A Decorated Ketubbah from Belgrade, 1854

Celebrating the marriage of David ben Menahem Amar and Rachel bat Samuel David Amar on Wednesday, 5 Tishrei 5615 (September 27, 1854).

Decorated ketubbot from the city of Belgrade are exceptionally rare. Jews from Italy and Hungary settled in Belgrade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and were joined by Sephardic Jews after the Turkish conquest in 1521. However, with the decline of the Turkish Empire in the late seventeenth century, the Jews of Belgrade suffered as the community was repeatedly attacked during the Austro-Turkish wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This document, embellished with rose, blue, and green floral borders, comprises the text of the marriage contract at right, the text of the tena’im (engagement agreements) at left, and below, the dowry list. The items in the dowry were apparently displayed and evaluated by experts who signed their names beneath the list (the signatories of the dowry are different from the witnesses who signed the ketubbah and the tena’im).

Provenance

Sold Sotheby’s New York, June 26, 1985, lot 100.

Physical Description

Ink and gouache on paper (22 x 15 1/2 in.; 560 x 393 mm). Two long tears in upper and lefthand edges; short tears in other edges; some abrasion of paint; upper-lefthand corner lost; creasing along fold lines. Glazed, matted, and framed; not examined outside of the frame.

Literature 

Shalom Sabar, The Art of the Ketubbah: Decorated Marriage Contracts from The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 1 (New York: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2022), 330-332.