Karaite Ketubah (Jerusalem)

This ketubah is the only known example of a Karaite wedding contract from Jerusalem. It united Sarwa bat Tsedakah (Ṣadaqa) ibn Jarīr to Hezekiah ben Benjamin in the presence of witnesses, one of whom, Solomon ben David ha-Kohen, wrote the document. Despite the family’s modest wealth, Sarwa has doubles of many of the items in her trousseau; it has been conjectured that one set belonged to a deceased sister. Here, the formulaic writing in the ketubah appears in Hebrew, and the list of items is in Arabic. At the end, the couple agrees to preserve Karaite traditions, such as counting the new months without a fixed calendar. The ketubah is dated to the “era of the Greeks,” which is equivalent to the Era of the Documents, or the Seleucid period, a common way of dating documents. Ellipses indicate lacunae in the manuscript.