U of M Center for Jewish Studies Lecture Series: Eve Krakowski (Princeton University) Presents: How the Ketubba Became Jewish

The ketubba, or Jewish marriage contract, is the best-recognized and most widely-used kind of Jewish legal document. But it is also the sole surviving descendant of an ancient Aramaic contract-writing tradition that was once shared widely throughout much of the Near East, and not only among Jews. This talk will trace the surprisingly long and varied history of the ketubba’s evolution and eventual consolidation as an iconic rabbinic Jewish practice, from the ancient Near East until the tenth century CE – a history that illuminates how rabbinic Judaism itself transformed and spread in the wake of the Islamic conquests.

Bio: Eve Krakowski is an associate professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She studies the social history of the medieval Middle East, mainly through everyday documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Her work to date has focused mainly on gender, kinship, and rabbinic law among Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt. Her first book, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture, was published in 2018. She is now working on a second book tentatively titled Jewish Writing in the First Millennium, which examines how and why new forms of Jewish documents developed and spread widely across the Islamic Mediterranean during the ninth and tenth centuries.

FREE

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Cosponsors: Center for Premodern Studies, Department of Anthropology, Department of Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Cultures, Department of History, Institute for Global Studies, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies, University of St. Thomas

Lectures will be held monthly on varying topics by different lecturers.