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

by Matti Friedman

  Walk with your children as if you’re going for a stroll, he told Bahiyeh’s mother, as if it were normal for a Jewish family to be out strolling in the Lebanese countryside at night. He warned them not to say a word. It was winter, when the citrus fruits ripen, and low-hanging fruit bumped Bahiyeh’s head as she followed her mother through a grapefruit orchard. Bump, bump, bump: this is what the sexton’s daughter remembered best decades later.

  Soon they reached the shoreline. Fishing boats were waiting for them, and a man threw her into one as if he were heaving a sack of flour. The boat was so overloaded that Bahiyeh could reach over the side with her little girl’s hand and touch the waves. It began to rain, and one of the fishermen suggested that whoever had a God should start praying. A woman was crying because she could not find her child, who must have been put on a different boat.

  After a few hours at sea, Bahiyeh was lifted out of the boat, and she waded onto a beach that looked much like the one they had just left. Men in blue work shirts were waiting to greet them. They gave the newcomers blankets and hot tea. They also gave them pickled herring, an eastern European delicacy, and must have thought they were being kind. Bahiyeh, raised on the cheese and spices of her city, thought it was vile. She would never see Aleppo again.

  Twelve-year-old Bahiyeh Baghdadi was one of the one hundred thousand people from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East who entered the new state of Israel that year as the war with the Arabs raged. Eventually, nearly all the Jews living in Arab countries would be pushed out, two-thirds of them arriving in Israel: French-speaking, middle-class professionals from cities on the Mediterranean coast and clansmen from squalid villages in the interior, streams of the displaced from Morocco to Iran. Most were poor; the better-off preferred Europe and the Americas. Israeli immigration agents were bringing them to chartered propeller planes idling on desert tarmacs or to boats floating surreptitiously in dark coves along the North African coast and then to the sunlit bedlam of the new state.

  These new arrivals had little in common with the European Jews who had previously made up the majority. Some of Israel’s leaders, as they struggled to house, clothe, and employ the newcomers, saw them as inferior specimens necessary for the new state largely because its intended manpower pool in Europe had been annihilated. They were inclined to discuss all the new immigrants, including Europeans, in the cavalier ethnic generalizations of the time. One government report declared immigrants from Europe to be lazy and above manual labor; Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, and Libyans to be “generally healthy”; and North Africans “mostly destitute, hot-tempered, unorganized and nationalistic,” and “of low cultural and social level.” Turks were “good human material,” and Yemenis were “quick witted.” One member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, described the Jews from Arab countries as generally “medieval.” At the peak of the immigration wave that followed Israel’s founding, the Foreign Ministry sent a memorandum to its representatives noting that most of the newcomers were from the Middle East: “This will affect all aspects of life in the country,” it read, warning that the “preservation of the country’s cultural level demands a flow of immigration from the West, and not only from the backward Levantine countries.” A senior official in the Jewish Agency, which was in charge of immigration, said, “Perhaps these are not the Jews we would like to see coming here, but we can hardly tell them not to come.” Despite these reservations and prejudices, however, immigration was never restricted to any significant degree, and Israel went to great lengths to bring as many Jews as possible as fast as possible, regardless of their origins, and to absorb them to the best of its ability.

  At about the time of Bahiyeh’s escape, a poster went up on a wall next to the Shika Café in Aleppo with a list of boys slated to be drafted into the Syrian army. Several of them were Jews, who were officially considered Syrians like everyone else and were not exempted from service. One was Rafi Sutton, the retired spy I met as an old man. He was seventeen.

  By this time, Rafi had spent months watching young Muslim men march and ride in open trucks through the streets before leaving in high spirits for the battlefield in Palestine. Many of them were kids he knew from the neighborhood. They had rifles that they sometimes fired into the air, and wore checkered headdresses, and performed calisthenics and weapons training on a soccer field near his home. As the fighting wore on and went increasingly badly for the Syrians, he saw soldiers, some bandaged and supporting themselves with crutches, coming home in jeeps and trucks pocked with bullet holes.

  Rafi reported to the draft office in May 1949 as directed. Rafi had heard stories about what awaited Jewish soldiers in the army, and when he exited with a new military identity card and an official draft date in a few weeks’ time, he stood on the building’s wide steps and swore he would find a way out.

  Rafi’s family had arrived in Aleppo four and a half centuries before, after Spain’s Christians expelled the Jews. The story of how they arrived was contained in the family’s name—not the Anglicized version, Sutton, but the original, Setehon. One of the exiles from Spain, the story goes, was a rabbi whose family name was Seton. Reaching a port, he was forced to decide where to go. The known world did not extend much to the west; not far away was Gibraltar and what Gentile scholars called the finis terrae, with unknown seas beyond. So the rabbi would travel east. He had heard about a city past the eastern edge of the Mediterranean where Jews had lived, somehow, for thousands of years without interruption: Aleppo, a lighthouse for a man reduced to bundles of belongings and books, a wife, and a huddle of homeless children. To win divine providence for the perilous sea journey, he took the Hebrew letter that represents the name of God—heh, pronounced like the letter h—and inserted it into his family name. God had done this to the idolater’s son Abram in the book of Genesis, making him Abraham. Seton became Setehon, and this, the rabbi hoped, would see his family delivered safely to their new home. He must have been proud of his foresight when they were.

  The rabbi’s descendants were now on the move again. For Rafi, the way out led through the taxi stand outside the Baron Hotel, a grand Aleppo landmark where T. E. Lawrence had stayed in his days as Lawrence of Arabia and where Agatha Christie was a guest while writing Murder on the Orient Express. Jews, as a rule, were not taxi drivers, but there was one exception: a man universally known by the nickname Ufo, who worked the Aleppo-Beirut line for the Al-Karnak Taxi Company. Rafi found him in the hubbub of drivers and hustlers outside the Baron.

  The border crossings from southern Syria leading directly to Beirut were all heavily guarded, the driver said. Instead they would try to get into Lebanon from the north, driving on the coastal highway toward the city of Tripoli, where the crossing was less traveled and the guard would be lighter. Rafi was to dress like an Arab, in a white skullcap and robe, and was to bring nothing else with him. They would set out at a time when no one would suspect Jews to be on the road: the Sabbath, when driving is forbidden. Rafi had never desecrated the Sabbath, and the thought made him ill.

  Still, on the last Sabbath in May, at five o’clock in the morning, Ufo parked outside a mosque near Rafi’s house, switched off the headlights, and knocked on the door. Rafi’s father pressed his hand against his son’s forehead in blessing. His mother wept, and his sister said a hurried good-bye from the doorway as he rushed out. Inside the cab were two other Jewish boys. They took off their European clothes and donned Arab garb. The first soldier they encountered at the checkpoint on the outskirts of the city asked a few questions and waved them through. They stopped in a town along the way to kill time, because the driver wanted to reach the border crossing after dark, and then they continued toward the frontier, passing through little villages along the Mediterranean coast. It was close to midnight when the taxi finally approached the Lebanese border. A military guard post was a few hundred yards away, downhill. The lights were off.

  The driver cut the engine, flicked off the headlights, and let the car roll. Fifty yards away from the
checkpoint, he braked. They all listened: silence. The driver got out of the car and walked over to the border post, where he saw two soldiers asleep inside. He gingerly pulled the rope raising the barrier, then returned to the car, left the door open to avoid unnecessary noise, and continued rolling down toward the checkpoint. Rafi thought his frantic heartbeat might wake up the guards; the fear was so intense he could feel it eating away at his leg muscles. But then they were through, and then they were past Tripoli and the gardens and churches of Jounieh in the suburbs of Beirut, and then his uncles, the jewelers who had given Rafi’s family their Zenith radio, were lifting their heads from their desks as the shop door opened and in walked their sister’s son from Aleppo.

  Rafi wanted to cross into Israel overland, but that plan was scuttled by news that the usually laissez-faire Lebanese authorities had decided to show they were taking action against Israel and had cracked down on Jewish refugees sneaking across the border. Not long before he arrived, the Lebanese had arrested a group of Syrian Jews on the frontier at night and sent them to prison. At loose ends in Beirut, Rafi took to hanging around at the Café Bahrain, near the port, where one day a fisherman who looked about thirty asked him for a light. Rafi did not smoke. The fisherman was wearing a necklace with a cross and said his name was Michel. After a few casual meetings with Michel over a period of weeks, Rafi gathered his nerve and undertook a trial run. He told the fisherman he knew a man who needed to deliver a box to the island of Cyprus. Would Michel be willing to do the job?

  It would depend on the price, Michel said, in Rafi’s recollection. A fair sum would be five hundred pounds. Rafi nodded. A few days later, he went back to Michel and mentioned that he knew two people without papers who needed to get to Cyprus. Would he take them? Yes, Michel said.

  Rafi Sutton in Beirut, 1949.

  A few days after that, Rafi informed Michel that the two had changed their minds and now wanted to go in another direction.

  What other direction? asked Michel. Where could you go from here except to Palestine?

  Let’s say to Palestine, Rafi said, and he thought, There, I said it.

  Michel was perhaps not as surprised as Rafi had hoped. Why start with the bullshit about Cyprus and the box? he said. Tell me you want to escape to Israel and I’ll take you.

  This was getting too complicated for a teenager, and soon figures in the Jewish community of Beirut had taken over the planning. Before long, the group had grown from the three Aleppo boys into a group of several dozen, mostly Syrians, along with a few Iraqi Jews who had also washed up in Lebanon. By the end it had swelled to more than 150 people. Instead of one fishing boat, they would take two large boats manned by Michel’s relatives. The date was set for the Rosh Hashana festival for the same reason that the boys had set out from Aleppo on the Sabbath: no one would suspect a smuggling attempt on the Jewish new year.

  Taxis brought the escapees in small groups in daylight to the busy fishing port in Beirut, and launches ferried them out to the waiting boats. They brought no luggage and dressed for a sightseeing excursion. Rafi sat by the prow, crushed among other bodies, the shoes he had bought the day before submerged in ankle-deep water. He was wearing all the clothes he owned, including five pairs of socks, four pairs of underwear, and multiple undershirts and pants.

  One of the boats was soon blown off course, and then its engine broke down, and the passengers lost sight of the shoreline. One boat towed the other. In Rafi’s boat was a man he recognized as a prominent lawyer from Aleppo, and when the man took off his sunglasses a few hours later, Rafi was amused to see their shape imprinted in pale white on the sunburnt skin of the lawyer’s face. The weather changed, darkness fell, chilly winds followed periodic downpours of rain, and a trip that was supposed to take only hours stretched overnight and into the next day. The escapees were shivering with cold and exhaustion when they finally heard the crunch of hull on stone.

  Rafi splashed through the tidal pools in his ruined shoes, avoiding the jagged rocks of the Galilee coastline, and collapsed on the sand. Before long he saw the lights of a jeep, and then something that almost could not be real: two policemen running toward the beach, shouting in a language he knew from synagogue. The refugees mobbed them, grasping at their hands, weeping. It was the fall of 1949, the second day of the Jewish new year.

  9

  The President

  WHEN ITZHAK BEN-ZVI became president of Israel, he did not forget the Crown of Aleppo. Instead he used the weight of his new station to aid his pursuit. His young chief of staff, David Bartov, heard about the Crown shortly after his boss took office in 1952, and then regularly after that. Bartov believed the country had more pressing problems and joked with the other staffers about the president’s “hallucinations,” he told me when I met him much later, a dignified, slow-moving man in a Jerusalem home for the aged.

  Jerusalem, where the president’s office was located, was a divided city. Gunfire crackled regularly along the urban frontier line between the western, Jewish side and the Jordanian-held Arab sector in the east. Israel was a chaotic, heroic, and desperate refugee camp, a four-year-old country that had more than doubled its population since independence, its cities and absorption camps overflowing with the remnants of European Jewry in jackets and caps, women with numbered tattoos, herders from the Atlas Mountains with robes and hennaed hands, Yemenis, Russians, Romanians, Greeks, a confused, impoverished mass of humanity that was somehow at once homeless and home. “The ‘ingathering of the exiles,’ as the Zionists call this heartbreaking irruption, is the principal point of pride—and also the principal burden and growing despair—of the State of Israel,” a writer for the New Yorker reported in a dispatch at about this time. Absorbing these immigrants, and especially the ones from the East, into a viable state will require miracles, he wrote, but he added thoughtfully, “Everywhere a visitor goes in that country, he sees symbols of the imminence of these miracles.”

  After assuming the presidency, a figurehead position that bequeathed to its holder little political power but considerable public stature and authority, Ben-Zvi met with a prominent American Jewish leader and tried to persuade him to fund an attempt to obtain the Crown. The American, exiting the president’s office, met the young chief of staff and twisted his finger against his temple: Ben-Zvi was crazy. The president tried the country’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, but found him preoccupied with other matters. On a different occasion, the president told his chief of staff to summon the head of the Mossad. The new intelligence service had agents in Syria who were organizing illegal emigration and collecting information, and perhaps they could help. Bartov was not present at the meeting but remembered an incredulous Ben-Zvi telling him afterward that the country’s top spy had no idea what the Crown of Aleppo was. For several days afterward, the president asked Bartov if the Mossad had returned an answer, and each day the chief of staff was forced to say no. Eventually he had to inform Ben-Zvi that Israel’s spies were otherwise engaged and would not be able to take on the president’s mission.

  Itzhak Ben-Zvi was one of the state’s most important leaders and symbols. Like Ben-Gurion, his friend and colleague, he was a member of the small group of utopian revolutionaries who had fled persecution and grinding poverty in the Pale of Settlement in the early twentieth century for a life of relentless labor, repeated bouts of malaria, furious ideological arguments, and pursuit of an unlikely dream in Turkish Palestine. In the end, Ben-Zvi and his comrades had willed a Jewish state into being against impossible odds, almost against the very logic of human events; they had glared at history and watched it bend to their will. “With the tenacity which Latins devote to love and Frenchmen to food, they pursued and served the idea of Zion Revived,” the Israeli historian Amos Elon wrote of this generation. “Their main relaxation consisted of composing argumentative, quarrelsome, ideological diatribes against one another upholding the superiority of one notion of socialism, or Zionism, or an amalgam of both, over all others.”

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sp; Ben-Zvi, like the country’s other leaders, had his eyes fixed firmly, ruthlessly forward, but he differed from most of them in allowing himself a fascination with the past. He was an avid traveler and was said to be proficient in eight languages. Observing the various costumes and tongues of the world’s Jews, Ben-Zvi saw traces of a shared nationhood “not extinguished by the snowstorms in the farthest corners of the north nor by the storms of Yemen.” He was an archaeology enthusiast, seeing the pursuit of physical remnants of the past as a way to establish a physical link between the people of Israel and their land. The new pioneers, though, marching as they were into a glorious socialist future, had little use for the past and often carelessly destroyed artifacts they turned up; Ben-Zvi held symposiums on how to educate the New Jew he had helped create to respect what was old.

  The president was also different from many of his peers in Israel’s leadership in his approach to the new immigrants from the East. He shared the casual paternalism of his colleagues, but not their disdain. He saw a culture “overflowing with rich tradition and carrying powers,” albeit one “hidden beneath a shroud of primitivism and Levantinism.” He was fascinated by these Jews and set up an academic center to study them, the Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the Middle East. His new institute had chosen “the most backward Jewish tribes,” he said in 1952, people “whose cultural possessions have no responsible curator.”

  The exile of the Jews was over, as far as Ben-Zvi was concerned; it was now to be studied and memorialized in museums. The mystique of the Crown, which had been written in the land of Israel and then preserved by one of Judaism’s most venerable outposts in the East and which was now tantalizingly unavailable, played simultaneously on several of his interests. Such a potent Jewish symbol needed to be in Jerusalem, the capital of the new state that had superseded the Diaspora. More specifically, it had to be in Ben-Zvi’s institute, where, he dreamed, it would be studied by scholars and not hoarded in secrecy by rabbis.