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

by Matti Friedman

  These five books, the Torah, are the heart of the Jewish religion. It is the Torah that is read out loud from a scroll every week in synagogue in a yearly cycle of portions that begins with the creation of the universe and ends with the death of Moses. Other books were added later: the moral and social prophecies of the humble Amos; Ezekiel’s vision of God, experienced along the river Chebar during the Babylonian exile; the sexually evocative language of the Song of Songs. Other books were left out. By the first century of the Common Era, after the Jews had returned to their land and had then been exiled yet again, this time by Rome, the Bible’s books had been selected, edited, and refined into the text we know.

  At first these stories were one of many threads making up the national life of the Jews. They also had a land, and a language, and a temple that was the center of their religion. But that changed with the destruction of the temple by Rome in AD 70 and the exile of the Jews. There was no precedent for a scattered people’s remaining a people; dispersion meant disappearance. If the Jews were to be an exception, instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, they needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.

  On Mondays, Thursdays, and the Sabbath, in synagogues anywhere on earth, a member of the congregation opens an ark and removes a book. It is a double scroll because this is the way books were once written. Written inside is the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. On top of the scroll there is often a silver crown: the Jews dress their book up like a king and stand up in respect when it is taken from the ark, just as they would if a dignitary entered the room. The Jews, in exile, would no longer have their own king to protect them or rule over them. They would have no political power themselves. Instead they would have a book that would connect them, wherever they were, to each other and to the power and protection of the King of Kings.

  A member of the congregation places the scroll on a table and rolls the two sides of the scroll away from each other, revealing long columns of black Hebrew letters, preparing to read it aloud. But the book cannot simply be read. Hebrew, like Arabic, is written without most of its vowels, and a reader is supposed to recognize the word and fill in the vowel sounds from memory. To demonstrate the problem this creates, imagine encountering the word mt. Is it mat? Meet? Mate? Moat? Now imagine more than three hundred thousand words written without vowels: this is the Hebrew Bible. There is also no punctuation, and some words are written one way but read another. And yet despite this absence of adequate information, reading the scroll with the utmost precision is imperative: When the reader chants the text, there are people standing on either side of him listening for errors. Congregants sometimes call out corrections, upon which the reader has to go back and repeat the words. On rare occasions, a reader will find a mistake in the scroll itself—a scribal error, or a letter worn away by age or by the constant rolling of the parchment—and the reading comes to a halt. The most learned worshippers gather around and peer at the scroll, and then, if it is deemed flawed, it is returned to the ark; even the tiniest defect renders the entire scroll unusable. Later it will be taken to be corrected by a scribe. Another scroll is brought out, and only then does the reading continue.

  Behind these stringencies lies the contention that there is only one text and that anarchy in these matters is an abomination. Catholics have Rome, a single religious institution holding all of the church’s constituent parts together, but after the Jewish exile, Jerusalem was just an idea, not an organization. Judaism had no central institution, only thousands of self-contained communities linked by the content of their religious belief and practice. The Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one, because minor differences in the text could lead to diverging interpretations and a splintering of the faith. And yet much of the information crucial to reading the book properly could not be found in the book itself.

  There needed to be another book, then, that would tell people how to read the first. It had to be written down before this key supplementary knowledge, which had been transmitted orally for centuries, was lost in the Diaspora. This is why the Crown was created.

  The language of the Bible had to be clear and not in dispute. Spelling and pronunciation had to be standardized, and punctuation inserted. But there is more to it than that, because the biblical text means more than might be conveyed by the simple meaning of the words. The text tells many truths—those on the surface, and those hidden beneath it. The text must be perfect because an imperfect text loses information vital to the book’s divine message. It is not just that we must know exactly what the words mean, Jewish tradition tells us, because we do not and cannot know exactly what they mean; perhaps we did once, and perhaps we will again one day, but for now the information must be preserved even if it is beyond our understanding. A tiny vowel sign, one that makes only a minute difference in how a word is pronounced—prolonging the syllable ah, for example, into aah—might be sheltering precious and secret information. So might the mysterious fifteen dots that are written above certain words in the text, or the baffling rules instructing scribes to make certain letters big and others small. If we lose these, we lose knowledge that God wanted us to have, even if we don’t know why.

  One tradition recounts that the sage Akiva, who lived in Roman times, used to expound not only on individual letters but on their tiny calligraphic flourishes, the “crowns of letters.” Even these were important. Another tradition tells us that the Five Books of Moses are actually one very long version of the name of God, which is another way of saying that you must not get anything wrong. Yet another tradition reminds us that when God created light, he did not just create light. He said, “Let there be light.” He created the world with words, which are therefore a kind of blueprint for creation and for the nature of the universe. Any tiny aspect of the text, no matter how useless we may foolishly believe it to be, is part of the code.

  Hundreds of years had gone by after the destruction of the temple when a group of scholars in Tiberias began the work of compiling the authoritative text of the Bible, inventing a system of tiny lines, hooks, and dots that served as symbols for vowels and cantillation—the tune to which the text is chanted, which also serves, crucially, to add punctuation and emphasis. The project, which took centuries, became known as the Masora, from the Hebrew word meaning “to pass on.” Their goal was to collect and record oral traditions, to reach consensus where there was disagreement, and ultimately to create the text of the Bible on which all others would be based.

  Of the rabbis engaged in the project, the greatest were those of the Ben-Asher dynasty, which produced five or six generations of scholars. The family’s greatest scion was Aaron, and his greatest work—the one that marked the end of the process of attaining perfection in the text—was this one. There were many biblical codices produced in later centuries, and certain examples of particularly high quality came to be called crowns of the Torah, or just crowns. This codex, the final achievement of hundreds of years of scholarship and the most accurate and famous of them all, became known as the Crown. While there are many tens of thousands of Torah scrolls, there is only one Crown.

  The rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the swift scribe Shlomo Ben-Buya’a worked together for several years. Because the book was meant to be a reference guide, not a ritual object read in synagogue, it did not need to be a scroll; scrolls, by this time, were already obsolete for recording practical documents. Instead it would be a bound codex, or what today we would refer to simply as a book. The invention of the codex allowed scholars to easily flip through text without rolling yards of parchment back and forth.

  Tanners soaked, stretched, and scrubbed the animal skins, removing traces of hair from one side and innards from the other. Ben-Buya’a wrote the letters in indelible ink made from powdered tree galls mixed with iron sulfate and black soot. Above, beneath, and beside those letters, on just under five hundred parchm
ent leaves, Ben-Asher added the marks indicating vowels and cantillation. He added thousands of tiny notes in the margins. Some were merely one letter: A Hebrew letter lamed, for example, indicated a word that appears nowhere else in the biblical text. A bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, indicated a word that appears twice. Longer notes warn of words that are not to be read as they are written or point to other passages where a certain rare word can be found. Ben-Asher could do this because he knew the entire text by heart. When the scribe and the scholar were finished, the new codex was ready to be sent into the world. More than a thousand years later, scholars of the Hebrew Bible would still have no more important book than theirs.

  PART TWO

  5

  The Treasure in the Synagogue

  THE CANTOR IN the synagogue sang the Hebrew words—For the beloved of my heart, Elijah the prophet—to an old Aleppo tune, and two young women in short dresses tottered around the sanctuary in high heels, holding a silver tray with a few dozen lit candles and a loose pile of dollar bills for charity. The men were clean shaven and wore dark suits or leather jackets and black velvet skullcaps. Some had both phylacteries and BlackBerries. They shook hands and kissed one another on both cheeks. One had his prayer shawl in a cloth bag embroidered with the family name Sha’alo, one of the Aleppo clans. The women, in their own section, tended toward dark haired and gorgeous. From one of the back rows, I took all of this in.

  A new mother, dressed in white, her belly still swollen, entered the sanctuary from the back, her own mother carrying the newborn boy on a pillow. The young father took him from the women and carried him toward a huddle of men near the front. They chanted the traditional blessings of the circumcision rite as one of the men readied his sharp instruments, and then the baby wailed and the ceremony was over. People kissed the mother and said, “Mabruk,” Arabic for congratulations. “Many more, inshallah,” one grinning man her age added: if Allah wills it.

  I slipped out of the synagogue onto a wide boulevard lined with trees and red brick American homes, and a yellow taxi zoomed by just then as if to confirm that I was, in fact, in Brooklyn, New York.

  Jewish Aleppo is gone. Today the Syrian city’s great synagogue sits empty in the middle of a Jewish Quarter with no Jews. The Crown’s grotto, the secret nerve center of the community’s spiritual life, contains nothing but dead air, and the volume that was kept there is as absent as its guardians. Using the portable survival mechanism built into their religion—the book—the exiles have regrouped in small, tightly knit colonies across the globe, in Buenos Aires, Panama City, Tokyo, and Milan. The largest is in this New York borough, the petri dish where fragments from lost Jewish worlds are cultured and regrown, where today the Jews of Aleppo exist among other communities, synagogues, and rabbinical seminaries bearing the names of lost towns in Poland and Ukraine. They and their descendants have survived and prospered, but in the city of their origin a world thousands of years in the making simply vanished. Few besides the Aleppo Jews themselves seem to have noticed.

  On the day of the riots in 1947, eighteen Jewish houses of prayer had been gutted by the time the Syrian government finally sent troops in to disperse the mobs at nightfall. The Crown, as far as almost anyone knew, had gone up in flames along with countless other texts in the inferno at the great synagogue.

  The rioters had also torched fifty shops, five schools, and an unknown number of homes belonging to their Jewish neighbors. Stories circulated among the Jews about rioters who had fashioned gloves and bags from the parchment of looted holy books. Aleppo’s wealthy Jewish families, the ones whose money maintained the synagogues and schools and provided dowries for needy brides and who had the clout to intervene with the government, had already fled down to the Mediterranean coast and the cosmopolitan quarters of Beirut. They would soon be on ships bound for Europe and America and would not be back. Within days of the riot the community was rudderless and destitute.

  Only one house of prayer was left unharmed: a modest building overlooked by the rioters because of its location off a particularly narrow alley. It was here, on the first Sabbath after the riots, that many of the Jewish men who remained in the city went to pray.

  Some of the people who gathered at the synagogue that Sabbath morning still believed life would return to normal. Some understood that it would not. But they were all wounded and furious, and so an extra prayer was added to the regular service: chapter 83 of the book of Psalms. Isaac Tawil, the rabbi’s son, shouted the lines with everyone else, pouring his anger into Hebrew verses that the “cursed ones,” as he called them, could not understand if they heard them, as they surely did, from windows nearby. Not far away was the gutted great synagogue, its courtyard littered with parchment, the broken safe in one corner. Lord, do not keep silent, be not quiet, Lord, be not still, they intoned with emotion, just as the rabbi’s son did when he sat opposite me in Tel Aviv more than sixty years later, his eyes closed.

  See how your enemies are astir, how your foes rear their heads . . .

  Make them like tumbleweed, Lord, like chaff before the wind

  As fire consumes the forest, or a flame sets the mountains ablaze

  So pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm.

  Accounts of the Aleppo riot usually repeat the claim that the mob killed dozens of Jews, as if without death the violence would not register on the scale of Jewish tragedy. That claim is false. No one was killed, raped, or even seriously hurt, and if the immense destruction was a telling indication of the extent of local Muslim tolerance for Jews, we must acknowledge that this fact was, too. In the middle-class quarter where Rafi Sutton lived, there were Muslims who stood outside the doors of Jewish homes and faced down the marauders, and Rafi himself took refuge with his family in the apartment of Muslim neighbors. Some of the Jews in Aleppo saw the fact that the rioters killed no one as a reason for hope that all was not lost; it was the 1940s, and this was a people with no good options and little expectation of kindness. Others saw it as proof that the authorities were in control, encouraging the devastation of property, and thus of the community’s livelihood and future, but halting the disturbances before blood was shed.

  Though it would take time, the destruction of the community was under way; it was the Jews, not their enemies, who would now be driven like chaff before the wind, until none remained. But the loss of the community’s most sacred possession was a clever falsehood.

  The Syrian authorities knew of the codex and knew its value, and they might have considered the manuscript a cultural artifact that was part of the history of their new country. Agents of the regime had already questioned one of the rabbis about it. A wealthy Armenian doctor from the city, perhaps a collector of manuscripts, had also contacted the same rabbi and had inquired about purchasing the book. The Crown was in danger, and to mislead those seeking it, the Jewish elders spread the lie that it had been destroyed.

  Later, what had actually happened to it became a matter of almost comic disagreement. If all the stories told over the years by Aleppo Jews about people spiriting the Crown from the synagogue are true, then no fewer than a dozen different men were there at the same time, individually removing the same book.

  In one story, a rabbi who later emigrated to Mexico City went into the great synagogue after quiet had returned to Aleppo, or so he would tell a writer in his adopted home many years later. Inside he discovered the Crown, charred. He picked it up and hid it in the ruins of the synagogue, where it was later recovered.

  Another version was recounted in a book written by an Aleppo Jew in Brooklyn: During the riot the Crown was stolen by no less a personage than a minister of the Syrian government, who fled with it to Lebanon. Upon his return he was caught by Syrian authorities and sent to the gallows, and the book was returned to the Jews.

  Yet another account came from Murad Faham, the cheese merchant who heard about the United Nations vote as he walked to the bazaar and who will soon reappear as one of the key playe
rs in this story.

  After the riots, Faham recounted much later in his taped oral testimony, he dressed like an Arab, in a woolen cloak, and went out onto the street. It was almost dawn. He walked to the great synagogue, passing the shells of Jewish stores, and went through the gate, seeing that the fire had blackened the walls and melted the metal supports under the pews. He found the safe that had been in the Cave of the Prophet Elijah. Inside was the Crown, which was still on fire but somehow had not been consumed; here is a magical element inspired, perhaps, by the Exodus story of the burning bush. “I took it in my hands, a ball of fire, and wrapped it in my outer coat,” Faham recounted. His cloak “was like that of a Bedouin, thick and made entirely of wool, and I did not feel the fire.” A few Arabs came by, but they took him for an Arab himself, greeted him without much interest, and continued looting the synagogue, taking pieces of silver from the pomegranate-shaped decorations placed on top of Torah scrolls.

  Faham went to the house of the sexton, Asher Baghdadi, who was too frightened to open the door.