Rivka Plesser, who catalogued the collection, writes in an introduction: “Marriage contracts are the earliest written agreements to survive until the present…. Sometimes a ketubbah provides the only sure evidence for the existence of a Jewish community. And, inasmuch as the ketubbah is a legal document in every regard, financial agreements included, it also offers historical evidence of the Jews’ socio-economic status in various times and places.
“From the Second Temple period onwards, ketubbot were dated by minyan shtarot, the counting of years since the founding of the Seleucid monarchy (312 to 311 BCE). This custom continued for many years throughout the East, and in Yemen down to the present time. In North Africa and Yemen, an added obligation was given to the groom, not to make his wife move against her will from one city to another in the same country. If he wished to move away from the city, against her wishes, he was obligated to give her a bill of divorce and to pay the value of her ketubbah. Likewise, some ketubbot have an additional, explicit obligation on the wife’s part, to care for her husband’s children from earlier marriages as if they were her own.
“In some ketubbot from Syria and Eretz Israel, there is a clause barring the husband from going on distant journeys without leaving his wife a conditional get (bill of divorce), to spare her the status of abandoned wife (agunah), which could bar her from remarrying.”
In addition to the ketubot, Plesser writes, the library also holds a collection of 107 contracts for engagement, matchmaking or dowry, and a collection of 191 bills of divorce. They are not yet part of the digitized collection.