Skip to content

An offhand remark, a choice bit of gossip, a curious object, obituaries, marital notices – you never know where you’re going to find a juicy historical revelation.

Just the other day, while making my way through the Vows column of Sunday’s New York Times – something I do religiously – I came across a fascinating nugget of history.

Flickr/kjmatthews

There, in a story about the nuptials of one Kramer Morgenthau and his bride Tracy Fleischman, which took place in a former Roman Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles, the reporter referred, in passing, to how the young couple ceremonially drank from a kiddush cup that had been in the distinguished Morgenthau family for generations.

A gift – a gift(!) – from Herbert Lehman, a former governor of New York State, a United States senator and a member in good standing of American Jewry’s elite, whose comings and goings were chronicled in Stephen Birmingham’s celebrated book, Our Crowd, this delicious little tidbit or grace note personalized the mighty Morgenthaus and the redoubtable Lehmans.

To know that they valued a kiddush cup, passing it down from one generation to another, not only made me smile.  It quickened my resolve to be on the lookout for history even in the most unlikely of places.

Now that June is upon us, it’s high season for weddings — and reason enough for the Jewish Museum in New York to mount an exhibition of ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts.

The Art of Matrimony showcases 30 different versions of the age-old document. Some hail from the Cairo genizah of the 12th century, others from the atelier of a contemporary artist. Some bear flowers, others fish and still others a sturdy handshake. For all their differences, each ketubbah reflects a union of heart and head.

cupid
A "cheeky" Cupid. Flickr/Cinnamon Cooper
Elsewhere within the museum world, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has gone a step further in its commitment to the ketubbah by operating a Ketubah Gallery where happy couples can have this “monumental milestone marker,” as one museum official would have it, made to order.

And if that weren’t enough to highlight the central role that the Jewish marriage contract plays, both contemporaneously as well as historically, the most current issue of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture features a fascinating article by Jeffrey Shandler on the multiple and varied meanings the ketubbah has accrued over time and space: at once a legal document and a work of art, a token of steadfastness and an emblem of idiosyncrasy.

In his Transformations of the Ketubbah; Or, The Gallery of Broken Marriages, Shandler does more than chronicle the ways in which the Jewish marriage contract has changed its stripes over the years. His account offers a smart and close reading of the mutually constitutive relationship between the ketubbah and its context, be it domestic or museological, a matter of ritual or of aesthetics.

Given his subject matter, one expects Shandler’s essay to end with a paean to the power of love or with a salute to the stability of Jewish identity. Instead, it concludes on a playfully ironic and decidedly post-modern note: Jewish museums are blessed with an abundance of Jewish marriage contracts because of the frequency of divorce. The “Jewish public,” Shandler tells us, “have repurposed the museum itself by using it as a repository for their unwanted ketubbot.”

In contemporary America, Cupid’s arrows, it seems, have found a new target.