Ketubah

The traditional ketubah is a legal instrument and reads like one. It records a sum owed to the wife if the marriage ends, conventionally two hundred zuz for a first marriage and one hundred for a subsequent one, together with whatever additional amount the husband undertakes. It records the property she brings and on what terms it is held. It obliges him to provide food, clothing and conjugal relations, following the verse in Exodus, and the rabbinic elaboration adds medical care, burial, maintenance of her from his estate after his death, redemption from captivity if she is taken, and provision for her sons to inherit her portion.

It is written in Aramaic, in a set formula, and signed by two witnesses who must be qualified and unrelated. It is given to the wife and is hers to keep, and traditional law holds that a couple may not live together without one, so a lost ketubah is replaced before anything else happens.

The Talmud credits Simeon ben Shetach with the decisive reform: making the obligation a lien on the husband's whole estate rather than a sum deposited with the wife's family. The stated purpose is that divorcing should not be a light matter, since a man ending a marriage has to find the money. A document that reads coldly is doing protective work, and the rabbinic sources say so openly.

A ketubah is handed over, kept in the house and produced only rarely, which makes it the ideal surface for decoration in a tradition cautious about images elsewhere. Illuminated examples survive in quantity from Italy, where the seventeenth and eighteenth century Venetian, Roman and Anconan workshops produced architectural borders, zodiac cycles, biblical scenes and elaborate papercut frames; from the Netherlands; from Iran, where the style is entirely different and the borders are floral and calligraphic; and from the Jewish communities of Cochin and Calcutta. European illuminated examples survive from the medieval period as well, and the workshops that produced them were often the same hands that decorated other communal documents.

The modern practice is a straightforward continuation. Ketubot are commissioned from calligraphers and artists, hung on the wall of the home rather than filed, and constitute a small but genuine contemporary craft market.

The text has moved too. The Conservative movement added the Lieberman clause in the 1950s, a provision submitting a future divorce to a rabbinical court, intended to address the position of a woman whose husband will not give a religious divorce. Reform and other liberal communities use reworded, mutual and egalitarian texts, often alongside or in place of the Aramaic, and same-sex ketubot are written in those communities. The traditional Aramaic form continues unchanged where it is used.