Marriage Contract on Vellum. Uniting Elijah and Zara on 24th of Av, 1868

(KETHUBAH)

24th Av

Gibraltar

1868

Text in brown ink, Sephardic square and cursive Hebrew scripts. Text is enclosed within a colorful oval wreath of flowers and ears of corn accomplished in subtle watercolor hues of pink, red, yellow, green and blue and tied at the bottom with a fluttering ribbon in blue watercolor highlighted by gold. The upper border is dominated by a large crown embedded with precious stones. The subscription “Be’simna tava...” is written below the crown in gold with blue watercolor shadow. Below, the initial word “on Wednesday” is similarly inscribed in monumental characters. In the text of the contract, the customary word “Chai” occupies the height of eight lines. The text concludes with the characteristic Sephardic invocation that God be gracious, protect , preserve and show his mercy to the Holy Community which has been exiled from Spain

cf. Sabar 163

The bejewled crown that is a popular decorative element of Gibraltarian Kethuboth is customarily interpreted as representing the English crown, thus alluding to Gibraltar’s status as a British Crown Colony on the Western tip of the Iberian peninsular. The crowns depicted in Gibraltarian Kethuboth are generally imitations of the standard crown from the Royal Coat of Arms of the British Empire - with the Maltese Cross atop replaced by a fleur-de-lis. The emblem appears in other Sephardic Kethuboth of the period. Shalom Sabar suggests that; “[though] the use of the motif may originally have been a goodwill gesture, motivated by the wishes of Jewish community leaders to forge good relations with the new ruler, in time...the crown became simply one more decorative element appearing....without any political significance.” See S. Sabar, Ketubbah: The Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract (1993), p. 119