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

by Matti Friedman

  On December 11, 1957, Pessel sent a telegram to Jerusalem: 30 ISH MAFLIGIM HAYOM BEMARMARA NEKUDA BEYN NANOSIM MAR FACHAM. This was Hebrew written phonetically in Latin characters. It meant, “Thirty people are sailing today on the Marmara. Among the passengers is Mr. Faham.”

  13

  The Brown Suitcase

  THREE WEEKS LATER, two messengers walked in from a chilly night in Jerusalem’s Jewish sector and climbed the stairs of 8 Jewish National Fund Street, an apartment building just across from the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. One of them carried a brown suitcase.

  The men knocked on a door and were shown into an apartment full of books. This was the home of Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the head of the Aliya Department. The immigration chief’s grown son Eliyahu was there that Monday night—January 6, 1958—and remembered it well when I met him years later. He was used to strange visitors at strange hours: members of parliament, the director of the Mossad, anonymous men who would appear briefly, whisper something to his father, and disappear. He had been brought up not to ask questions. Eliyahu heard the knock, and when the door opened he saw two men whose appearance was unremarkable but for the brown suitcase. His father appeared to be expecting them. They crossed the living room to his father’s study, and the door closed behind them. They emerged a few minutes later and left without their suitcase. This, in itself, was not an entirely unusual occurrence, but what happened next was.

  Shlomo Zalman Shragai (left) with Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1951.

  The immigration chief beckoned Eliyahu into the study, where he saw the open suitcase. Inside was a package wrapped in a white fabric of rough weave, which he recognized as the kind used to wrap cheese. His father peeled it away, revealing a stack of yellowing parchment folios.

  “This,” Shragai told his son, emotion evident in his voice, “is the Crown of Aleppo.” He quickly replaced the shroud and closed the suitcase.

  Shragai had been notified immediately when Faham arrived with the treasure at Haifa. Once Faham’s goods had cleared customs, a process that took several weeks, the immigration chief ordered his Jewish Agency subordinates in charge of new arrivals at the port to drive to Jerusalem and bring the Crown directly to him. On January 8, with the book now in his hands, he penned a brief note to the courier Faham, who was staying with one of his sons in Kfar Saba, a town among citrus orchards on the coastal plain. “Two days ago Mr. Zvi Grosbach brought me the suitcase with the Crown of the Torah,” Shragai wrote. He asked that Faham come to meet him and provide more details about the Crown.

  Faham replied a few days later with a letter that would soon be used against him in court. “I am the immigrant Mordechai, son of Ezra Faham Hacohen,” the courier wrote, introducing himself with his Hebrew name,

  who was exiled from the city of Aleppo, in Syria, and who arrived in Israel with my family on December 16, 1957. We brought with us the Bible of Ben-Asher, who lived in Tiberias at the beginning of the tenth century and who was one of the last masters of the Masora and who marked the beginning of the time of the grammarians.

  This Bible is a guide for the eyes of the scribes and copyists, and it was upon it that Maimonides based his book, and he used it in clarifying the matter of when to leave full or empty lines, as is discussed in the Laws of Torah Scrolls, section eight, chapter four.

  The tradition kept by the residents of Aram-Tzova (Aleppo) is that this Bible, the one called the “Crown of the Torah,” is from the days of the second temple and the plunder taken from Jerusalem, and that it was only edited by Ben-Asher, and that is why it was named for him—the Crown of Ben-Asher.

  At the time of my departure from Syria, the rabbis and the heads of the rabbinic court in our city, Rabbi Moshe Tawil, descended from Elia the Priest, may he be deserving of a good and long life, and Rabbi Shlomo Zaafrani, may God protect him, gave me this Bible to bring up to the land of Israel and to give to a man who seems to me to be honest in his worship of God and in his fear of sin. That is why I decided to give it to your honor, Mr. Shragai, may God protect you.

  In the accepted version of the Crown’s story, the one upon which I relied in my original article about the manuscript, the envoy from Aleppo brought the book to Israel and gave it to the country’s president. Here was the first deviation I found from the official narrative. Slight as it was, it alerted me that something in the story was not right. Presenting a book of the Crown’s importance to Israel’s head of state had a certain logic to it; the fact that the Crown had actually been presented to a lower-ranking functionary was peculiar, as was the fact that the immigration chief was mentioned nowhere in the material I had read. Yet Faham’s instructions from the two rabbis, as he had written, did not mention the president at all: Faham was only to spirit the book to safety in Israel and entrust it to a man of his own choosing, providing he was religious. He chose Shragai, a rare Orthodox Jew in a position of power, and had thus fulfilled his mission.

  In Eliyahu Shragai’s recollection, his father, awed by the Crown’s age and sanctity, told him the book was too holy to remain in his hands and had to be given promptly to President Ben-Zvi. His father went the very next morning to the president’s residence, a five-minute walk away, Eliyahu told me, and gave him the Crown. When it was placed on Ben-Zvi’s desk, remembered the president’s chief of staff, David Bartov, “the happiness was beyond anything I had seen before.”

  By this time, the official narrative’s small but curious inconsistencies with what my own research was turning up, and the resistance I was encountering to my inquiries, had convinced me that there was more to this story than was immediately apparent. I redoubled my efforts to penetrate the Aleppo Codex Underground, making more phone calls to scholars, a small number of whom became my allies; laboriously expanding my circle of contacts in the insular Aleppo Jewish community, a nearly impossible task for an outsider that began to succeed only after the amateur Crown sleuth Ezra Kassin volunteered to make introductions and to serve as my guide; spending more time in the Israeli government’s archive in Jerusalem, where I found an old file bulging with papers and marked “Crown of Aleppo”; and sifting through documents at the Ben-Zvi Institute, where, after several months of hesitation and delay, the current head of the institute and its academic secretary—neither of whom had been there in the years around the Crown’s arrival—eventually decided to grant me access to their archive.

  As I dug deeper, I noticed enigmatic references to a trial that had taken place in Israel after the manuscript arrived. The official history of the Crown, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute in 1987, gave this trial only the briefest mention, making it seem little more than a communal spat of scant consequence. When I met the author of that history, he told me he was not interested in “legal fights over ownership” and had barely read what information he had found. The story seemed to be becoming more opaque the more I learned, and I grasped at the trial as a possible key to understanding the lacunae and contradictions of the existing narrative. I met no one who had seen a transcript of this trial, but I was told on several occasions that such a transcript did exist; it was, however, classified and off limits. This made it seem all the more alluring. I spent months looking.

  The trial, I learned, took place not in a civil court but in a rabbinic court, part of a parallel religious legal system the government of Israel instituted after the state was founded. The rabbinic courts dealt mainly with matters like marriage and divorce, but sides in a dispute could also choose to have their case adjudicated in a religious court by rabbis instead of civil judges. When I contacted the Jerusalem Rabbinic Court—housed in a cluttered, hectic building whose main elements of interior design are piles of yellowing file folders and hurried clerks in black skullcaps—I was told the case was so old that the file could not be found. Repeated e-mails to a court spokeswoman did not help. “No one here remembers this ancient case,” she wrote.

  It was around then that I went to see Ezra Kassin at his home in a working-class
suburb of Tel Aviv. By this point we had met numerous times. Some of my most informative conversations had taken place on his moped as he wove through Tel Aviv traffic. Each time, I felt he was testing me. He would feed me a scrap of information, hinting there was more where that came from, and then grin and tell me to wait or look for it myself. He had been hoarding material about the Crown for years and was not about to give it all away just because a reporter came and asked.

  We went out for lunch at a falafel stand near his house, taking Ezra’s two-year-old boy with us. I had already asked him more than once about the trial, eliciting characteristically vague responses. Now, while we ate, he said, “I’m going to show you something you’ve wanted for a while.”

  Back in his apartment, he brought out a green binder and handed it to me. I opened it and saw a photocopy of a page written with an old Hebrew typewriter.

  The State of Israel

  Ministry of Religious Affairs

  District Rabbinic Court

  Jerusalem

  Page 1

  File No. 906/5718

  It was the transcript from the first day of the trial: March 18, 1958.

  The transcript and the other trial documents I eventually obtained were indeed the breakthrough I had been waiting for. They removed the smooth casing constructed around the story of the manuscript’s travels in the mid-twentieth century and exposed the carefully concealed gears and levers inside.

  Ezra’s documents appeared to be copies that someone had made long ago of the transcripts, and as I could not be sure of their accuracy, I still needed the originals. I made another attempt to contact the rabbinic court in Jerusalem. This time I reached a senior clerk who had more important things to do and whom I kept on the phone nonetheless with an enthusiastic explanation of why the Crown and its story were important enough to be worth his time. He agreed to look for the file in the archives, but then weeks went by without word. When I finally called him, he told me he had found it.

  “When can I come?” I asked.

  The official apologized: he had found the file but did not have permission to let me see it. He gave me the same answer a few more times in the weeks that followed, until I showed up at the court building and knocked unannounced on the door of his office. Distracted, he gestured at his file cabinet as if he had been expecting me. On top was a stack of papers in a disintegrating folder of brown cardboard.

  “I’ll take it now,” I suggested.

  “Enjoy,” he said. I sat in a corner of a busy waiting room, and within an hour I had photographed the entire file, which included letters, summonses, and other documents pertaining to the trial, as well as the original fifty-year-old transcripts in handwritten Hebrew. With a few exceptions, they matched the typed copies Ezra had shown me.

  The court case lasted, on and off, for four years. It was charged and, at times, ugly. Most of the major characters in the story appeared in court. Not all of them told the truth. The trial documents included names, dates, and descriptions of how the Crown traveled from Syria to Israel, and these led me to other documents and people who shed further light on a story that was now quite unrecognizable.

  PART THREE

  14

  The Trial

  NEWS OF FAHAM’S arrival in Israel on December 16, 1957, spread quickly within the small community of Aleppo Jews who were already in the country. A few days later, a young teacher named Yitzhak Zaafrani went to pay him a visit. The teacher was the son of one of the two rabbis who had sent the Crown from Aleppo. Because there was no direct communication between Israel and Syria, however, neither he nor anyone else had any inkling that the book that could never be moved had been moved.

  Faham was surrounded by other well-wishers when he arrived, according to Zaafrani’s testimony in court a few months after this visit—testimony he repeated to me with impressive accuracy more than five decades later. It was the merchant’s son who told Zaafrani that the Crown of Aleppo had been sent from Syria and had arrived with his father. Zaafrani could not quite believe that the book had been removed from the synagogue. At the time of his visit, the codex was still held by the customs authorities at the Haifa port, along with the rest of Faham’s belongings, and had yet to be transferred to the immigration chief in Jerusalem.

  Faham’s son said his father had been asking for Rabbi Isaac Dayan, the chief Aleppo rabbi in Israel. Zaafrani took this to mean that Dayan was to be given the Crown, and because Dayan was the head of the local Aleppo community and a colleague of the two rabbis still in Syria, he indeed seemed the most logical recipient. In any case, Faham’s son said, the matter was to be kept “completely secret.”

  More than a month later, on January 22, Zaafrani met Rabbi Dayan at a bar mitzvah celebration and asked him about the Crown, assuming the rabbi had long since received it. But Rabbi Dayan was startled: he did not even know it had arrived. Zaafrani began to understand that something was wrong.

  They would go to see Faham the next day, the rabbi declared, and told the young teacher to bring a sheet they could use to wrap up the great book. By this time, more than two weeks had elapsed since the messengers’ nighttime arrival at the house of the immigration chief, Shragai, with the brown suitcase, and Faham was no longer in possession of the Crown. But the Aleppo Jews did not know this yet. When they arrived, Zaafrani knocked on the door while the rabbi waited downstairs.

  Faham’s daughter-in-law came to the door. Faham wasn’t there, she said.

  “I said that the rabbi of the community was with me and wanted to speak to her father-in-law about an important question,” the teacher testified not long afterward. “I said she should come downstairs and speak with him. I told her the rabbi was standing not far away, and that she should take off her apron.” She did so. The rabbi asked her about the Crown.

  Her father-in-law “did not bring anything old from Aleppo,” she said. The two visitors left with their sheet.

  Not long afterward, Zaafrani met Faham, who was furious about the way he had behaved with his daughter-in-law. “Why did you come to search as if I’ve done something wrong?” Faham asked, in the teacher’s recollection. Eventually, Faham revealed what he had done. He had turned the Crown over to Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the head of the Aliya Department—to the Israeli government. Not only had the Crown of Aleppo, the community’s treasure and talisman, been moved from its synagogue and city, but it had somehow found its way out of the hands of its guardians and into the hands of strangers.

  The Aleppo Jews were suspicious of any government and did not see the largely secular European socialists of the Israeli leadership as representing the entire Jewish people, as they claimed. Indeed, most Aleppo exiles were using Israel as a transit point to the West or bypassing it entirely. The austere socialism of the new state, and its poverty, made it hard for them to do what they knew how to do well—business—and the domination of eastern Europeans, with their condescension toward the Jews of Arab lands, stung. Most of them continued westward, to Panama or São Paulo, or to Brooklyn, where the rows of Lexus SUVs parked along Ocean Parkway decades later would testify to the happy marriage between a people’s abilities and a country’s possibilities. To them, the idea that the Israeli government had any claim to their book was absurd.

  Rabbi Dayan appeared to be under the impression that Faham could still change his mind and get the Crown back. The rabbi took Faham to a new synagogue built by the Aleppo community on the beach in Tel Aviv and showed him a box where he intended to keep the Crown. It was far too flimsy, Faham recalled telling the rabbi. They could build a room of stone, just like the grotto in the Aleppo synagogue, the rabbi suggested, but Faham replied that he did not like the place “in general.” The two rabbis in Aleppo told him only to consult with Dayan, Faham informed the rabbi, not to give him the Crown or obey his orders. Those rabbis were in Syria, of course, and could not be contacted for clarification.

  While the Aleppo Jews were still struggling to figure out what had happened, the state was swiftly movi
ng to draft a trusteeship document for the Crown that would place the codex permanently under its own control. The trustees were to be President Ben-Zvi, the immigration chief Shragai, and Faham himself; it was now clear Faham’s loyalties were no longer with the Aleppo Jews and that he had thrown in his lot with the Israeli authorities. The Aleppo Jews understood they were about to lose the Crown, even if they still did not quite understand how any of this had come about.

  Israel, in those years, was a centralized state with one dominant political party: Mapai, the Labor Zionist faction of Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion. The party controlled the unions and public housing and nearly everything else, and a signature from an apparatchik often decided who got a job or an apartment. Nonetheless, the Aleppo Jews did not give in, nor did they make do with letters and complaints. In February 1958, two months after the codex had arrived at Haifa, the Aleppo Jews retained a lawyer, went to court, and sued the government.

  The court proceedings documented in the long-sought transcripts began the following month at the Jerusalem Rabbinic Court. The hearings were held before three rabbis, instead of judges, but otherwise followed the recognizable formula of a trial. One of the government lawyer’s first moves, unopposed by the Aleppo community’s attorney, was to ensure that details would not be published in the press. He cited the safety of the Jews still in Syria, who would presumably be in danger if the regime there learned that the Crown had been smuggled to Israel. This was true, but it was also true that the state, as the transcripts make clear, had other reasons not to want details made public. The proceedings were duly kept secret and have remained so for fifty years.