Jewish Studies Research Guide

The Art of the Ketubbah includes high-quality color photographs that document the rich variety of decorating and calligraphic styles used by Jewish communities to enhance the ancient text formulas they shared. These contracts reveal social customs, family relationships, economic situations, and a community's interactions with the world around it, spanning thirty-seven countries on four continents from the 10th through the 21st centuries. The catalogue includes 472 full entries, plus two addenda -- one of 50 more recently acquired ketubbot and the other of 45 ketubbot from the Cairo Genizah. About one-third of the ketubbot in the collection originate from Italy. The remaining two-thirds include those from elsewhere in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. The earliest ketubbah in the catalogue is from Fustat, Egypt, dated 1023, while the latest is from New York, 2012. The high-quality color photographs, comprehensive indexes, and detailed scholarly commentary on each ketubbah in the collection make this catalog valuable to scholars and the general public alike.

"The custom of illuminating the traditional Jewish marriage contract, the ketubbah, developed over the last four centuries into a rich and varied form of Jewish folk art. This book offers a broad selection from one of the outstanding collections of ketubbot, representing Jewish communities from the Near East to Northern Europe. It focuses particularly on the ketubbot of Italy, where the art of the illuminated ketubbah found its most beautiful expression during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the influence of Renaissance and Baroque art." "Co-produced with the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, home to one of the largest collections of ketubbot, this book also offers a fascinating account of Jewish marriage customs and a vivid picture of diverse Jewish communities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Epstein, Louis M. The Jewish Marriage Contract: A Study in the Status of the Woman in Jewish Law. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1927. xvii, 316 pp. Reprint available December, 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. 1-58477-464-9. Cloth. $85. * A cogent and compelling examination of the history and significance of the Jewish marriage contract, the Ketubah, with extensive notes in Hebrew and English. As Epstein notes in the preface, the Ketubah offers an excellent introduction to the character of Jewish marriage because it is not a sentimental, rhetorical or subjective text. Instead, it is "a legal document embodying the essential points agreed upon by the parties and sanctioned by the law as to the manner of their living together as husband and wife" [2]. This work will interest those concerned with property rights, family, divorce, and the evolution of betrothal and marriage.

100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World features stories of Jewish brides from six continents, highlighting diverse customs and rituals related to weddings now and in the past. The stories, written by brides, their relatives, clergy, and other intimates, cover similarities and differences across the Jewish diaspora, from courtship and betrothal to pre-wedding customs, the wedding ceremony, and beyond. With stories from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, this collection of intimate personal testimonies will surprise and inspire. A Jewish wedding after conversion in Madagascar, a reunion of Holocaust survivors in Sweden, a shipboard romance initiated by a celebrity, these stories from 83 countries describe Jewish wedding traditions, some familiar and others eye-opening, in a multitude of cultures and settings, past and present. 100 Jewish Brides offers intimate glimpses into the worlds of brides and their families based on their own written accounts. It represents opportunities to learn how Jewish lives were and are currently lived around the world from memories of the distant past to recent times.

Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women's agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women's dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy of the traditional texts and the chronologically corresponding visual and material culture. The author challenges traditional approaches to the study of Jewish culture by employing tools from art history, archaeology, and film and media studies. It is argued that, in each of these different contexts, there is ample evidence that women-despite persistent overall structural discrimination-have found ways to challenge male constructs of gender norms. Ultimately, these examples from past and present times highlight women's eminence in shaping Jewish history and culture. Bringing a new interdisciplinary lens to the study of the history of gender and sexuality, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish history and culture, art history, archaeology, and film studies.

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war.

This book explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. Appeals to romantic love were also significant in justifying relationships between Jews and non-Jews, even when those unions created conflict within and between communities. By incorporating novel approaches from the history of emotions and life-cycle history, Christian Bailey moves beyond existing research into the sexual and racial politics of modern Germany and approaches a new frontier in the study of subjectivity and the self. German Jews in Love draws on a rich array of sources, from newspapers and love letters to state and other official records. Calling on this evidence, Bailey shows the ways German Jews' romantic relationships reveal an aspect of acculturation that has been overlooked: how deeply cultural scripts worked their way into emotions; those most intimate and seemingly pre-political aspects of German-Jewish subjectivity.