(pl. ketubot). A Jewish marriage contract. Marriage contracts protected the financial rights of women, making sure that they didn’t lose the money they brought to the marriage if their husband died or if they got divorced. This was important as secular laws in the British colonies gave all a woman’s money to her husband when she wed.
Although couples both in early America and today choose to have an more elaborate “illuminated” ketubah with beautiful drawings on it, in the early Atlantic World each Jewish congregation also kept a ketubah register that had a copy of the marriage contract without an images.
