This online lecture was given at the Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University in May 2026.
Examining ketubbot as visual objects, this lecture demonstrates that in the early modern period, these marriage contracts became elaborate sites of artistic production, depicting elite Jewish couples in which women are given visual prominence through biblical imagery, allegorical figures and courtly visual language. Prefaced by rare early Ashkenazi medieval precedents, a distinctive visual language is traced from the Hamburg ketubah of 1690 across decorated ketubbot, haggadot, megillot Esther, and prayer books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the German and Habsburg lands, the Dutch Republic, and northern and central Italy. Drawing on Court Jewry and the Italian mercantile elite, it situates this visual culture within aristocratic self-presentation and cross-cultural exchange, showing women as active participants in religious, domestic, communal, and economic life.