Ask any rabbi, any Jewish bride and groom: The breaking of the glass at the end of the wedding ceremony commemorates the destruction of the Temple, to remind us of ancient communal sorrow in the midst of present individual joy.
Not so, says Shalom Sabar. It’s a medieval German superstitious ritual to drive the devils away. He can prove it, too.
Born in Kurdistan and raised in Israel, with graduate degrees in art history from UCLA, the soft-spoken scholar is a senior lecturer in Jewish and comparative art history and folklore at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also is chair of the Israel Society for Jewish Art. Presently on sabbatical, he flew from his temporary New Jersey home to the Bay Area for a series of December lectures.
Seated in the reading room of the Judah Magnes Memorial Museum in Berkeley, Sabar used examples of antique Judaic art in his lavishly illustrated book “Mazal Tov” (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1993) to illustrate some of his points.
“I teach in the folklore department, but not from literature,” he said. “I’m interested in objects and what they have to tell us.”
Chief among those objects are the intricate ketubot, illuminated wedding contracts that reveal much about the customs and beliefs of their time through the illustrations they bear.
But there are others too: decorated Kiddush cups, the Sivlonos gurtel, a wide belt that encircled bride and groom together under the chuppah, becoming a popular wedding gift in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the chuppah itself.
“Today we use the chuppah on the four poles,” he noted. “But that actually is a relatively new custom, perhaps derived from Christian processions. Before the 14th century, people were married under a tallis.”
In Ashkenazi weddings, he continued, the chuppah was held outside the synagogue so that wedding celebrants could see the stars, reminding them of the biblical promise to make the Jews “as numerous as the stars in the heavens.” In Sephardic synagogues, weddings were held indoors, under a chuppah that was permanently attached to the wall.
As for those Germanic demons and the broken glass, Sabar has an explanation. In the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a large stone, the chuppahstein, on the north side of the shul. At the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, the groom would take a full glass of wine and smash it against the stone.
“Superstition held that all bad things come from the north,” Sabar explained. “The belief was that the devils would come for the wine and be injured by the broken glass.”
Other societies had other customs. In Morocco, the whole family would wait outside the connubial chamber until the groom displayed the bloodstained sheet, proof of the virginity of his bride. This custom is illustrated in a famous painting by Delacroix.
A German bride in the Middle Ages would drink the ceremonial wine poured from a bottle with a wide bottom and narrow neck, symbolizing her virginity. “And, if she was not a virgin, they would use a wide-necked bottle. Everything was symbolic,” Sabar said.
Especially the images on the ketubah. Pagan elements such as the blind Cupid with his bow and the goddess Fortuna with her wheel mingle on the same parchment with biblical elements that relate to the names of the bride and groom. Allegorical representations of the couple may show the groom as a farmer (“he who plants the seed”) and the bride as an angel blowing a horn that broadcasts the future family’s good name.
Many ketubot bear an image of Jerusalem (often looking like Munich or Rome) at the top. This, Sabar explained, comes from Psalms: “I shall put Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Labyrinths appear, representing a love that has no beginning or end.
There are many symbols of the zodiac — the word “mazel” actually means constellation and “mazel tov” was a wish for favorable stars — as Jews, like their Christian neighbors, consulted astrologers before important events. To this day, Sabar noted, weddings routinely are scheduled during the first half of the lunar month, the period when the moon is waxing. “The growing larger of the moon is considered a good sign from heaven,” he said.
An interesting feature of some 19th-century Moroccan ketubot is the inclusion of American flags. This indicated that the father of the bride or groom did business with America.
Almost all ketubot bear architectural elements, such as a background or a frame around the page. “It is like an entrance, a doorway, ” Sabar said. “When you marry, you go from the secular to the holy, to another stage in life. `This is the gateway to the Lord, the righteous shall go through it.’ “
Twisted columns, however, are common to all, representing those thought to have decorated the Temple of Solomon. These columns, Sabar said, also can be found in the Vatican and on the pages of Renaissance holy books.
Also from the Renaissance comes a final note that should gladden the hearts of today’s feminist brides.
Italian Jews historically enjoyed an economic and social equality not present in many other lands. During the Renaissance they were people of substance, frequently dealers in textiles.
“When you look at 15th-century paintings of Italian Jews, they look like something out of Botticelli, ” Sabar said. Adorned like a queen, a Jewish bride would arrive at her wedding, riding on a white horse, escorted by soldiers, to the tune of a band of musicians.
To underscore the lofty status of the Jewish woman in that society, Sabar cites an Italian Renaissance women’s prayerbook. In contrast to the morning prayer still said today by Orthodox males, a Jewish Renaissance woman thanked God for not making her a man!