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Fun with ketubot – 1830s Modena, part 5/5
So the last thing to do is fill in the text.
First I learned the script, copying the original quite carefully. Then I used the techniques I talked about last summer, for fitting ketubah texts into given shapes, to fit the text into the available space. Exact text blurred for privacy reasons, but you get the general idea.
We didn’t use the archaic version, with its interesting currency, highly-specific place-naming conventions, and fulsome honorifics. Such things tend to scare today’s rabbis, unless they happen to have a passion for ketubot, and you don’t want to be dealing with a scared rabbi, they’re a lot of work. So we did a very standard modern text, with Lieberman clause.
If you click on the above image of the new version, you’ll be able to see the final mem, whimsically extended to bring the text into an exact rectangle. Rather fun. The original stretches the last few words; this is another way of accomplishing the same thing, that’s all.
So now we have a new incarnation of this old ketubah, spotted in an archive by my client and envisioned by him as a fresh, shiny, new ketubah. The whole thing is really rather happy and lovely. I hope someone else wants a border like this; it was jolly good fun to do, and very interesting.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.
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