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

by Matti Friedman

  Maggen was puzzled by one aspect of the codex: the purplish marks on the damaged lower corners of the pages, traces of the flames that had consumed much of the book. It was not just common wisdom that had identified these as burn marks; previous experts had believed the same. “Microscopic and microchemical methods have found no biotic agent that caused the books to change color or the brittle nature of the corners of the Crown,” one specialist wrote after examining the book sixteen years before. “The damage is without a doubt chemical and was the result of hydrolysis of collagen when the fire was extinguished.” Maggen, however, thought the marks looked strange. Fire warps, blackens, and hardens parchment, but the damaged corners of the Crown were soft and brittle.

  Maggen collected a few purplish corner fragments and sent them across town to the clinical microbiology lab on the second floor of the Hadassah Medical Center. The head of the hospital’s mycology lab, Izhack Polacheck, treating the one-thousand-year-old pieces of parchment like infected human skin obtained in a biopsy, placed the fragments in an alkaline solution that melted the parchment’s proteins and then examined the remains under a phase-contrast microscope. Across the globe, in Albany, New York, two scientists then ran fluorescence tests on the same fragments. These were methods unavailable to the earlier experts who had examined the Crown. The results were sent to the museum.

  In his office off the restoration lab, Maggen looked at the photographs taken of the microscope slides. They showed sausage-like structures with dark dividers in the middle. The scientific explanation: “Specific fluorescent-antibody staining identifies the filaments as Aspergillus hyphae.” Maggen remembered actually leaping from his chair.

  The subsequent headline in the US scientific journal Nature read, FUNGI NOT FIRE DAMAGED ALEPPO CODEX. The Crown, read the article, “was damaged by a fungus of the genus Aspergillus, rather than by fire as was previously assumed.” The “burn marks” were not burn marks at all.

  The widely circulated stories of the Crown’s rescue from the flames, combined with the marks on the corners of the parchment, had helped create the conviction that the manuscript had been burned. Conveniently, this account also explained why so much of it was gone. But nothing Maggen saw in six years of studying the manuscript suggested it was harmed by fire in the 1947 riot. The damage was a fungus, one that had taken hold, the scientists theorized, on the corner of the leaves that would have been touched repeatedly with saliva from fingers licked as readers turned the page. (If this theory was true, human saliva had helped to both damage and repair the Crown.)

  Simple stories tend to be hard to kill, and the myth that fire consumed part of the Crown lives on even today. A Jerusalem Post article from 2010, for example, referred to the “parts of the once complete manuscript lost in a fire set by Syrian rioters in Aleppo on the eve of Israel’s establishment.” Other such references still crop up with some frequency.

  Maggen’s discovery, though, was not just a minor alteration of the manuscript’s history. It resurrected a question to which nearly no one had paid any serious thought in decades. If the two hundred missing pages of the Crown had not been consumed by fire, then where were they?

  22

  Brooklyn

  THE ASSUMPTION THAT the Crown’s missing pieces had been burned gave way to a new theory that changed the method, but not the time, of the pages’ disappearance. The pages, it was now said, were taken by Aleppo Jews during or immediately after the riot. This belief remains in force today, and at first it largely guided my own research, when most of what I knew still came from the Ben-Zvi Institute. “The key to finding the pages,” I wrote in my first article about the manuscript in 2008, lies with “Jews originating in Aleppo, Syria, where the manuscript resided in a synagogue’s iron chest for centuries.” Past efforts to locate them “came up against a wall of silence in the Aleppo community.” This idea dates to the 1980s, when two Crown fragments surfaced, four decades after the riot in Aleppo, among the brick homes and kosher pizzerias of Brooklyn.

  The first piece materialized with a man named Leon Tawil. When I tracked Tawil down in the Aleppo Jews’ New York colony, I found a storyteller in possession of a sarcastic sense of humor that seemed only mildly marred by the broken hip that had imprisoned him in his armchair. He was looking out at the traffic going up and down Ocean Parkway.

  In 1981, a woman brought an old parchment leaf to a scholar at Israel’s national library in Jerusalem. It came, she said, from her aunt in Brooklyn, who was originally from Aleppo. One side began as follows:

  and are incorporated into the laments. The other events of Josiah’s reign and his faithful deeds, in accord with the teachings of the Lord, and his acts, early and late, are recorded in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.

  The text, from the book of Chronicles, described the meddling of two ancient superpowers, Egypt and Babylon, in the politics of the little land sandwiched between them where people worshipped one God, or were, at least, supposed to. The page went on to recount a string of kings whose behavior was “displeasing to the Lord,” who then unleashed a catastrophe in the form of Babylonian armies that slaughtered old men and virgins and condemned the survivors to exile. The time of the first temple in Jerusalem was coming to a close. The page ended as it began, in midsentence:

  They burned the house of God and tore down the wall of Jerusalem, burned down all of its mansions, and consigned all of its precious objects

  The concluding words of the verse are to destruction. The writing was that of the scribe Ben-Buya’a; the notes across the top and down the margins were those of Ben-Asher. In one corner of the page was the telltale purplish “burn” mark. Thirty-four years after the riot in Aleppo, the first missing piece of the Crown had reappeared. It sent a frisson of excitement through the Aleppo Codex Underground.

  Leon Tawil was fifteen years old when he found the page, and seventy-eight when I found him. Sitting in his living room, eating nuts and apricots, he returned to Aleppo and to late 1947. The young Tawil—who was not related to Moshe Tawil, the chief rabbi—was a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast and a collector of British gold sovereigns, which he kept in a secret drawer in his room. He spent hours wandering around Aleppo on foot, beginning at his home in the Jamiliyeh neighborhood and ending up in the markets of the Old City. Every year on the Day of Atonement his father took him to the great synagogue, where he remembered dark rooms and one small grotto. “You walk in. It’s very dark, lit up by the candles that people brought, by the oil, and right next to it, a big safe. What’s in it?” He paused for dramatic effect: “The Crown,” he breathed, his eyes widening.

  When Aleppo erupted, the rioters stalking his neighborhood climbed the outer staircase of the family’s three-story building, but before the men could reach the Tawils’ apartment, a Muslim neighbor told them there were no Jews inside. The men turned back. That night, Leon’s mother sent him to sleep at the home of the Armenian maid. By the next afternoon the rage seemed to have dissipated, and the city felt bleary and exhausted. He set out toward the Old City. Muslim boys, like Jewish boys, wore short pants until they turned sixteen, but the Muslim shorts were longer, so when Tawil left the Jewish area he pulled his own shorts lower so that he wouldn’t stand out. He passed the Cinéma Roxy, and then a Jewish-owned clothing store that had been gutted by the looters. He passed the manzul, the brothel—a grin accompanied this memory—and followed the alleys to the synagogue. The gate was open.

  Inside, everything under the arched ceilings was “shadowy from the flame,” he remembered. There were a few other people around, Jews who had also heard of the synagogue’s destruction and had come to see for themselves. They were clicking their tongues and shaking their heads. No one paid much attention to him. The walls of books that he remembered from the visits with his father were now bare, and in the courtyard he saw a heap of parchment a yard high. “Right next to it I saw a paper, and I picked it up and put it in my pocket,” he said.

  Tawil knew only that it was a page fr
om an old Hebrew book. At home, his father told him it must be from the Crown of Aleppo and began reading the passages. This tells of cities burning, of an evil time like this one, the elder Tawil told his son, and handed the page back. Adults in Aleppo were preoccupied with other matters.

  Two years later, Leon escaped to Lebanon, and in 1950 he stood on the deck of an ocean liner with his family and watched the Statue of Liberty glide by. When they joined the other Aleppo Jews in Brooklyn, the Tawils stayed with Leon’s aunt, Mary Hedaya. Leon showed her his page, and she kept it. Leon did not think much about it after that.

  When I met Mary Hedaya’s daughter and son-in-law, Renee and Isadore Shamah, in an apartment high above the doormen and dog-walking women on Central Park South, Isadore remembered that Mary hid the page in a cupboard between two stiff panels, wrapped in fabric. It was her talisman, he said. Hedaya had died and her daughter did not remember much. She had been vaguely aware of the page’s presence in their home but wasn’t sure if her mother knew how many people were looking for it or that it was valuable at all. To an American kid it must have seemed like an inexplicable and slightly embarrassing relic of some unknowable world.

  The page remained in Mary Hedaya’s home for three decades. Her daughter did not remember why she decided to send it to Jerusalem; according to one account, Hedaya was caring for a sick relative when a visiting rabbi counseled her that the page was bringing bad luck and should be sent to join the rest of the Crown. Hedaya gave the page to her niece, who brought it to the national library. The page completed the book of Chronicles and brought the number of Crown pages in Jerusalem to 295. At this time the fire theory was widely accepted, but still some thought that if there was one page in Brooklyn, there might well be more.

  Six years later, in 1987, Steve Shalom, one of the prominent leaders of the Aleppo Jews in New York,* gave the Ben-Zvi Institute a rare and surprising piece of information: he knew someone who kept a piece of the codex in his pocket. He produced a name and a phone number. Not long afterward, the institute dispatched one of its staffers, Dallas-born Michael Glatzer, to New York. After landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the envoy from Jerusalem dialed the number Shalom had provided. Samuel Sabbagh answered the phone.

  The visitor found Sabbagh, a thin man in his seventies, at a Brooklyn community center amid other old Syrian Jews playing cards and waiting for lunch. Sabbagh pulled out his wallet and removed a plastic slip a bit bigger than a credit card. Inside was a mangled piece of parchment. On one side were the words

  and they piled them up in heaps and the land stank

  This was from the book of Exodus. After the Nile ran red with blood, Moses’s brother Aaron raised his staff again, and this time frogs descended on Egypt. When Pharaoh appeared to relent, Moses asked God to stop. And God did according to the word of Moses, the text tells us, and the frogs died out of the houses and yards and fields, and they piled them up in heaps and the land stank.

  On the other side were these words:

  upon your servants and upon your people and into your homes

  The frogs did not convince Pharaoh to release the Israelites, and neither did the lice he sent next. Go to Pharaoh again, God told Moses, and say, If you will not let my people go, I will send the locusts upon you and upon your servants and upon your people and into your homes, and all the houses of Egypt will be full of the locusts and also the ground upon which they stand.

  After the fire, Sabbagh told the visitor, he set out toward the great synagogue in old Aleppo. He found the fragment on the floor and took it.

  He would not part with the fragment for any sum of money, Sabbagh said: it had protected him for years in his new home and helped him survive open-heart surgery. Sabbagh did let the visitor take the fragment to the community center’s office, where there was a Xerox machine. Using the photocopies, a researcher back in Israel judged the fragment to be genuine. The second missing fragment of the Crown had surfaced.

  Sabbagh, true to his word, did not give it up as long as he lived. Twenty years later, after his death, his family sent the piece to Jerusalem. “There were all sorts of miraculous properties attached to the piece,” his daughter, Rachel Magen, told me. “My father was a believing man. He held it in his hand and he knew its worth—it had spiritual value.” Though the Sabbaghs, she said, “are not people who keep magic amulets,” her father nonetheless “believed it protected him.”

  The Aleppo Jews had always thought the codex safeguarded them. This belief, it seemed, had been transferred to pieces of the book that were circulating in the exile communities. When the fire story was disproved by the Israel Museum restorer, the scholars on the trail of the Crown decided that other fragments, pages, or larger sections of the manuscript were being held by Aleppo Jews. If two pieces had surfaced within a few years of each other between the Atlantic and the East River, the thinking went, surely more would turn up—if not in Brooklyn, then in São Paulo, Panama City, or another of the Aleppo Jews’ international outposts. And yet none did.

  ONE OTHER ATTEMPT to solve the mystery of the missing pages in those years deserves to be told, its failure notwithstanding.

  On June 4, 1978, the professor then in charge of the Ben-Zvi Institute posted a letter to Zurich, addressed to a certain Gavriel Gavrieli.

  I am sending you maps of south Lebanon as per the request from Ms. Miriam Gromb. I would be grateful if you kept the maps to yourself and then returned them to us as quickly as possible because of their classified nature.

  Among the rumors about the fate of the missing pieces was one suggesting that refugees fleeing Aleppo had buried them in southern Lebanon en route to Israel. Such a possibility, it appears, was behind this unusual letter. The maps were not intended for an intelligence expert or a diplomat, but for an expert in the art of divining secrets using a pendulum: a psychic. The professor’s contacts in Switzerland, Gavrieli and Gromb, arranged the session with the man, who is not named in the correspondence.

  Miriam Gromb posted a reply from Zurich on June 15. The psychic had come the day before, she wrote, and used the classified military maps sent by the institute. The missing pages could be found next to the village of Ein Ata in south Lebanon, near the intersection of latitudinal line 315 and longitudinal line 154 on the military grid, possibly “in a nearby grove of trees” or “down the hill.”

  “I paid him fifty francs,” Gromb wrote, adding that it was “not worth risking human lives for this matter.” This was stating the obvious: Lebanon was an enemy country, and the areas close to the border with Israel were controlled by the Palestinian guerrillas of Fatah and its various armed affiliates. There is no indication that anything was done with the information at first. In 1982, however, Israel invaded Lebanon and took over a swath of land close to the border. The occupied area, which Israel called the “security zone,” included Ein Ata.

  In 1985, a new professor heading the institute sent a letter to a friend in northern Israel.

  Subject: Locating missing pages from the “Crown of Aleppo” in the security zone

  We have information indicating there is a certain possibility that additional pages from the Crown of Aleppo are located in the security zone next to the village of Ein Ata. We will send you the exact locations of the possible sites in the next few days. These pages have great importance to the study of Bible traditions and to many other subjects.

  Please do what you can in order to convince IDF commanders in the area to look for these pages. We will address a letter to the relevant authorities at the right time.

  The professor’s friend contacted an officer in the military’s Northern Command and even showed him the maps with the locations pinpointed by the psychic, but army forces were unable to help. The letters documenting this episode were duly archived by the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  * Steve Shalom’s father was Isaac Shalom, President Ben-Zvi’s old New York contact from the 1950s.

  23

  The Fog Grows

  PERPLEXED BY
ASPECTS of the story that seemed more and more peculiar, I returned on more than one occasion to the only book that had existed on the subject of the Crown at the time I embarked on my own investigation: The Crown, a Hebrew volume published in 1987 by the Ben-Zvi Institute. Each time I became more confused.

  I first began reading the book expecting to find a clear account of what had befallen the Crown after 1947 and of how it had reached Israel. This was a reasonable thing to expect: behind the book was the institute that was the Crown’s custodian and that held all the relevant documentation. I did not find what I was looking for. Though ostensibly aimed at a general audience, the book opened with an almost impenetrable discussion of a debate among scholars over an obscure point related to the Crown’s connection to Maimonides, and a casual reader would find it hard to survive the first twenty pages. The book was exacting, often tedious, in its attention to matters relating to the Crown’s history before 1947, and markedly vague and hurried in its attention to everything thereafter. The examination of the debate over Maimonides, for example, stretched over six pages. A description of how the book traveled from Aleppo to Israel lasted two sentences:

  In the month of Elul 5717 the Crown left Syria for Turkey. In the month of Shvat 5718 it reached Jerusalem.†

  Elsewhere the story is summed up as follows:

  In the riots in Aleppo’s Jewish neighborhoods in December 1947, after the United Nations declaration of the founding of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, riots that centered on the burning of synagogues, the Crown was damaged. Most of it survived in the hands of members of the community and was hidden for about ten years in various places. In the year 5717 (1957) the rabbis Moshe Tawil and Shlomo Zaafrani gave it to Mordechai ben Ezra Faham, who took it secretly to Turkey. From there he brought it on January 23, 1958, to Jerusalem, and it came full circle.