A Decorated Marriage Contract, Surabaya, Indonesia: 1916

Recording the marriage of Moses son of Shraga to Leah daughter of Jacob on Sunday 3 Sivan 5676 [= June 4, 1916].

The only known decorated ketubbah from Indonesia

Surabaya is Indonesia's second-largest city, and the capital of the province of East Java. After the Dutch East India Company took over the city in 1743, Surabaya became a major trading center under the Dutch colonial government. In the 1850's, the traveler Jacob Saphir, an emissary from Jerusalem, became the first to write about the Jewish community in Indonesia after a local Jew told him about twenty Jewish families living in Jakarta and several more in Surabaya and Semarang.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of Baghdadi Jews settled in Surabaya and soon became the dominant component of the Jewish community there. They were meticulous in their adherence to traditional ritual observance and maintained close commercial and social ties with their relatives in Bombay, Calcutta, and Rangoon. It is therefore not surprising that the decorative motifs employed to ornament this marriage contract are typical of those found on ketubbot from the Baghdadi community of Calcutta.  The influence of the Calcutta Jewish community is also reflected in the dowry which is indicated in rupees.