Matti Friedman investigates the rescue of the 1,000-year-old Aleppo Codex.
By MATT NESVISKYThe mysterious fate of Maimonides’ Bible(photo credit: MATTI FRIEDMAN )
Three cheers for Matti Friedman, a Jerusalem-based journalist who honed his reporting chops at the Associated Press, The Jerusalem Report and elsewhere, and who in his first book got his teeth into a terrific story and investigated and reported it as thoroughly as possible.In other hands the bizarre saga of a priceless ancient Jewish text might have been over-dramatized and sensationalized; its subheading might well have alluded to suspected villainy, political cover-up, even murder. Friedman has resisted that. What we have instead is a straightforward report, a highly readable, deeply engaging, balanced and nuanced pursuit of the facts.This is all the more remarkable considering how hard the facts were to come by – and in view of how many sources were either circumspect, stingy, deceptive or otherwise unreliable when it came to revealing the truth. So let’s begin with what is known.The so-called Aleppo Codex is nothing less than the oldest extant copy of the Jewish Bible. Created by rabbinical scholars in Tiberias around 930 C.E., the codex (which simply means a book, as opposed to a scroll) consisted of some 500 bound parchment leaves with three columns of handwritten Hebrew text on each side. The pages contained the Torah, the Writings and the Prophets, as well as important marginalia.As such, the codex serves as the urtext of the Bible as we know it today.Some years after its creation, the codex was purchased by a wealthy Karaite and transferred from Tiberias to Jerusalem.Shortly thereafter, in 1099, the Crusaders sacked Jerusalem. Subsequently, hundreds of sacred Jewish manuscripts, including the codex, were ransomed from the new masters of Jerusalem and conveyed to the prominent Jewish community of Fustat, just outside of Cairo. The most notable member of that community, none other than Maimonides, used the Tiberias text as the basis of his great legal code, the Mishna Torah.Maimonides died in 1204, and during a period of turmoil in Cairo in the 14th century, his library was transferred to what was then considered one of the greatest centers of Jewish scholarship, Aleppo, Syria. (Maimonides had even dedicated his famous Guide to the Perplexed to his star pupil, Joseph ben Judah, a notable resident of Aleppo.) The Jews of Aleppo soon began referring to what we know as the Aleppo Codex as the “Crown” of its manuscript collection. It was locked away in an iron safe in a grotto of the community’s central synagogue and rarely brought to light.There the Aleppo Codex remained until the riot in the city that followed the UN vote for partition of Palestine in November 1947. The synagogue and much of its contents were put to the torch. And this is where contemporary history becomes much murkier than ancient history. The venerable Aleppo Jewish community eventually fled from a now-hostile Syria and scattered – to the new Jewish state, to Latin America, to New York City, and elsewhere.Somewhere along the line some Aleppo rabbis took it upon themselves to see that the revered codex, which had been zealously maintained in the central synagogue for centuries, should be spirited out of the country. The codex was duly smuggled to Turkey by a Jewish merchant, transferred to a Jewish Agency agent there, and eventually delivered to Jerusalem’s Ben-Zvi Institute, a scholarly academy headed by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become Israel’s second president.Lengthy litigation before a Jerusalem rabbinical court then ensued over who should have custodianship of the codex – the State of Israel or the Aleppo Jews now in Israel. After four years an out-of-court compromise was worked out on that issue – but a much more contentious issue remained – the startling fact that fully 40 percent, or some 200 pages, of the priceless Aleppo Bible, including virtually all of the Five Books of Moses, were missing.It is this mystery that forms the focus of Matti Friedman’s four-year investigation.It’s an inquiry that will lead him to numerous strange characters. (His book is prefaced by a useful “dramatis personae.”) These figures include dubious dealers in ancient manuscripts, jealous and suspicious academics, close-mouthed members of the ultra-Orthodox community, political operatives protective of their parties’ histories, dissemblers and distorters of the past, amateur detectives and at least one ex- Mossad agent.Friedman does an exemplary job of hacking his way through the various thickets that surround the Aleppo Codex, enlightening the reader in admirable fashion on a great variety of topics, whether medieval history or modern scientific techniques for restoring antique documents. He doggedly pursues and interviews just about everybody still alive who is connected in some manner to the codex, and he makes his own discoveries and astute observations in dusty libraries and record offices. As a good journalist, he is cautious about drawing conclusions or expressing opinions, but when he does, he makes sure he is on a firm foundation.Which is not to say Friedman is a mere gatherer of facts for a good story. Consider the feeling revealed in his concluding paragraphs: “The Hebrew Bible, of which our codex was the most perfect copy, the one used by Maimonides himself, was meant to serve humans as a moral compass. Its story is a tragedy of human weakness. The book was the result of generations of scholarship in Tiberias, of the attempt to arrive at a perfect edition of the divine word. It was a singular accomplishment and a testimony to the faith of the men who created it. It was desecrated...“We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail: A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it. It fell victim to the instincts it was created to temper and was devoured by the creatures it was meant to save.”
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