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

by Matti Friedman

  The Aleppo lawyer was still hinting, if not stating outright, that Faham’s decision to cede the book was related to the customs bill that had been waived thanks to the immigration chief’s intervention. Perhaps the lawyer had not yet fully understood the significance of the letters, which indicated that control of the Crown was settled long before it arrived in Israel. Shragai, in any event, brushed this allegation aside. “There are special rights for those who suffered abroad for Zionism and aliya, there are rights for those who bring money, and this is known, and in many cases we ask the government for customs reductions and so forth,” he told the court.

  The Aleppo lawyer was not done. “In light of Mr. Shragai’s testimony, I have questions for Mr. Faham,” he said. He had prepared his final offensive against the merchant’s credibility. This time, the subject was to be the letter that Faham wrote to the immigration chief soon after his arrival, the one that began, “I am the immigrant Mordechai, son of Ezra Faham.”† In it, he described the history of the Crown and, for the first time, put forward the claim that he had been told to give it to a religious man of his own choosing. The letter, the lawyer appeared to have noticed, read like a scholarly exposition on the history of the book, complete with source references; Faham must not have struck him as a likely author. Are you sure that you wrote it yourself? the lawyer asked Faham.

  Faham was sure.

  Are you certain that the letter was not dictated to you by—for example—the immigration chief? The lawyer was hinting that the “religious man” story originated with none other than Shragai—the “religious man” himself.

  “I wrote the letter myself and not according to the request of Mr. Shragai,” Faham insisted, at which point the lawyer appeared to abruptly change the subject.

  Do you know in what way the Crown was connected to Maimonides? The spectators in court most likely did not understand what the attorney was up to.

  No, Faham admitted, I do not. As the lawyer knew, the letter said Maimonides had used the Crown when preparing the laws governing the writing of Torah scrolls.

  And do you know anything about the rules governing when scribes must leave blank lines in the columns of a Torah scroll?

  No, I do not know what those are, Faham said. Faham’s letter said Maimonides used the Crown to draft just those rules.

  Do you know if tradition says the book dates to the time of the first temple in Jerusalem, or the second?

  No, Faham said, I do not. Faham’s letter cited an Aleppo tradition that it came from the time of the second temple. The attorney’s point was made: Faham had not written the letter but had rather signed one written for him.

  At a session on May 4, the lawyer asked Shragai about the same letter.

  “I did not draft the letter for him,” Shragai replied. “You should ask him who wrote the letter for him.” The lawyer moved on to other subjects before circling back.

  The letter, Shragai said this time, “was the result of my suggestion.” Still, he insisted, “It is not true that most of the material in the letter came from me. I told him to write about the crowns and how they arrived.”

  The lawyer returned to the letter yet again later on. He had noticed that nowhere did it mention any consultation with Rabbi Dayan, which had supposedly been part of Faham’s instructions. Had the immigration chief noticed this?

  “I did not note to Faham that his letter did not mention Rabbi Dayan at all,” the witness said.

  The anger in the Aleppo community increased as the proceedings went on. This had partly to do with a sense that they were being treated as inferiors by a European elite. During the trial, one of the community leaders, the lawyer Meir Laniado, wrote a furious letter to Ben-Zvi’s secretary accusing the president of trying to cut a deal for the Crown with a wealthy Aleppo Jew in New York—the refrigerator magnate Isaac Shalom—in an attempt to bypass the stubborn community in Israel. “I am amazed by the fact that you approached Isaac Shalom, as this fits arrangements and traditions that were practiced in Eastern communities fifty years ago, in which certain people would try to get the agreement of a rich man or notable of some variety, and thus get the rest of the community to cover their mouths with their hands,” Laniado wrote.

  That letter was written in 1960, the same year Faham packed up his family and moved to Brooklyn. The trial, which was still going on, was not criminal in nature, and Faham was not suspected of any offense, so he could leave freely. In the oral memoir he recorded two decades later, Faham described how the dispute was finally resolved before his departure. He attended a hearing at the rabbinic court, Faham recalled, and met Tawil, the rabbi from Aleppo, who had by then made it to Israel. Faham confronted him.

  [Tawil] answered before I could finish: “It’s true, they tricked me. I met with the president and told him that I never asked you to give the Crown to a specific person.” The meeting of the rabbinic court began. They called Rabbi Tawil first, they asked him, and he confirmed what I had said. They took him out a side door. After he left, they called me, asked for my forgiveness, and announced that the trial was postponed.

  It had all been a misunderstanding, according to Faham: the trial ended with an admission by his opponents that he had been right all along.

  Old men are allowed their stories, but not if they have somehow come to be mistaken for historical truth. In the absence of any serious investigation, this is what has happened here. The merchant’s account of this, one of the story’s most crucial moments, was quoted uncritically in a scholarly book about the Crown in English, by a professor from New York’s Yeshiva University. It is not contradicted in the official version of the Crown’s history in Hebrew, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute. It provides the neat ending many seem to want.

  The Aleppo rabbis Moshe Tawil and Salim Zaafrani.

  By the time Faham taped his memoirs in the late 1970s, he was elderly. His reminiscences are full of fantastic details and color: He spoke to the Syrian prime minister on an almost daily basis, for example, and single-handedly rescued the Aleppo community from persecution on several occasions. During the riots, he remembered saving no fewer than forty Jewish children in his home, although his son, who was in the house at the time, had no memory of this when I interviewed him. He claimed to have saved the Crown from the synagogue during the riot, though twenty years earlier he had testified that until he was approached by the rabbis about smuggling the manuscript out, he had not even been aware it had survived the fire. His version of the trial’s end, the court transcripts show, was another invention.

  By 1960, with the trial now two years old, the two Aleppo rabbis who had sent the book with the merchant had both escaped to Israel. They testified in court together on March 1. One can almost hear their anger in the old protocols.

  “We gave something to a man who betrayed a trust,” Rabbi Moshe Tawil told the court. “We believe the Crown of the Torah is dedicated to, and belongs to, the Aleppo community, and that should not be changed at all.

  “If Rabbi Dayan had not been in Israel, we would not have sent the Crown under any circumstances,” he said.

  “We gave the Crown to Mr. Faham to give it to Rabbi Isaac Dayan,” testified the second rabbi, Salim Zaafrani. “We did not tell him to give it to someone else at all, and he did not have permission to do so. We do not want compromises. I want the Crown to be given to the Aleppo community.”

  As the Aleppo Jews had insisted all along, the idea that the rabbis would have willingly handed the Crown to outsiders, or allowed a member of the community to give it to a person of his choice, was ludicrous. The Aleppo rabbis had decided that the Crown could no longer remain in their city, but they never dreamed of allowing it out of their community.

  “We guarded it with our last drop of blood,” Rabbi Zaafrani told the court. “It is the property of the Aleppo community and not of the state of Israel.”

  YEARS AFTER THE Crown was brought to Israel, its new keepers formally added a leaf to the manuscript. On it was an inscription by a
Hebrew calligrapher with the following text:

  This Crown of the Torah was given by the chief rabbi of Aleppo, Rabbi Moshe Tawil, and the judge Rabbi Shlomo Zaafrani, to Mr. Mordechai ben Ezra Hacohen Faham in the year 5718, to bring it up to Jerusalem, the holy city.

  Mr. Faham had the fortune of receiving this privilege when he agreed to risk his life in order to save it and bring it to Jerusalem, and he gave it to his honor the president, Mr. Itzhak Ben-Zvi.

  This is the simple story I knew at the beginning. The one I knew now was very different.

  When Faham crossed the border into Turkey with the Crown, Israeli agents were waiting for him on the other side. One was Silo, who ran the Alexandretta immigration station, and one was Pessel. According to Faham, he met with Pessel for several hours in Istanbul in the fall of 1957 and discussed the Crown. The precise content of this meeting is unknown; when I met Pessel’s son, he said his late father nearly never spoke of his work and left no written accounts. We do know, however, that the rabbis said they had instructed Faham only weeks before to bring the codex to Rabbi Dayan in Israel, but that by October 7 the Israeli agent was writing to Jerusalem and asking what he should instruct Faham to do with it, meaning that the Israelis were now calling the shots. It is possible, therefore, to deduce that at or near the time of the meeting in Istanbul, the Israeli agent persuaded the courier—whether by reason, seduction, or threat—to betray the Aleppo rabbis and yield the book.

  It is not difficult to conceive how this was done. Israel was poor, with housing and jobs in short supply, and the government had the means to make life much easier for a refugee and his family. As Faham’s port customs bill showed—as it was quite possibly meant to show—the government could also make it harder. Faham was performing a great service to the state: David Bartov, President Ben-Zvi’s chief of staff, told me fifty years later that Faham still deserved Israel’s gratitude for bringing “the greatest cultural treasure we have” and turning it over to the government, rendering it the property of the Jewish people and not of one community. Faham may have come to agree that the Israelis were right. Or he may have realized that the Crown changed him from just another helpless immigrant, one of thousands who arrived in Israel that month, into a man of consequence: he had something that important people wanted, people who were in a position to help him.

  There is written evidence that his powerful new friends did try to help. The state archive preserves a note from October 1958 in which the president’s wife, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, wrote to a government clerk about an “important matter”: she wanted him to help Faham find an apartment in one of the Tel Aviv suburbs. “The president and Mr. Shragai both know him and told me that he deserves special treatment by your department,” she wrote. In a later letter to Faham, the president himself mentioned his efforts to secure an apartment for him. Faham, who spent a little over two years in Israel, always maintained he had not asked for or received anything from the state. With the significant exception of the waiving of his customs bill at Shragai’s request, nothing I found in the written record indicates he did. Faham, who died in 1982, left us no clue to his motivations. Instead he spent the rest of his life insisting he had done as he was told.

  Agents of the Israeli government were effectively in control of the manuscript shortly after it arrived in Turkey in the early fall of 1957, and Shragai was giving orders from Jerusalem by mid-October. From Alexandretta, Faham continued on the Marmara to the Haifa port. There he was greeted by Jewish Agency clerks and exempted from paying the customs tax by Shragai, who had been waiting for the Crown and who ordered his men to bring it directly from the port to his Jerusalem home.

  In the first days after his arrival in Israel, Faham’s story was still in flux, and he appeared to be trying to give the impression that the codex was still his to dispose of as he pleased. The merchant’s claim that he had been told to give the book to a “religious man” of his own choosing appeared only several weeks later and only after the book was already in the hands of the “religious man”—the immigration chief Shragai. The story was hatched to justify what had already happened, which was that the book was in the hands of the government. The Israelis knew the story was fiction, and yet they presented it as truth to one of their own courts.

  In the end they were forced to concede. The Crown file at the rabbinic court in Jerusalem contains the trusteeship agreement drafted for the codex in 1962, when the long trial finally ended in an out-of-court settlement. The text includes a brief section recounting the Crown’s journey. The Aleppo rabbis, it says, sent the Crown and the lesser manuscript with the merchant Faham “in order to give them to Rabbi Isaac Dayan.” The document, in other words, explicitly contradicts the story the state had been pushing since the book arrived. It is signed by President Ben-Zvi.

  In order to explain how the Crown did not reach its intended address, however, the document follows its admission of the truth with a little convenient fiction: Dayan, it says, was simply out of the country when the book arrived, visiting his children in the United States and Brazil. The fact is that the rabbi was very much in Israel, as Ben-Zvi well knew. A log of the president’s meetings shows he met with Dayan himself on two occasions at this time: on January 21, 1958, five weeks after the codex arrived, and then again on February 19.

  The Aleppo Jews never got their book back.

  The compromise gave the community theoretical part ownership of the manuscript, while effectively ensuring that it would remain in the hands of the state and would never leave Ben-Zvi’s institute. The government, faced with evidence that its version was not true, must have realized it had to cede something—though not much, in practical terms—while the Aleppo Jews saw that though they were right, they would not win. Menachem Yadid, a young Aleppo community leader at the time and later a member of Israel’s parliament, remembered a feeling of helplessness. “After all, the regime is the regime,” he told me. “It was a dirty affair.”

  The Crown of Aleppo was never given to Israel. It was taken. The government may have believed it was serving the interests of its people and of the book itself, but though those circumstances deserve to be noted, they do not alter the ugly mechanics of the story: the state took the sacred property of people who did not give it voluntarily, with the collusion of a messenger who turned over something that was not his to give. Many of the fictions and evasions that have hidden this story for decades were designed to conceal what was, in effect, the theft of the Crown from the Jews of Aleppo.

  With the compromise agreement signed, the trial ended. The intricacies of this phase of the Crown’s history have served so far to obscure a rather startling detail: much of the manuscript that everyone was fighting about was not even there.

  † The text of the letter appears in chapter 13.

  PART FOUR

  17

  The Book

  AT THE CENTER of this story is not a diamond, a painting, or a suitcase full of bills, but a book. Some would say it is the book: the authoritative copy of a text whose position at the root of more than one civilization has given it bearing on the lives of billions of people, even if they have never read it.

  This book begins with the creation of the universe. It tells us about the Garden of Eden, about the expulsion of Adam and Eve for breaking the one rule they were given, and about the murder of their second son by their first. Human beings, the text seems to be saying at the very start, destroy everything good they are given. We read how the world descended so far into corruption that God regretted creating it and obliterated it in a flood survived by one human family, and then we read about Abram, son of idol worshippers, who saw that there was only one God, not many, and that he was invisible and all-powerful. When this God told him to travel to the land of Canaan, Abram was residing in Haran, which is not far from where Alexandretta sits today, and his journey south would have taken him past Aleppo, which is west of the Euphrates, one of the rivers that the text tells us flowed from Eden.

  The book t
ells us how Abram became Abraham, and how he nearly sacrificed his son Isaac. It tells us about his grandson Jacob, also called Israel, who escaped famine by traveling to Egypt, where his own son Joseph had risen to power in Pharaoh’s palace by interpreting dreams. We learn how Israel’s descendants were enslaved and how they were redeemed from slavery by Moses after God afflicted the Egyptians with ten plagues and drowned their armies in the Sea of Reeds. Moses led the people into the desert, to a hill in the wilderness of Sinai, where the book becomes frantic with dramatic detail—smoke, fire, shaking mountains, and horn blasts—as if grabbing us by our shoulders and demanding we pay attention to this, the story of its own appearance.

  The opening of the Torah’s last volume, Deuteronomy, finds the Israelites near the Jordan River, about to enter their land, and Moses near death. In a farewell address, Moses tells his people that if they obey God, they will be blessed.

  Blessed shall be the issue of your womb, the produce of your soil, and the offspring of your cattle, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be in your comings and blessed shall you be in your goings.

  The Lord will put to rout before you the enemies who attack you; they will march out against you by a single road, but flee from you by many roads.

  But if they do not obey, said Moses, they will be cursed.

  Cursed shall you be in the city and cursed shall you be in the country. Cursed shall be your basket