The traditional Jewish marriage contract, signed during the wedding ceremony, defines marriage as the husband’s acquisition of his wife. Note how the woman’s face remains covered by her future husband’s prayer shawl. This prevents the viewer from seeing the face of the bride and gaining any insight into her experience of the ceremony. There is also a clear separation of men and women, with a male figure officiating at the marriage. Aspects of this depiction, such as the clothing worn by the attendees, reveal early signs of modernity’s influence on Jewish culture that would ultimately challenge gender norms and reshape the Jewish wedding in some streams of Jewish practice.
What aspects of this eighteenth-century Jewish wedding might you expect to see in a modern wedding ceremony?
Can you find the wedding/marriage stone in this image (look near the right corner of the huppah.) What do you think this stone (called Treustein in German) might have been used for?
If we could see the bride’s face in the image, how do you imagine it would be depicted?
This late seventeenth-century manuscript contains a full copy of the text of the Ardashir-nāmah (The Book of Ardashir/Ahasuerus), an epic poem by the fourteenth-century Jewish Persian writer Shāhin-i…
Someone in a tales is walking your rooftops.
Only he is stirring in the city by night.
He listens. Old gray veins quicken—sound
Through courtyard and synagogue like a hoarse, dusty heart.
You are a…
In 1993, Schechner digitally inserted himself into a historical photograph of prisoners in a newly liberated bunker at the Buchenwald concentration camp, taken in 1945 by Margaret Bourke-White. He…