No one, at that time, knew precisely how much was missing. It was difficult to calculate how many of the original leaves were gone because no one knew how many pages had been in the manuscript in the first place. There were no page numbers. Shortly after the Crown’s arrival, Ben-Zvi, scribbling calculations in blue ink on a piece of paper I found in an archived file folder, reached the conclusion that there had originally been 380 pages. Two hundred and ninety-four had arrived, meaning that 86 were missing, or just under a quarter of the manuscript. In fact, as later scholars would show, the original manuscript had nearly 500 pages, and about 200 were missing, or approximately 40 percent of the Crown.
“The president’s request is to see if it is possible to salvage pages from those missing from the Crown,” Benayahu wrote to an Aleppo rabbi in Buenos Aires. Rumors began to reach Jerusalem: One said pages were stashed “next to the entrance hall” in a certain building known as the House of Olives, near the great synagogue of Aleppo, and Ben-Zvi asked a contact in New York to get someone in Aleppo to check. Another said the pages had been thrown down a dry well in the synagogue’s courtyard. The president himself wrote to Aleppo exiles in New York and sent an Israeli diplomat around South America to interview others who might have information about the book.
One exile whom the diplomat tracked down in Rio de Janeiro, a former community treasurer named Yaakov Hazan, gave a perplexing account. He had seen the book after the fire, he claimed, and there were nearly no pages missing at all. “To demonstrate what he meant about the missing part, he pointed at a booklet that was at most five millimeters thick,” the diplomat wrote Ben-Zvi from Brazil in November 1961. “He had difficulty estimating the number of pages, but in comparison with the thickness of the Crown, this would be only a few pages, perhaps no more than ten.” Ben-Zvi did not believe the treasurer’s testimony. A typewritten summary of the diplomat’s report survives in the Ben-Zvi Institute’s archive, and next to the odd testimony from Rio de Janeiro are the words, “This is an utter error. Close to one hundred pages are missing.”
At the same time that the president and his men were tracking the missing pages, there were indications that at least one stone was left unturned. The man who knew precisely in what condition the Crown had been rescued from the synagogue had escaped to Israel years before and was eking out a living making tin dustpans and watering cans in a poor neighborhood of Tel Aviv. This was Bahiyeh’s father, Asher Baghdadi. While Aleppo exiles in South American cities were questioned, the old sexton in Tel Aviv never was. He died in 1965.
By that time, Ben-Zvi himself had been dead for two years. With the Crown’s indefatigable champion gone, the search petered out.
19
The Officer and the Scroll
THE LAWYER’S PONTIAC sped through deserted streets toward the old border between Jerusalem’s eastern and western sectors, then across it. The rattle of gunfire was audible from the direction of the Old City, where Jordanian troops were holding out. It was June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War.
The Pontiac was currently in the custody of the Israel Defense Forces, and it had a new driver: Rafi Sutton, originally of Aleppo, last seen just after his arrival on a beach in northern Israel. Dear soldier, read a note that the car’s owner, an attorney from Haifa, left on the dashboard when the army commandeered his car a few weeks before the outbreak of fighting, may this vehicle bring you safely to your destination. Please take care of it.
Sutton, now thirty-five, was an officer in military intelligence. His mission that day, it turned out, would have nearly nothing to do with the war. Instead it would make him a bit player in the saga of a collection of manuscripts far more famous than the one from his own city, and it would serve as an illustration of the importance of ancient texts in the eyes of some in Israel’s halls of power—and of the lengths to which they were willing to go to obtain them.
Sutton’s sharp mind and native Arabic had helped him work his way up the ranks of the army’s intelligence branch, running agents in the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem, compiling dossiers, recruiting informers, and debriefing them in safe houses along the frontier. In the divided Jerusalem of the 1950s, Sutton discovered that useful connections could be made by frequenting Mandelbaum Gate, the crossing point between the two halves of the city, where Israeli and Jordanian officers met for regular talks on the 1949 armistice agreement that had split the city between them. He would come to chat up the Jordanians, changing his Arabic from the Syrian dialect to that of the local Palestinians. One of his early intelligence successes involved a Jordanian official who believed he was passing military secrets to an Arab leader, when in fact the man the officer believed was his liaison with the leader was passing the secrets to Sutton. This network was blown after a few productive years when the Jordanians caught one of Sutton’s couriers on his way to a rendezvous along the border. Sutton’s deputy around the time of the war, Samuel Nachmias, remembered his commander walking through Jerusalem massaging worry beads like an Arab. The deputy, with the direct style of native-born sabras, would take twenty minutes to debrief an agent, he recalled; Sutton, schooled in the intricate pleasantries of conversation in the Arab world, would take hours. Sutton invariably got better information, Nachmias said. These skills are important to the story of the Aleppo Codex because, much later, Sutton would use them against his own community in an attempt to shed light on the fate of the Crown.
The Syrian Jew was known as a first-rate operator in a business his deputy Nachmias referred to as “sending people to hang themselves” to protect others. More than forty years after the war, I was in Sutton’s apartment when the son of one of his Palestinian agents from the 1950s called to ask a favor; the old handler, nearing eighty, was still taking care of his people. Afterward he resumed his story of the conscripted Pontiac, which was speeding toward east Jerusalem. Columns of Egyptian infantry and armor were retreating in disarray in Sinai, to the south; in the north, the air force of Rafi’s new country had already obliterated the air force of his old one. Israeli troops now controlled most of the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem, where Jordan’s young king, Hussein, had attacked two days earlier across the armistice line. Israeli paratroopers were grouped near the Old City’s northeast corner, the same corner where Duke Godfrey’s crusaders had encamped nine centuries before, and were preparing for an assault on the walls. Rafi had been dispatched to link up with them. He had never been in east Jerusalem, only to the crossing point at Mandelbaum Gate, but had been running intelligence operations there for so long he believed he knew it blindfolded. He was speeding in his commandeered car through the bleak and empty summer streets, exhilarated to be on the move, when he was abruptly recalled to base and handed new orders. He was surprised to find a letter signed by the prime minister and a famous general.
“I awoke in the middle of the night,” the general, Yigael Yadin, wrote later, “and remembered the scroll.”
Yadin—soldier, politician, and scholar—was a hero of the independence war and a former chief of staff, an Israeli renaissance man who embodied a blend of political power and scholarship in the service of the state. In this he was much like Ben-Zvi. For these men, the good of Israel, the good of science, and their own professional prestige were often inextricably muddled; neither hesitated to use the government’s power to pursue aims that often conflated the three. Yadin was famous as an excavator of the stones and desiccated leather fragments of Israel’s ancient Jewish past, and his image—a fit bald man in shorts, smoking a pipe, examining a ceramic shard or crouching in a cave—was familiar to nearly everyone in Israel and to many abroad. He was behind the excavation of the desert palace at Masada, famous as the site of a mass suicide of Jewish zealots defying the might of Rome two thousand years before. The dig was a national project as much as it was an exercise in scholarship. Human remains found there were declared to be the bodies of Judaean rebels and buried as Israeli military heroes, their coffins draped in blue and white flags.
Yadin was al
so an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had come to light two decades earlier after some were found in Judaean desert caves by Bedouin shepherds and sold to antiquities dealers. The two-thousand-year-old scrolls, thought to have been written or collected by a Jewish sect that abandoned the corruption of Jerusalem for the purity of the desert, revealed much about early Judaism and the roots of Christianity. Yadin’s father, Professor Eliezer Sukenik, had been among the first to study them and had managed to acquire three from a Jordanian dealer on November 29, 1947—the day of the partition vote at Flushing Meadow. There were more scrolls to be obtained, but Israel’s war of independence and the impassable new borders it created left them out of reach. Sukenik died in 1953, and his son Yadin—who had taken a new Hebrew family name, in the fashion of those times—continued his investigations.
The scrolls, like Masada, were of more than scholarly importance. “I cannot avoid the feeling,” Yadin wrote, “that there is something symbolic in the discovery of the scrolls and their acquisition at the moment of the creation of the state of Israel. It is as if these scrolls had been waiting in caves for two thousand years, ever since the destruction of Israel’s independence, until the people of Israel had returned to their home and regained their freedom.” They were kept at the national museum, in a special building known as the Shrine of the Book, down a dark corridor of rough stone evoking the mouth of a cave, in a circular chamber with the aura of a chapel.
In 1960, seven years before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Yadin received a letter from a Virginia clergyman offering him a chance to buy another of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The man, whom Yadin referred to in his writings as Mr. Z, sent the Israeli a sample of the merchandise, the remainder of which he said was held by a Jordanian dealer in the West Bank. “And true enough,” wrote Yadin, “the envelope contained a fragment of the scroll wrapped in the tinfoil of a cigarette package and set between two pieces of cardboard. The back of the fragment was reinforced with a scrap of a British postal stamp and gummed paper.” Yadin judged it to be authentic, and they settled on a price: $130,000. Yadin gave the middleman $1,500 to make the trip to Jordan, plus a $10,000 advance. The middleman Mr. Z then wrote to say that the West Bank dealer now wanted $200,000. “This is the most important discovery in history. Without a doubt this is the book of the beginnings, ‘genesis,’ ” he wrote. The dealer “puts his life on this!” he went on. “The piece you have is the key. Don’t lose it.” Mr. Z dispatched one more letter in the spring of 1962 before disappearing for good, along with the advance. “From time to time I would check the listings from Jordan to see if it was mentioned,” Yadin wrote, referring to the enigmatic scroll, “but no trace of it ever appeared.” Like Ben-Zvi, Yadin did not forget, and he, too, would be granted his wish in the end.
When war loomed in 1967, Yadin was called away from his scholarly pursuits to serve as special military adviser to the prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Fighting, however, was not the only thing on his mind. On the first day of battle, the Jordanians unleashed an artillery barrage on west Jerusalem, and one shell, Yadin noted, just barely missed the Shrine of the Book. That meant the shell had also barely missed Israel’s parliament, which sits next to the scrolls’ building, but that fact seems to have made less of an impression. When the Israelis fought their way close to the Old City, the army’s deputy chief of operations contacted Yadin. The officer was worried that the nearby Rockefeller Museum, which had its own Dead Sea Scrolls collection, might be damaged. Yadin had two Hebrew University professors dispatched in an armored half-track to the museum under artillery fire to ensure the scroll fragments were safe.
With Israeli troops pushing into the West Bank, Yadin remembered the dubious middleman Mr. Z and the scroll and realized that the West Bank dealer was now under Israel’s jurisdiction. As Ben-Zvi had done in his quest to acquire the Crown, Yadin went right to the top. “With the approval of the Prime Minister,” he wrote, “the General Staff placed a lieutenant colonel of the Military Intelligence at my disposal.” It is worth taking a moment to dwell on this sentence: at the height of a war that Israelis saw as a fight for national survival, with thousands of infantrymen, tank crewmen, and pilots from Israel and three of its neighbors dying on the battlefield, the prime minister of Israel spent time, even if it was only a minute or two, dealing with Yadin’s book.
The lieutenant colonel was Rafi’s commander. The letter Rafi received after being summoned to base in his Pontiac instructed the Jerusalem section of military intelligence—this was Rafi’s outfit—to send officers into east Jerusalem and apprehend a man who was in possession of one or more of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The man was identified only as “Dino.” The mission was to be executed immediately, before the fact of the Israeli conquest had sunk in and the man could escape or conceal the scrolls. Rafi remembered still being at headquarters when the paratroopers in the Old City reported that the Temple Mount and the Western Wall had fallen and were in Israeli hands.
Along with the lieutenant colonel, Rafi got back in the Pontiac and, accompanied by another commandeered civilian vehicle, sped back toward Mandelbaum Gate. By now, Jews were thronging the streets, elated at the capture of the Western Wall and determined to get there even though the fighting had not yet subsided. A harried soldier was trying to keep the crowds at bay. Rafi’s team turned back and made its way into east Jerusalem through a circuitous and more dangerous route. He found the main commercial thoroughfare of the formerly Jordanian sector, Saladin Street, lined with burnt-out cars and trucks. They went south until they reached the Damascus Gate, leading into the Old City, where Rafi found two paratroop sergeants keeping watch over several hundred Arab men standing with their faces to the stones of the Ottoman wall, their hands up. The men appeared to be Jordanian soldiers or policemen. One, in a neat khaki uniform, caught Rafi’s eye. Rafi had the man taken from the lineup and brought to the Pontiac. The man was terrified, and Rafi—sifting coldly in his mind through a list of ways to approach potential sources of information—decided to be friendly, greeting him in the dialect of Jerusalem Palestinians. The man’s name was Yunis, and he had been a policeman in the service of the Jordanians.
We’re looking for a man called Dino, Rafi said, suggesting that information would be repaid with permission to go home.
Never heard of him, Yunis answered, sitting nervously in the car’s leather passenger seat. He asked if Rafi knew the man’s profession.
He sells antiquities, Rafi said.
You’re looking for Kando, the policeman replied. He took Rafi to an antique store nearby with a sign in Arabic and English. It was, not surprisingly, closed. The policeman said the dealer lived in Bethlehem, which had just fallen to the Israelis, so Rafi sped down the thin strip of asphalt leading south from Jerusalem into the newly conquered territory of the West Bank, past the small dome of Rachel’s Tomb, across dry, marbled hills of brown and white. Helmeted Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint stopped them outside Bethlehem—there were still pockets of resistance inside, they said—but soon the Pontiac was allowed to pass. Rafi followed the policeman’s directions to a neighborhood not far from the Church of the Nativity and stopped. Yunis pointed to the house. The man who opened the door was about seventy and had, in Rafi’s recollection, a friendly face and clever eyes.
We’ve come to drink a cup of coffee with you, Rafi said.
Tfadalu, said the man, faced with his city’s new masters: Come in. The dealer known as Kando—an Assyrian Christian and a cobbler by trade, whose real name was Khalil Iskander Shahin—was joined by his adult son.
We know you have in your possession some of the hidden scrolls of Qumran, Rafi said, and as representatives of the government of Israel we are interested in receiving them in return for full payment.
The dealer denied it. Over the next hour, Rafi tried the various techniques in his repertoire: he tried friendly, and implicitly threatening, and then overtly threatening. Kando would not budge.
Get dressed and come with me, Rafi said, his patience e
xhausted, and, citing martial law, he placed both the man and his son under arrest, bringing them out to the Pontiac as the women of the house wailed.
In Jerusalem the interrogators got nowhere: the man and his son knew nothing of any Dead Sea Scrolls. With their bag of tricks nearly exhausted, the interrogators tried an old one: Kando, they told his son, had just broken under questioning and had revealed that he did have the scrolls, and the Israelis were already on their way to Bethlehem to pick them up. The son still did not break, and the interrogators put him in a cell with his father, who was already asleep, and left them alone. The night passed.
How could you have told the Jews about the scrolls? the dealer’s son said when they woke up.
Don’t be stupid, Kando said. I revealed nothing.
The Israelis then entered the cell, Rafi remembered, took Kando to another room, and replayed the conversation on tape. The dealer betrayed no emotion. He would give them the scrolls on two conditions, he said, as if this had been the plan all along. The government of Israel must pay him full price, and he would not be identified as having collaborated. The Israelis agreed—he would eventually be paid $105,000—and the scroll-seeking convoy sped back toward Bethlehem.
In his bedroom, Kando started at the doorframe and walked forward, counting floor tiles. Then he stopped, turned right, and counted several more. He took off one of his shoes, stooped down, placed it across two tiles, walked over to a closet, and took out a toilet plunger. He stuck it to the tiles and pulled. Underneath the floor, Rafi saw a little niche lined with straw. Inside was a shoe box; photographs show one that is yellow, white, and red with the word Bata on the lid. Inside the box was an ordinary white towel, and under the towel, wrapped in cellophane, was an ancient parchment scroll. It would later be identified as the Temple Scroll, one of the most important of the Dead Sea collection. Other scroll fragments were later discovered behind family photos in the dealer’s home and in an old box of Karel I Elegant cigars.
The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible Page 14