The Aleppo Codex

by Matti Friedman

  and your kneading bowl.

  It continues with a list of curses:

  Cursed shall be the issue of your womb and the produce of your soil, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock. Cursed shall you be in your comings, and cursed shall you be in your goings.

  The Lord will let loose against you calamity, panic and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evildoing in forsaking me.

  The first page of the Aleppo Codex as it exists today, from the book of Deuteronomy. The manuscript’s distinctive purplish damage marks are visible on the bottom left corner.

  The Torah, or the Five Books of Moses—the story of creation, of Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham’s wanderings and Joseph’s dreams, the slavery of the Israelites, the plagues, the Exodus, the giving of the book at Mount Sinai, the long trek through the desert to the promised land—are the books at the heart of the Bible, the ones Hebrew scribes need to produce perfect Torah scrolls for use in synagogues, and the most important part of the Crown. Except for the last five leaves, these books are gone. So are the last books of the Bible: the book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the armies of Babylon; the burlesque book of Esther; the hallucinatory Hebrew-Aramaic parables of Daniel; the story of the first return from exile in the book of Ezra; and the despair of Ecclesiastes. Individual pages and sections from the middle of the codex are also gone. And yet while there are many dozens of documents from the months around the time the Crown was spirited to Israel—the letters exchanged by the Israeli agents and officials, two transcripts of meetings between Faham and the president, and records of the court hearings—none of them mentions this. Reading the documents of the time is akin to listening in on a conversation among a dozen art critics who are looking at the Mona Lisa and having an acrimonious discussion of the frame without mentioning that someone has taken scissors and cut out her face.

  On February 21, 1958, a month and a half after the book was brought to Shragai’s home, three Aleppo rabbis in Israel wrote a letter to the president with an offhand mention of “pages missing from the great Crown.” These, they wrote, were “gathered by various people and hidden in a dry hole nearby,” and they hoped to recover them soon. On March 2, Rabbi Dayan, who seems to have carefully tried to maintain cordial relations with the president during the trial and thereafter, sent a letter to Ben-Zvi saying he would try to locate the “missing pages.” On March 18, at the first court session, the lawyer for the Aleppo Jews described the looting of the synagogue, saying rioters “tore a few pages from the Crown.” None of these references makes clear the scope of what was missing, or that the missing sections included the most important one, the Torah; indeed, all three would seem to refer to a small number of leaves.

  The first description of the enormous number of pages missing appears only in March, three months after the codex arrived in Israel, in a document drafted by a government lawyer to outline a suggested legal arrangement, with no suggested explanation of why this was so. About two hundred pages were gone, or about 40 percent of the five hundred leaves originally written by the scribe on the Sea of Galilee. This must have weighed on everyone, and one would expect it to be the main topic of discussion. Instead there is only an uncanny silence.

  18

  The Keepers of the Crown

  THE FACT OF the Crown’s arrival in Israel had been kept secret for more than two and a half years by the time readers of the Jerusalem Post saw the following article on October 28, 1960.

  SAGA OF OLDEST BIBLICAL CODEX

  President Ben-Zvi Describes 1,000 Year Journey of Recently Recovered Book

  “It is my privilege and my pleasure to inform the Jewish public and the world of Biblical scholarship that the precious manuscript of the Codex of Ben Asher has been found and is in safe keeping.”

  The above words, by President Izhak Ben-Zvi, were uttered in a quiet scholastic fashion, almost in parenthesis, as Mr. Ben-Zvi delivered a paper at the late-night closing session of the Israel Exploration Society conference in Jerusalem during the Succot festival. They probably escaped many in the large audience. Mr. Ben-Zvi’s address seemed to be one of those reports of esoteric research . . . The story of this 1,000-year-old book has now come full circle. Details of its latest and last sojourn must for the meantime remain unpublished.

  The news was picked up by the foreign press, and a month later a certain M. S. Seale, an Irish Presbyterian missionary, wrote to the Times of London.

  Many of your readers will have read with relief your correspondent’s report from Tel Aviv on Nov. 16 of the recovery from Aleppo of most of the Ben Asher codex which was feared destroyed in the 1948 [sic] riots. It is to be hoped that the present holders of this great authoritative text will see fit to reveal the mechanics of the “rescue.”

  The missionary Seale probably did not live to see the mechanics revealed.

  The Crown was perhaps the most important book to reach Israel in those years, but there were many thousands more. Accompanying the migration of people was a great migration of books, as Jews returned from the Diaspora with the sacred texts that had helped them survive there as Jews. Legal treatises, tractates of the Talmud, rabbinic expositions and Torah scrolls, printed volumes and handwritten manuscripts arrived in crates at the ports and filled government warehouses. This is a largely untold story, and one key to understanding the story of the Crown.

  The president’s preoccupation with the Crown of Aleppo reflected a broader appetite for old Hebrew books from the East. In August 1961 he wrote to the Joint Distribution Committee, which sent charitable funds to the Jews of Aleppo, asking that it urge the community to send books to Jerusalem, and specifically “to the institute of which I am head.” In July 1962 the president’s secretary and the director of his institute, Meir Benayahu—the son of a chief rabbi and scion of a powerful political family with roots in Iraq, who will return later to figure in this story—wrote to Rabbi Dayan, who was now in South America but had left an extensive library in Israel. “It is very unfortunate that these books are touched by no one and have no guarantee of their safety,” reads the letter, which requested the rabbi’s permission for the institute to take the books it wanted.

  The story of the Jews of Yemen, who were airlifted to Israel immediately after Israel’s independence, is instructive. The immigration effort, Operation Magic Carpet, saw nearly all of Yemen’s Jews, fifty thousand people, leave their cities and villages and make their way to a transit camp outside Aden, where they were put on gleaming white Douglas Skymasters chartered from Alaska Airlines and flown to Israel. They were pulled by an old messianic dream of return to the land of Israel, and pushed by fear: after the partition vote at the United Nations, a mob in Aden killed eighty-two Jews, and there were other outbreaks of violence in the country, as there were in Aleppo and across the Middle East. The transit camp was the scene of terrible suffering; it had been built for five hundred people but for a time held twelve thousand, many of them malnourished and ill after their journey from the interior. These Jews left much behind but brought their books, most of them handwritten codices and scrolls, many of them ancient. At the transit camp, new arrivals were told to deposit them with staffers, who were to transfer them to Israel by sea. Many of the Yemeni Jews never saw their texts again.

  Ben-Zvi was particularly enchanted by the Yemenis, with their robes and long side curls and air of biblical authenticity, and he traveled to the Aden camp in 1949. While he was there, he wrote later, he opened two or three crates of belongings that were awaiting shipment. “I intended to check carefully and see if there was any valuable material there which could be purchased for the Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the Middle East,” he wrote. Ben-Zvi was not the only book enthusiast rummaging through the crates. A large portion of the scrolls and volumes deposited at Aden for transfer to Israel, the Israeli historian Gish Amit has written, ended up in public collections such as those a
t Ben-Zvi’s institute and Israel’s national library or in the hands of private dealers and manuscript collectors in Israel and abroad.

  One important Yemeni rabbi gave his community’s ten Torah scrolls to an Israeli official for safekeeping, but when he came to pick them up from a government warehouse in Tel Aviv, they were gone. “It is a disgrace,” he wrote in a furious letter to the immigration authorities of the Jewish Agency, that the holy books “were preserved in the land of the Arabs and stolen in the land of Israel, the land of the Hebrews.” Many years later, the same rabbi claimed to have found one of his scrolls in the shop of a Jerusalem bookseller. A different rabbi from the Yemeni city of Sanaa described trying to get his synagogue’s books back from a Joint Distribution Committee warehouse at the Jaffa port.

  We would go to the Jaffa port and ask for our books. They would say: Bring evidence that these are books from your synagogue. In Sanaa we had a large synagogue. Before we came to Israel, we put the holy books in crates . . . and on every book we wrote, “Sanctified to the Al-Sheikh synagogue.” So I said, “What proof do you want? Our names are on the books.” They said: Bring forms from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Prove to us that you have a place to store them. Afterward I came again, and they said: “There was a fire, the books were burned, don’t go in.” I didn’t believe them.

  The Yemenis were seen as primitives, products of a Jewish culture unpolluted by modernity. Their books, as Amit writes, “were presented as sacred relics from the past that should be stored in research institutes for the benefit of science, the state of Israel, and the world.” The justification given for taking the books was that their owners were unable to properly care for them; that they had ably done so for centuries was ignored.

  One Yemeni Jew who came to Israel with the Magic Carpet airlift left his family’s possessions in a crate at the camp in Aden, including two large ram’s horns, a five-hundred-year-old prayer book, and a two-part manuscript of the legal text known as the Mishna. The crate arrived several months later, when the family was housed at an immigrant absorption camp near Tel Aviv. When the man, Shalom Ozeri, went to the camp director to ask him to release the package, the director told him to come back the next day. When Ozeri arrived, he wrote many years later, he found that the crate had been opened and looted. The ram’s horns, the prayer book, and one of the two books of the Mishna were gone. More than forty years afterward, in 1993, Ozeri happened to see a photograph of a Mishna manuscript kept in Israel’s national library, on the campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It seemed familiar. He went to meet with a librarian, bringing along the half of the manuscript that had remained in his possession. It matched. The library returned his property, but according to Amit the stacks there still hold 430 other Yemeni manuscripts. Thousands more simply disappeared.

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 1962, with the trial over, the trusteeship agreement signed, and the manuscript secured in his institute, President Ben-Zvi convened a meeting of the new keepers of the Crown. The state had originally suggested three trustees—the president, Shragai, and Faham—but now there were eight, in keeping with the compromise agreement reached in court. Four were from the Aleppo community, and four from the state. The Aleppo representatives included the two rabbis who had sent the Crown and were now in Israel. Faham, spurned by the community and by then residing in Brooklyn, was not included. The government representatives, led by the president himself, were clearly in charge. The rancor of the trial had not subsided.

  Ben-Zvi opened the meeting. “For years, we feared for the fate of the Crown,” he said, recalling that he had once seen the manuscript in Aleppo long before. “I heard that only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, would they take it out and read the book of Jonah—”

  “This was not done in our time,” Rabbi Zaafrani cut in. Reading the old transcripts, I could almost hear him snapping in Arabic-accented Hebrew. “Rabbi Intabi says he doesn’t know about this custom either.”

  Ben-Zvi forged ahead. “Mr. Faham of Aleppo had the great honor of being given the Crown by the sages of the community to bring to Jerusalem. He gave it to Mr. Shragai on the second day of Shvat 5718”—January 23, 1958—“and Mr. Shragai brought it to me the next day.” The precise date cited by the president was off, in fact, by seventeen days; the nighttime messengers had reached Shragai’s apartment on January 6. Shragai, who had also become a trustee, was sitting in the room, but he did not correct the president. This peculiar hiccup in the chronology will be relevant later on.

  Rabbi Zaafrani interrupted again. “Faham has no merit at all,” he charged. “He is a simple man. He didn’t know where the Crown was kept and knew nothing of its value. We gave it to him to give to Rabbi Isaac Dayan in Tel Aviv, and he did not. None of the stories he tells have any truth to them.”

  The president would not be drawn in. “It has been agreed” to place the book in his institute, he told those present, and he suggested that allowing the Aleppo Jews to participate in the board of trustees at all was an act of generosity. “Because the manuscript once belonged to the Aleppo community, we agreed to appoint eight custodians, half of them from this community,” he said.

  “Once belonged”: this must have stung. One of the other Aleppo representatives interjected that his community should have the majority.

  Shragai spoke up: “The document has been made and there is no reason to change it.”

  “The trust document has been made, and we all approve it, and it was approved by the rabbinic court and it will not be changed,” Ben-Zvi summed up. Then he quickly changed the subject to one he may have thought would be more popular. He had received an offer of 20,000 Israeli pounds to photograph the Crown and publish an edition that would be made available to the public.

  The sum is too small, the immigration chief said.

  It was “close to zero,” one of the Aleppo representatives agreed. An expert he spoke to had suggested that a fair price would be $200,000.

  At this time, the location of the codex was kept secret. Ben-Zvi, with his scholar’s cap on, had already become the first to publish an academic article about the manuscript. Access was limited to a handful of scholars from a special department at Hebrew University, the Bible Project, who were using the Crown to prepare a new edition of the holy text. No one else was allowed to see it.

  “I was shocked to hear that Ben-Asher’s Crown of the Torah was burned by Arab rioters, and how happy I was to read in Haaretz that most of this book is in Israel and was given by the president to the faithful hands of scholars,” a certain Mordechai Rigbi wrote to the president after the book’s arrival was made public. He had owned an import-export business with a branch in Aleppo and had once been allowed a glimpse of the book in its “underground synagogue.”

  “I would be happy to be allowed to see this ancient book for a second time and would thank Your Honor if he would instruct the researchers to show it to me for a few moments,” he wrote. Other such requests from ordinary people hoping for a glimpse of the great book survive in the archives. They received the same answer Rigbi did.

  “For many reasons,” the president’s secretary wrote, “there is still no possibility of showing the book to the general public.” Scholars from Israel and from abroad were similarly turned away. In 1959, Ben-Zvi had decided that photographs of a small number of pages would be published and that other scholars could study them, “but the place of the photographs will be in my articles.” The scholars of the Bible Project promised not to remove the Crown from their workroom on campus “and not to let any person not from the project make any use of the manuscript.” They would not publish the first book of their new Bible edition for decades.

  In his obituary for the Crown a decade and a half before, the Bible scholar Umberto Cassuto had bemoaned the Aleppo rabbis’ refusal to allow access or at least to allow photography. The book, after all, had been created for the express purpose of being copied as much as possible. Now, after Ben-Zvi had been granted his wish and had seen the Crown finally
come under the control of modern scholars, the trustees had the following exchange about the proposed publication of a copy.

  “If they photograph the Crown, it will be in their possession and they won’t need us, and they will be able to make copies and send them to whomever they want,” said Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Isaac Nissim, who happened also to be the father of Meir Benayahu, the president’s close aide and the director of the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  They can’t possibly put the original on public display, said the immigration chief.

  The trusteeship document says it may never leave the Ben-Zvi Institute under any circumstances, added one of the Aleppo trustees.

  “The rabbi was right when he said that if we give even one copy, we will lose our rights to it,” the president finally agreed. The Crown was to remain hidden, the possession solely of its new owners. A facsimile of the surviving section of the manuscript would be published only fourteen years later, in 1976.

  The matter of the missing pages was of great concern to Ben-Zvi in those days, even though there was a ready explanation for their disappearance: they had been consumed in the synagogue fire. Rescue from the flames was a recurring theme in the various stories about the codex, and this notion was supported by its physical appearance: the Crown had purplish marks, burn scars, on the lower corners of its pages. The president, however, appeared to believe that perhaps not all of the missing pages had been burned, and he undertook a worldwide search for surviving pieces.

  No one, at that time, knew precisely how much was missing. It was difficult to calculate how many of the original leaves were gone because no one knew how many pages had been in the manuscript in the first place. There were no page numbers. Shortly after the Crown’s arrival, Ben-Zvi, scribbling calculations in blue ink on a piece of paper I found in an archived file folder, reached the conclusion that there had originally been 380 pages. Two hundred and ninety-four had arrived, meaning that 86 were missing, or just under a quarter of the manuscript. In fact, as later scholars would show, the original manuscript had nearly 500 pages, and about 200 were missing, or approximately 40 percent of the Crown.