Shalom Sabar
Prof. Shalom Sabar
shaloms@mail.huji.ac.il
Shalom Sabar is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Jewish Art and Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is the author of a substantial body of publications on Jewish art and the material culture of Jewish communities in both Eastern and Western traditions. His research spans a broad spectrum, including Jewish ceremonies and rituals, life-cycle events, objects of daily life, ephemera, folk art, amulets and magic, and the visual culture of illustrated Hebrew books and manuscripts.
A passionate collector of Israeli and Jewish ephemera, Sabar has also led numerous international travel seminars to Jewish sites in Europe, North Africa, India, and Central Asia.
Lecture Abstract:
The visual culture of the Baghdadi Jewish community—particularly that of its affluent members—was disseminated to India and the Far East through the activities of the community’s mercantile elite. This cultural diffusion is most clearly evident in two categories of Jewish ceremonial art: the design of ornate Torah cases, fashioned from repoussé silver and lavishly decorated, and the illustration of marriage contracts (ketubbot). Baghdadi models reached India—primarily Bombay, Calcutta, and Pune—via commercial networks and from there spread to the more distant Baghdadi communities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Burma. Notably, some of the luxurious silver sheets adorning these Torah cases were produced by non-Jewish Chinese silversmiths influenced by Baghdadi designs.
The illustrated ketubbah, by contrast, reflects the profound transformations that accompanied these new routes of transmission. In India, this genre—well-known from the Cairo Genizah and long cultivated in Jewish communities across Islamic lands—underwent significant adaptation. In some regions, particularly Yemen, early medieval ketubbah traditions had been preserved for centuries. The Jews of Cochin adopted the distinctive format and epithalamium characteristic of Yemenite ketubbot, and this model subsequently spread to the other two Jewish communities of India—the Baghdadis and the Bene Israel—each of which developed its own distinctive features. In the case of the Baghdadis, these forms were further transmitted to their affiliated diaspora communities.