Michael Shapiro’s Ketubah Renaissance: The Artful Revival of the Jewish Marriage Contract is a brilliant and beautiful presentation of illustrated Jewish marriage documents created in recent decades.
Shapiro, founder and CEO of ketubah.com, is an enthusiastic and inspiring guide through the history of the ketubah and its current range of representations. As the scholar Shalom Sabar notes in the foreword, the earliest illustrated marriage contract was produced in Austria in 1391. Sparked by the Spanish Expulsion, the custom of decorating the text then spread across Europe and the Middle East, reaching “an artistic peak in leading Jewish communities such as Venice, Rome, Mantua, and Ancona.” After a decrease in popularity in subsequent centuries in Ashkenazic lands, Sephardic Jews carried on the practice.
The flourishing of Jewish communities in Israel and the US during the past few decades, coupled with advancing artistic technology, have led to a resurgence in illustrated ketubahs, which the book demonstrates through sixty examples, helpfully introduced by Shapiro, who also provides biographical information on each artist. Included are wondrous ketubot by Naomi Teplow, Amy Fagin, Jessica Tamar Deutsch, Baruch Sienna and dozens of others.
As the preface notes, beautifying ketubot is in line with a Jewish concept of “hiddur mitzvah.” The principle, the artist David Moss has noted, suggests that “when a joyous commandment requires a physical object for its performance, that object should be a beautiful one if possible.” In a similar vein, The Song of the Sea, Exodus’ fifteenth chapter, contains the verse “this is my God and I will glorify Him.”
From paper-cut to wood-cut to AI-generated images, this volume offers a tapestry of testimonies to not only the love Jewish couples have for each other, but their affinity for the traditional text that reflects covenantal love of the Jewish people and God.
Dr. Stu Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost of Yeshiva University. He has edited or coedited 17 books, including Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity and Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought, and has lectured in synagogues, Hillels and adult Jewish educational settings across the U.S.
