San Antonio, TX - In a San Antonio chapel last August, after reciting their wedding vows and exchanging their rings, Sally and Mark Austin’s minister asked them to sign a document. It was a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract.
The Austins’ was not an interfaith marriage. Nor was their ceremony some sort of multicultural mashup. Both Sally and Mark are members of Oak Hills Church, a nationally known megachurch. They were using the ketubah as a way of affirming the Jewish roots of their faith.
In so doing, the Austins are part of a growing phenomenon of non-Jews incorporating the ketubah, a document with millennia-old origins and a rich artistic history, into their weddings. Mrs. Austin, in fact, first learned about the ketubah from her older sister, who had been married five years earlier with not only a ketubah but the Judaic wedding canopy, the huppah.
Such sentiments have been reshaping the market for ketubot (the plural in Hebrew) in the past decade. Michael Shapiro, an observant Jew from Toronto who sells artistic ketubot through the Web site ketubah.com, said he had seen the non-Jewish share of his customers rise from zero to about 10 percent. He is forming a spinoff site, artvows.com, that concentrates on non-Jewish consumers.
Mr. Shapiro said, the concept of marital sanctity they expressed is one he hears from many gentile buyers.
“There’s an idea of this being significant and lasting, a nod to something greater at work in a couple having come together,” he said in a telephone interview. “For some, it’s about God and faith. For others, it’s almost a sense of a miracle. In Jewish terms, we have the Yiddish word bashert, for ‘meant to be, intended for each other.’ ”
What makes the ketubah boom among non-Jews more striking is that even for Jews the present concept of a ketubah - simultaneously a work of fine art and a religious document - took centuries to develop and spread.
The earliest known version of a Jewish marriage contract dates to the fifth century B.C.E. in Egypt. Roughly 1,000 years later, during the Talmudic period in Palestine and Babylon, a formally codified version of the ketubah emerged.
And in its original form, far from declaring marriage as an everlasting bond, the ketubah largely served to protect a wife’s right to financial support in the event of a divorce, which under traditional Jewish law is entirely a husband’s decision. To this day, the standard Orthodox ketubah still contains language requiring a divorced man to pay his ex-wife “200 silver zuz.”
Sephardic Jews, though, wrote ketubot with specific provisions for each marriage. And, of more enduring aesthetic importance, they began to illustrate the documents elaborately with images and calligraphy. With the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, refugees carried that artistic tradition to Italy, Germany and Holland, where the decorative ketubah began to seep into Ashkenazi culture.
But the style never reached into the Eastern European heartland of Jewry - which itself was the source of most of America’s Jewish immigrants - and by the mid-20th century the ketubah was back to where it had started as a document of religious law to be signed and stowed away.
Submitted by andie531 on Mon, 2011-02-14 04:46
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