Need an Arabic-Hebrew Ketubah? This Artist Can Help.

When a couple from Washington, D.C., a Baha’i man and a Jewish woman, married in 2012, they wanted a ketubah, or Jewish decorative marriage contract, that reflected their diverse backgrounds.

As a nod to their meeting in an Arabic language program, they imagined a ketubah that included phrases in Arabic and Farsi (Baha’i is a religion that originated in Iran, and Farsi is Iran’s predominant language), as well as standard Hebrew and English text.

They wondered who might have the linguistic and artistic skills to create such a bespoke item.

Enter Josh Berer, who is also based in Washington. Mr. Berer makes his living as an Arabic calligrapher, and most of his work comes from designing Arabic tattoos. However, since that job in 2012, a small subset of his business has become multilingual nikahnamas-ketubahs. (A nikahnama is an Islamic marriage contract.)

Mr. Berer, who is Jewish, created the ketubah for his own wedding in 2014. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Arabic from the University of Washington and doing graduate studies in the Uzbek, Dari/Farsi languages at Indiana University, he was certified as a master Arabic calligrapher in 2020 after eight years of full-time study with a private teacher. Arabic calligraphy is so exacting that a student only passes when they can copy a sentence without needing a correction. Mr. Berer said it took him two years to pass the first lesson and eight years to complete all 15 or so lessons in the curriculum.

Mr. Berer’s personalized ketubas start at $1200 and often vary between $2500 and $3000 for more detailed ketubas that include a decorative border with illuminated gold work or paper-cut designs, with at least a month’s lead time required for completion.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Tell me about the process of working on an interfaith wedding contract.

In most cases, it’s one text in English and a different one in Hebrew and then a verse or poem in Arabic, so it’s usually different elements of each culture. I did one recently for a Muslim-Jewish couple that had a Bismillah (a common Islamic Koranic phrase that begins: “In the name of Allah”) across the top in Arabic and then, on the bottom it said, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” (a commonly used phrase from the Song of Songs) in Hebrew. The main text was in English.

Tell me about some of the couples you’ve worked with.

Muslim-Jewish is the most common, but I’ve done some Muslim-Christian couples, too, in Arabic and English. I’ve also done Hebrew and Urdu for a Jewish-Pakistani couple, and Farsi (which is not difficult for me since both Urdu and Farsi use the same script as Arabic).

How similar are Arabic and Hebrew?

While Arabic and Hebrew have some words in common, there’s not a lot of similarity in the written versions. What sets Arabic calligraphy apart from every other calligraphic tradition is that the nature of the script is so much more involved and has so many more possibilities of letter form and combination, that the training process just has to take longer because there’s more to learn. Hebrew is so much simpler.

In addition to the calligraphy, you create your own paper, grind inks and pulverize the gold you use for gold leaf illumination. Why?

It evolved out of necessity. If we were in Istanbul or Tehran, I would just do the calligraphy and farm out the papermaking and the illumination and buy ready-made materials; I would send it to another artist who would take it from there. But we don’t have that capability in America, and even if we did, at this point, I wouldn’t do it because I like being in charge of every element. I even make all the frames from an oak tree that grew in our yard.

And you can make a living doing this?

I did do the calligraphy for the major company that offers nikahnama lithographs, but yes, there just isn’t the same tradition of hanging a nikahnama in your home. However, there’s enough demand for my tattoo designs and other wall art that I’ve had a waiting list of clients who are paid up and waiting for their work consistently since 2010. This is essentially the only job I’ve ever had.