The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible

by Matti Friedman

  On one occasion, Rafi saw a crowd of men stop a French army jeep, order the soldiers out, tie their hands, and force them to lie down on the street with their heads on the curb. Then they crushed their skulls with stones. In 1946, the French gave up and left the people of Syria to govern themselves, and with the French gone, the Jews were at the mercy of their countrymen. Rafi’s French-language Jewish high school, the Alliance Israélite, was promptly shut down.

  At the time of its demise, Rafi’s world consisted of perhaps ten thousand people with a small number of recurring family names and roots deeper than those of nearly any other Jewish outpost on earth, a mix of people who had always been there or who had washed up over the centuries, fleeing persecution or pursuing trade. The Jews of Aleppo were an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, and an ancient community by the time Muslim conquerors arrived in the seventh century. They had been here for two and a half millennia, though time-honored local estimates would not admit to a year under three millennia. Tradition linked the community’s roots to the capture of the city by Yoav, the general of King David’s army, in an episode given brief mention in the Bible. According to one story—of the type that seeks to aggrandize something very old and impressive by claiming it is even older and more impressive—it was the general himself who laid the foundations of the great synagogue, and of the Aleppo Citadel as well.

  The Arab residents called the city Halab. The Jews still occasionally called it by the name the Bible gave it, Aram-Tzova; this made the point that they were no one’s guests. Among the Jews were families like the Dayans and Tawils, who traced their lineage in the city back thousands of years, and families like the Suttons or the Kassins, who had run from the Spanish Inquisition. There were the di Picciotos, one branch of a Tuscan merchant family, and the Baghdadis, like the sexton’s family, who were from Iraq, and even families with names like Hornstein and Goldman, who had come from eastern Europe. Conservative, traditional, and paternalistic, they nonetheless included a small number of freethinkers, a smattering of Zionists, and at least one communist, who named his sons Lenin, Stalin, and Karl.

  Since the rise of Islam, Jews had lived as a tolerated minority, or dhimmi, a status granted to Jews and Christians because they were monotheists. Despite a growing tendency in our own times to paint the premodern Islamic world as an Eden of religious tolerance in which Jews flourished, they always lived by the whims of fickle rulers and the mood of a hostile majority. In the eyes of that majority they were effete, lacking in honor, and powerless by definition, but as long as they accepted the supremacy of Muslims they were usually allowed to live and observe their faith and occasionally to prosper. Rafi’s father, like everyone’s father, did business with Muslims, and most Jews in Aleppo bought pastries from Muslim bakers and kosher meat from Muslim butchers who employed Jewish ritual slaughterers. But the old contract was already eroding by the time Rafi was born.

  With the appearance of the French and other European powers in the lands of Islam, Jews had begun to forget their place, learning foreign languages, improving the education of their children, succeeding in business, and often leaving Muslims behind. In Algeria, they assumed French citizenship, which was not granted to Muslims. In downtown Cairo, under British rule, Jews built a grand synagogue modeled on the architecture of the pharaohs. Arab Muslims, who increasingly saw themselves as a national group—one that might admit Arab Christians but not Arab Jews—resented the growing incursion of Western countries, while the Jews were emboldened by foreign protection and patronage. When other Jews, Europeans, began arriving in Palestine in large numbers, the antagonism grew worse, forcing the Jews of the Islamic world to plead their loyalty to their neighbors. “The Jews of Syria have no connection with the Zionist question,” read one plaintive advertisement that a Jewish youth club in Damascus, Syria’s capital, published in local papers in 1929. “On the contrary, they share with their fellow Arab citizens all their feelings of joy and sadness.” Muslims, it read, must “differentiate between the European Zionists and the Jews who have been living for centuries in these lands.”

  During the Second World War, Syria’s citizens came to overwhelmingly support Hitler, and the leader of Palestine’s Arabs spent part of the war in Berlin engaged in Nazi propaganda work and raising units for the SS. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to control world events, was translated into Arabic and circulated widely. Iraqis in Baghdad, where one-third of the population was Jewish, massacred 180 Jews in their homes and shops in 1941. Four years later, mobs in Libya killed 130 more, and there were less noteworthy incidents in between.

  The number of insults Rafi suffered on the street began to rise with the number of lurid newspaper headlines trumpeting the atrocities inflicted by the Jews on the Arabs of Palestine. He became used to hearing the word yahudi—Jew—spat at him. The teenage son of one of the city’s chief rabbis, who used to wear a black beret like a Frenchman, gave up and went bareheaded after Muslim toughs took to knocking it off. One man I interviewed, who was a small child at the time, remembered that getting home from school in those days meant a mad sprint through the streets and then shouting, as soon as he saw his building, for his mother to open the door.

  As the day of the vote at Flushing Meadow approached, the rabbis and notables of Jewish Aleppo, like their brethren across the Islamic world, tried to distance themselves publicly from Zionism. One of the community’s leaders, Rabbi Moshe Tawil, stood at Rafi’s synagogue one Sabbath and delivered a sermon condemning the Jewish national movement in Palestine. Young Aleppo Jews in Palestine, living among secular socialists from Europe, were eating food that was unclean and abandoning the faith of their fathers, the rabbi warned the congregation, not untruthfully. The Jews of Aleppo belonged in Aleppo and had nothing to do with the foolhardy ambitions of other Jews in the land to the south. The rabbi raised his hands to heaven and surprised Rafi by bursting into tears.

  3

  The Fire

  RABBI MOSHE TAWIL’S teenage son, Isaac, learned of the United Nations vote after he woke up that morning in his home near Rafi’s, outside the Old City, and heard shouting from the street: Sayouni, sayouni. That meant “Zionist.” Now an elderly man, a rabbi like his father, he punctuated his recollections by periodically slapping his hand on the table and causing my digital recorder to hop in the air. He went downstairs, he said, and eventually found himself in a crowd that had swelled to thousands of men.

  Filastin biladna, wal-yahud kilabna, they were shouting: Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs. Isaac quickly did what the Jews had been doing throughout the years of nationalist ferment in Syria: he joined the mob, raised his fist, chanted along with everyone else, and prayed he would not be noticed.

  Standing inconspicuously opposite the neighborhood’s grand modern synagogue down the street, Isaac saw policemen hoisting rioters through the windows and into the sanctuary. Some had cans of kerosene. The community’s most venerated sage, Moises Mizrahi, a bent man in a red fez whom everyone believed to be a century old, was inside. Isaac saw the same policemen escort him out. On the street outside the synagogue, the rioters constructed an enormous pile of prayer books, Torah scrolls, and tractates of the Talmud and then set it on fire.

  By this time, most of Aleppo’s Jews had locked themselves in their homes. Roving mobs burned the neighborhood’s other synagogues and a Jewish youth club where young people who had stayed up listening to the proceedings at the United Nations the night before had smashed wineglasses in jubilation and foolishly sung the Zionist anthem loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Rioters shattered the window of the Mazreb delicatessen, leapt inside, and ransacked it. They set fire to smaller prayer halls, the religious seminary run by Isaac’s father, dozens of Jewish stores, and heaps of prayer shawls and phylacteries.

  The fires spread down the city thoroughfares toward old Aleppo and the Jewish Quarter, where, in an a
partment not far from the great synagogue, one nine-year-old boy—a tailor in his seventies when I interviewed him in a Tel Aviv apartment—heard rioters battering at the gate leading into the courtyard of his family’s building. The banging stopped only when the rioters gave up and began scaling the wall instead. Howls of rage came from outside. The Jews in Palestine, someone screamed, were cutting Muslim babies from their mothers’ wombs. His parents barricaded the family in the main room of the house, under wheels of cheese hung from the high ceilings to keep them from the cats. Then the rioters were at the door, and the boy escaped barefoot through a window into a side alley as they broke in. When they had taken his family’s valuables, they used the kerosene and coal his parents had been storing for winter to set the building alight.

  The Baghdadis of Aleppo, around 1940. Asher Baghdadi, the sexton, is in a striped robe. Bahiyeh is seated on a stool to his left.

  Bahiyeh Baghdadi, the sexton’s daughter, was huddling not far away from the boy’s burning house, in the basement of her family’s building. Dull animal roars followed each crash of glass outside. She knew the mob was already across the alley inside her father’s ancient synagogue.

  Indna jabas, indna tin, wa-indna yahud a-sakin, came the chanting from the street above. This was meant to be a joke: We have watermelon, we have figs, and we have Jews on the knife. An apostate woman, a Jew who had become a Muslim, was at the entrance, pleading with the rioters in the name of their prophet to spare the building: Dahilkom, dahilkom, she was crying—Please, please. As the sexton’s daughter, now an elderly woman, recounted this to me, she stared through me wide eyed.

  The sexton, Asher, rose and wrapped his head in his cloak like an Arab. He was going to save the Crown. Bahiyeh’s twelve-year-old sister, Carmela, grabbed him and begged him not to go, then followed him out when he went anyway. Carmela made it a few steps into the alley before a rock thudded into her head and drove her to the ground, unconscious. The sexton lifted her up and retreated inside under a barrage of stones.

  Arab neighbors came and told the sexton’s family to run or they would burn with the building, but the Baghdadis were too afraid to venture out. Asher, Asher, come see your synagogue, the rioters taunted him from outside. The sexton stayed in the basement. By this time, people looking from their roofs in Rafi’s neighborhood outside the Old City could see black smoke rising from the Jewish Quarter. From belowground, though, Bahiyeh and her family could see nothing.

  Inside the great synagogue, the rioters found a metal box hidden in a grotto and carried it into the courtyard. They must have assumed it contained something worth stealing. It had two locks but was not much of a safe; they simply pried off the back and flipped it over. Out fell a few old books.

  One of them was bigger than the others. It had five hundred parchment pages, each with three columns of neat Hebrew script, twenty-eight lines to a column. What was left of the volume’s ancient binding disintegrated, and leaves scattered on the smooth stones of the courtyard. And just like that, the cobwebs of belief that had preserved the Crown perfectly for centuries were brushed away.

  Someone lit a match and touched it to spilled kerosene.

  A MONTH LATER, the January 2, 1948, edition of the Hebrew daily Haaretz went on sale in Tel Aviv with the following headlines on the front page:

  OVER FIVE HUNDRED IMMIGRANTS LAND ON THE BEACH AT NAHARIYA

  A ship carrying Hungarians, Lithuanians, and Poles, survivors of the war in Europe, had braved the British sea blockade imposed to quell Arab anger by keeping Jewish refugees out of Palestine. The immigrants had landed safely on a beach near a Jewish town on the Mediterranean coast.

  DOZENS OF ARABS KILLED IN 2 HAGANA REPRISALS IN HAIFA AND SALAMA

  3 HAGANA MEN KILLED NEAR HAIFA, ONE JEW STABBED TO DEATH IN JERUSALEM

  The Hagana was the Jewish military organization in Palestine. The war between Jews and Arabs was growing in violence as the British prepared to pull out. There were daily ambushes on the roads, bombings, reprisals, and reprisals for reprisals. The declaration of the state of Israel, and the invasion of regular Arab armies, was four months away.

  And, among the day’s stories, this:

  THE BIBLE OF ALEPPO

  If the news published in the newspapers matches the truth, the famous Bible that was the glory of the Jewish community of Aleppo, the Bible that according to tradition was used by Maimonides himself, was devoured by fire in the riots that erupted against the Jews of Aleppo several weeks ago. The “Crown of Aram-Tzova,” as it was commonly known . . . is lost and gone, according to what we have heard.

  With the Jewish enclave in Palestine at war, its very existence in doubt, the writer—a Bible professor—was in mourning for a book. “We might still hope,” he wrote,

  that perhaps this information is no more than false bragging on the part of the rioters and that in fact this wonderful book has survived yet again. But this is nothing but a slim hope, and in the torching of the ancient synagogue of Aleppo this beloved relic of the wisdom of the Middle Ages is likely to have gone up in flames.

  Perhaps it is difficult to grasp, in our times, how a book could elicit such passion. The codex had outlived the age of its creation, when a book was an object of vast worth, a product of great craftsmanship and scholarship, and a repository of irreplaceable knowledge. It had survived into the time of the printing press and the photograph but had retained its singular value because of the zealousness of its keepers: there were no known copies.

  A closer examination of the parchment leaves scattered in the courtyard of the Aleppo synagogue will enable a grasp of what this book was. On its pages were inscriptions that served as passport stamps, revealing much about why the Crown was created and where—for the Aleppo Codex was not from Aleppo at all and was ancient by the time it arrived there—and where it had been since, and what its loss meant to the people who revered it.

  4

  The Swift Scribe of Tiberias

  Tiberias, circa AD 930

  THE MEN WHO created the Crown would have looked out every day over the same landscape I saw when I traveled to their town more than a millennium later: across the level face of the Sea of Galilee to the barren rise of the Golan plateau on the other side, the specks of fishing boats the only blemishes on the water’s surface. Tiberias was a cluster of markets and stone buildings on the western shore.

  “This is the full codex of the twenty-four books,” read an inscription on the Crown, “written by our master and rabbi Shlomo, known as Ben-Buya’a, the swift scribe, may the spirit of God guide him.”

  Shlomo Ben-Buya’a, the swift scribe, sat on the floor or on a mattress. He would have placed a wooden plank on his knees, then spread out a parchment folio.

  The scribe worked under the direction of another man, a master who knew every consonant and vowel of the holy text and whose fame exceeded his own. This scholar, Aaron Ben-Asher, the same inscription tells us, was the “lord of scribes and father of sages.” Perhaps he was in the room as the scribe looked at the first empty page, already scored with a sharp instrument to delineate a grid of columns and lines, and then touched his quill to the parchment. In the beginning, he wrote, God created the heavens and the earth.

  I imagine Ben-Buya’a pronouncing each word out loud, following the tradition of Hebrew scribes, before applying ink to the rectangles of animal skin, hanging his angular letters from the horizontal lines.

  In those years, nine of every ten Jews in the world, including the scribe and the scholar, lived in the lands of Islam. Tiberias, ruled by a Muslim dynasty from Baghdad, was renowned among Jews as a center for the study of Hebrew. The city attracted Jewish scholars from afar, like a certain Eli, son of Judah, the Nazir, the latter title indicating that he had taken monk-like vows to refrain from drinking wine and cutting his hair. Eli seems to have arrived here at about this time to study the holy tongue; one of his interests was the pronunciation of the letter r. “I would spend a long time sitting in the squares of Tiberias and it
s streets,” this scholar wrote—in Arabic, for though he was studying Hebrew, Arabic was the language of Jewish scholarship—“listening to the speech of the simple men and the crowd and studying the language and its basic principles.”

  Reading this, I pictured Eli, the linguistic pilgrim, trolling open-air markets where merchants hawked olives, dates, and fish from the Sea of Galilee, listening for interesting Hebrew words and turns of phrase, as the scribe Ben-Buya’a sat in a room nearby transcribing the divine book in that same language, line by line.

  It had been nine hundred years since Jesus of Nazareth walked this shoreline. Only slightly less time had elapsed since Roman legions razed the temple in Jerusalem and crushed what Jewish sovereignty existed in the province of Judaea. While some Jews remained in the land of Israel, many of them in Tiberias, most had dispersed, drifting farther into distant countries until the gravitational pull of their homeland could scarcely be felt. They would acknowledge the authority of kings other than their own and be exposed to gods other than the one who, as they understood it, created the heavens and the earth. Their lifeline to Judaea and Jerusalem was long, and getting longer, and with the years it would become more tenuous.

  And the earth was unformed and void,

  with darkness over the surface of the deep,

  and the wind of God sweeping over the waters

  And so the scribe continued, printing twenty-eight lines before beginning a new column, filling three columns before moving to a new page.

  The book the scribe was copying was woven from interlocking stories of complicated characters interacting with a single transcendent deity to whom the Jews believed their fate was linked. These were stories their ancestors had told each other long before to explain their connection to this God, their land, and each other and to raise themselves from anarchy into order and law. It was their guide to the world. The book began to take shape before the first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by a Babylonian army in 586 BC. During the reign of King Josiah a few decades earlier, the Bible recounts in the book of Kings, one of the priests found a “scroll of the law” in the temple, a hint in the text itself that the stories were already being written down. Later, in exile in Babylon, scribes continued to write and redact, and by the fifth century BC the work that we know as the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, or the Pentateuch had come into being.