now, the data is all over the place. No one knows.
From Aboul-Enein B, Bernstein J, Ross M. Evidence for masturbation and prostate cancer risk. Do we have a verdict? Sex. Med. Rev 2016: 4;229-234.
We now turn to the last topic. The rabbis equated masturbation with other pretty bad sins. To the modern mind it may seem a bit much, but their worldview considered the loss of potential people to be morally (if not legally) criminal in a way that we usually don’t.
Potential People and the Abortion Debate
Way back in 1984 I read Michael Tooley’s Abortion and Infanticide, which examines the philosophical issues on the morality of these two practices. It had a powerful impact on me, not so much because of its topic, but rather because of the rigor with which the author addressed the issue. In terms of a book that teaches the importance of clear thought and logical reason, it remains hard to beat.
Anyway there are two long chapters in the book that address the arguments from potential persons and possible persons. These are sometimes invoked as reasons to prohibit abortion. One argument (and there are many versions) goes like this:
Abortion is wrong not because it kills an innocent human being or a person. It is wrong because it kills a potential person. It prevents a bunch of cells from developing into an actual person and we can all agree that it is wrong to kill an actual person.
But hold on, says Tooley. The developing embryo will only develop into an actual person if all the conditions are correct.
If a human embryo is only, or at most, something that will develop into a person if not interfered with, it is difficult to see how it can be wrong to destroy it for that reason, unless it is also wrong to disrupt a system of objects so interrelated that the system will, if not interfered with give rise to a human. (p329).
But when (and where) do we believe the potential to be of moral significance? Consider a separate egg and sperm in two petri dishes side by side. The contents of those two dishes is a potential person too - only they must be mixed together and implanted in a woman. Most people would say that it is not morally wrong to fail to unite the zygotes and implant the egg. But why is that “potential” morally different from a growing implanted embryo? At most it is a difference of degree, not of kind.
If it is seriously wrong to destroy a human zygote inside a woman, and is so because one is thereby destroying an ‘almost active’ potentiality for giving rise to a person, then it must be almost as seriously wrong to destroy the ‘almost active’ potentiality associated either with an isolated human zygote, or with a system consisting of a normal woman and a collection of spermatozoa. The potentiality associated with the latter could, however, be destroyed by means of spermicide. The question, then, is whether the anti-abortionist is prepared to maintain that the destruction of the sperm, given the presence of willing and able women, is seriously wrong. If not, it seems that he cannot be justified in holding that it is seriously wrong to destroy the “almost active’ potentiality inherent in biologically unified potential persons. (p183-184.)
There are of course many arguments to be made as to why abortion might be morally wrong, but Tooley is certainly onto something here. This particular argument only takes us as far as showing that all potential people, including sperm and eggs that are not yet fertilized, are to be actualized. And today, that’s not what, when asked, people really believe. But the rabbis of the Talmud did.
The Talmudic View on Potential People
Here then, is where the Talmud - and the rabbinic tradition - would come to a quite different conclusion from Tooley and others who believe that there is nothing morally wrong with failing to unite an egg and sperm to get the whole potential person thing going. And it is recognized in the Talmud’s discussion today on the sin of self-pollution. Indeed, every potential person is one that should be actualized, and failure to do so is seen as the moral equivalent of murder, for there is no difference in moral standing between a potential person and an actual one. (True, the abortion debate in Judaism is way more complicated than that, and it recognizes that in many cases the rights of the fetus do not override the rights of its mother. But as a rule, abortion is a procedure undertaken only with reluctance and in a limited set of circumstances. It’s certainly not available on demand. Because the fetus is a potential person.)
Thomas Laqueur (p123) sums it up perfectly: the “spilling of seed to prevent conception or for pure pleasure is almost irrelevant in the light of the cosmic harm such an act perpetrates.” That’s precisely the point, and the place in the discussion where traditional Jewish thought and the kind of arguments made by Tooley diverge. Whether that is enough to condemn almost the entire population of men and women as murders and idle-worshippers (כאילו שופך דמים...כאילו עובד עבודת כוכבים) is another question. But there is indeed an internal consistency in a rabbinic outlook that considered all human seed as potential people.
