The most recent is from Jerusalem in the year 2000. Especially noteworthy is a collection of 226 illuminated ketubbot from Italy, which was received in 1945 from the estate of Mordechai ben David Hamitzer, and also a ketubbah fragment from Segura, Spain, written only a few years before the Expulsion.
Marriage contracts are the earliest written agreements to survive until the present.
The purpose of the marriage contract is to regulate the legal and financial relations of husband and wife. Besides these, the ketubbah often includes additional Terms of the Ketubbah , designed to secure the rights of the wife during marriage and afterwards. In places where a man was permitted to take several wives, the ketubbah determined that he could not take another wife while the present wife was still married to him, unless she consented or until ten years had passed and they still had no offspring. In many places they were concerned lest the husband die childless and his widow be dependent on release from marriage with one of his brothers. In Poland and Ashkenaz an additional bill was occasionally written at the time of the wedding, obligating the grooms brothers to release the bride from Levirate marriage.