The Earliest American Ketubbah (Jewish Marriage Contract), New York: 1751

Ink on paper (17 ¾ x 14  in.; 445 x 360 mm). Creased at folds with minor losses at horizontal fold-lines; ink biting in a few spots; in all affecting only a few words. Matted and glazed for viewing both recto and verso, within a gilt wood frame; not examined out of frame.

Goldman, Hebrew Printing in America, 1735-1926, New York, 2006, p. 1161; David De Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers 1682-1831, pp. 252-59; David and Tamar De Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World (1955) p. 213; Joseph R. Rosenbloom, A Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews : Colonial Times through 1800, 1960, pp. 91, 130.

 

THE ONLY KNOWN ILLUSTRATED 18TH CENTURY AMERICAN KETUBBAH

This ketubbah celebrates the marriage of Shalvah daughter of Solomon (Sloe Myers) to Haym son of Moses ha-Levi (Hayman Levy) on Wednesday, 2 Sivan, 5511 [= May 15, 1751]. 

This rare and important ketubbah is among the most significant surviving documents of early American Jewish history.

The groom, Hayman (Haim) Levy was born in Hanover, Germany and immigrated to New York sometime before 1750. He would go on to distinguish himself as a successful merchant, a patriot of the American Revolution, and as as a leader and philanthropist within the New York Jewish community in Colonial America in the mid-eighteenth century. The bride, Sloe (Shalva) Myers was born in New York, where hers parents had emigrated from Holland. She was the younger sister of the famous colonial silversmith, Myer Myers. Both the bride and groom were members of the small but important New York Jewish community and of its only synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel. The witnesses to their wedding included Moses Gomez and Benjamin Pereira, the Hazan of Shearith Israel from 1748-1757. The signatures both witnesses, as well as the groom’s, appear twice on this document; once directly beneath the ketubbah (wedding contract) text, and again, beneath the text Tenaim (engagement contract), enframed within a cartouche, below.

Though the engraved floral border is modeled on those found on printed ketubbot from Amsterdam and London, this border contains two unique and otherwise unknown illustrations. In the upper right corner, an elaborately dressed couple stands beneath a wedding canopy; the officiant faces them, cup in hand, flanked on either side by groups of onlookers. In the upper left corner a man sits at his desk, grasping a quill, his hand raised to his face, apparently deep in thought. At his feet, several books are strewn, and next to them a large mounted globe. Nearby, a woman tends a young child; in the background a farmer plows a field and the harbor is filled with sailing ships. Though both these illustrations are unique to the present document and unknown from any other printed border, it is the latter illustration which clearly demonstrates that this engraving was designed for, and executed especially to be used in, the New World. This is the only extant complete copy of this exquisite printed border designed for the use of Jews in America.