According to the Talmud, the Jewish marriage contract or k’tubah was standardized by the sage Simon ben Shetah in the 2nd century BCE. In later years, they were often decorated with patterns and illustrations. Emily Leah Zitter delves into the physical history of these documents.

The earliest written k’tubah known is dated almost 2,000 years ago, before the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 132 CE. In a cache of documents found in a cave near Ein Gedi, archaeologists found a k’tubah belonging to a woman named Babatha, given to her by her second husband, Judah. The wording of the k’tubah, written in Aramaic as k’tubot still are today, would be familiar to us, but there was one major difference between then and now: in those days, men could have more than one wife, and Judah already had another wife, Miriam. From other documents we discover that Babatha went to court after Judah’s death to fight that other wife and her family to retain possession of four date orchards she was entitled to as part of her k’tubah.

Decorative k’tubot became popular in 17th- and 18th-century Italy. . . .  Hand-painted on large parchments, they included biblical scenes connected with marriage, [biblical verses], flowers, birds, and geometric designs—works of art on public display at the weddings. They often included architectural motifs such as columns and pillars, appropriate for a document that is the foundation of a Jewish home.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.