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

by Matti Friedman

  This is the official version with which we are familiar, and the closest thing to a coherent narrative the book provided. It erased the role of Shragai, the immigration chief, and made no mention of the Israeli agents in Turkey. What sparse details of the story were included were broken up, scrambled, and inserted piecemeal into different chapters, rendering them all but incomprehensible.

  The book laid out the dispute between the Aleppo community and the state only in the briefest terms and skimmed over the trial in three sentences:

  The trial took place in the district rabbinic court in Jerusalem in 5718—1958. The transcripts of the trial have enough material for a whole book, if not for a drama centering on the character of [Murad] Faham. In the end, not least because of the respect commanded by Israel’s president, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, the Sephardic chief rabbi, and the Aleppo sages, the sides reached a compromise agreement.

  The writer, clearly sensing the peculiarity of this omission, offered an unusual explanation in the next paragraph: “I prefer not to open old wounds.” With my own research making progress, I sought out the author, hoping to clarify the more bewildering aspects of his account. I was presumably going over many of the same documents he had. Why had I found a more complicated story?

  The author of the Ben-Zvi Institute’s book was not an academic but an important Hebrew novelist, Amnon Shamosh, who was born in Aleppo and came to Israel as a child. At the time he took on the Crown project, under contract with the institute, he was at the height of his fame, thanks largely to the success of Michel Ezra Safra and Sons, a multigenerational epic about a fictional Aleppo family that was made into a popular TV miniseries. The writer had a longtime interest in the Crown, as well as a family connection to the story: Isaac Shamosh, who had been sent from Jerusalem to Aleppo in 1943 to bring back the Crown, was his older brother.

  I interviewed Amnon Shamosh, who is now nearly blind, during a fierce rainstorm at his tiny home on a kibbutz along the Israel-Lebanon frontier. He told me of arriving in Tel Aviv from Aleppo in 1937: “It was a city of wonders,” he said. “Everything was written in Hebrew. People were speaking Hebrew. I thought, This is redemption. This is the city of the Messiah.” Uniquely, for a first-generation Aleppo Jew, he found his way to the secular, socialist wing of the Zionist movement, marrying a Viennese woman and settling on this communal farm as a young man. For years, Shamosh put all his royalties into the members’ joint bank account, which left him with nearly nothing when the kibbutz’s finances failed. Our exchange, which lasted several hours, was interrupted once by an air raid siren—“They’re testing,” said his wife—and once when the writer rose to help make tea, which he and his wife do together because his hands are still steady and she can still see.

  When he began work on his Crown history, he told me, he felt that time was slipping away: “I kept calling widows who said, ‘Thanks for calling, but he died two months ago.’ ” Researching the more distant history of the manuscript was relatively easy, he said. Anything after the riot in 1947 was not. On more than one occasion he knew he was being stymied, especially when he began looking into what happened after the codex arrived in Israel. “I encountered a closed wall,” he said. “No one knew anything. Nothing.” Shragai, the immigration chief, was “evasive.” Meir Benayahu, the director of the Ben-Zvi Institute at the time of the codex’s arrival, agreed to talk; the writer found him “polite” but felt he was not telling the truth.

  “You felt that you were touching something unpleasant, something people didn’t want to talk about,” Shamosh said. “The feeling was that everyone wanted me to leave them alone, not to write about them.”

  Why was that? I asked.

  “Because two hundred pages are missing, every one worth . . .” His voice trailed off. “I was not given the authority of a policeman,” he said. “I was given only the authority to interview people and ask them questions.”

  The officials in charge of the Crown were concerned about what Shamosh might write. In 1985, as Shamosh worked on the book, the Crown trustees convened. One of the trustees was Shlomo Toussia-Cohen, the attorney who had represented the government at the trial years before. “Amnon Shamosh must be warned that there are serious disagreements about the matter of the Crown’s removal from Syria and its transfer to Israel, and we shouldn’t walk into this entanglement,” the attorney told those present, according to a transcript of the meeting. The trustees decided that they would vet the book before it was published.

  Shamosh was a novelist, and a respected one, but he did not have a journalist’s nose for confrontation and dirt. He had the opportunity to read the trial transcripts—the key to understanding the whole story—but claimed he did not do so. I asked him why. “I said, I don’t have the energy, I don’t have the time, I don’t think it’s important what every rabbi said about what he thinks about who it belongs to,” he replied. He knew that the book he had written did not include the real story. Faham was a teller of tall tales, he told me, who had disobeyed his orders from the rabbis and turned the book over to the state. “From the Aleppo community he would have got merely a thank-you, while the Aliya Department, through Shragai and Ben-Zvi, received him with the best conditions that immigrants could get, on the condition that he did not agree to the version saying he had been told to bring it to the Aleppo rabbis in Israel.” Shamosh knew all this but did not write it.

  The manuscript Shamosh submitted did include references to Faham’s inventions, which he understood were muddying crucial details of the story. The Ben-Zvi Institute refused to publish most of them, the writer told me, arguing that the cheese merchant, who had died by then, deserved to be portrayed in a positive light for his two “good deeds”: he had brought the book to Israel at considerable personal risk, and he “gave it to the state and not to the Aleppo Jews.” A few remaining critical references to the cheese merchant were left in, but when Faham’s children got wind of the unpublished text and threatened to sue, the institute removed those, too.

  Shamosh had come to feel protective of the Crown, taking its neglect personally, and he wrote sections on the deterioration of the manuscript over the years in the institute’s care, quoting from the same experts’ reports I found later. Those sections do not appear in the book, however, because the institute cut them out. The scholars told Shamosh, he remembered, that they “would not put out a book that makes us look like criminals.” He put up a fight, he said, but finally agreed to go ahead with publication when he realized that his contract left him powerless and after the institute promised to expedite the physical restoration of the Crown. I found the writer’s original pages in the institute’s archive with X marks through the offending paragraphs. The book that was finally published included no overt indication that anything was amiss, that anyone had been less than perfectly honest, or that any facts had been left out.

  One of the scholars involved in editing the book was Menahem Ben-Sasson, a professor who went on to serve as a member of the Knesset and then as president of Hebrew University. In an interview, he said he could not recall what information had been removed from Shamosh’s history of the Crown. Another of the book’s editors was the institute’s longtime administrative director, Zvi Zameret, who left in 2009 after twenty-six years to take a senior position at the Ministry of Education. When I presented him with the writer’s account, he unapologetically confirmed it. The reports of the book’s neglect “did not appear to us to be central,” he told me, suggesting that the fact that the institute paid for the Crown’s restoration more than made up for any mistreatment in the past. “It seemed to us like kicking ourselves,” he said. “We restored the Crown, and we should make ourselves look bad—for what?”

  For his part, Shamosh wrote proudly of his own connection to the Crown’s story through his brother, Isaac, but chose not to mention a second, more complicated family link. It will be noted here later on.

  If The Crown was meant to cripple independent inquiry into the manuscript’s recent history, it worked:
for twenty-three years, it remained the only book on the subject. In 2010, when I was already involved in my own investigation, a new book appeared in the United States. This one, The Crown of Aleppo, was printed by the venerable Jewish Publication Society. One of its two authors was Hayim Tawil, an expert on Semitic languages from Yeshiva University in New York. (He is not of Aleppo descent and is not related to any of this story’s other Tawils.) The book included rich historical material and scholarly analysis, but on the events after 1947 it was no less confounding than the first. As in the Ben-Zvi Institute’s account, this one also accepted at face value the idea that the Crown had been “returned” or “restored” to Israel. It quoted extensively and uncritically from Faham’s taped oral recollections from the late 1970s, which are contradicted by information available elsewhere; this information appeared to have been either missed or ignored. The book’s brief description of the trial was drawn solely from Faham’s account, ending with the merchant’s assertion that the legal proceedings in Jerusalem ended with an admission by the Aleppo rabbis that he had been right all along. The book referred to Faham’s “heroic efforts,” and while it acknowledged some kind of “controversy” around his actions, it attributed the Aleppo rabbis’ anger toward him to a “grudge.” Faham was the vehicle of the state’s seizure of the manuscript, as anyone who carefully went over the documentary record would know, and yet here, too, those truths were covered up; instead, the book perpetuated the same story that had been in circulation for years.

  The explanation for this is not complicated: if the first book was put out by Ben-Zvi’s executors, the scholars of his institute, this one was put out with the support of descendants of the man who turned the codex over to Israel. Though this is not explicitly noted anywhere in the book, one of Faham’s grandchildren, a New York businessman, partially funded it. His condition—according to the author Tawil and the donor himself, both of whom I interviewed—was that he be allowed to see the manuscript before publication to ensure there was nothing the family would find damaging.

  In an interview, Tawil acknowledged that some funding had come from Faham’s family, but he said he had not been pressured to make any changes to the text. The book’s account of Faham’s role dovetailed with Faham’s own account of his role simply because it was based entirely on Faham’s oral testimony and on interviews with his sons, Tawil said. “I didn’t want to get into controversy,” the author said. The Israeli government’s official version supported Faham’s, he noted, and nothing he found in the Ben-Zvi Institute, which helped him with his research, contradicted it. That being the case, he said, “who am I to argue against it?”

  Having concluded that the Ben-Zvi Institute’s book, the one written by Amnon Shamosh, was less an example of historical inquiry than a carefully engineered smoke screen, I combed through it again to analyze its treatment of the missing pages. Here, I thought, the institute would have little to hide. If pages had survived the riot, they were held by Aleppo Jews, and the codex had arrived in Jerusalem incomplete only a decade later. And yet here, too, the book was not forthcoming. “Surprisingly, as we get closer to our own times, the fog grows, and there are more and more differing accounts of the Crown’s journeys,” read one typical sentence, without elaborating. The codex’s travels “are cloaked in mystery, and it is doubtful that the truth will ever be known,” read another. The book ventured no hypothesis about what might have happened, and most of the sections about the missing pages read like this: “The question that arises, one we must never tire of asking, is what happened to those books [of the Bible] and missing pages? Are they lost and gone? Every last one of them? Or, perhaps, do some of them exist in the hands of different people in different places, waiting to be redeemed?”

  At his home, Shamosh told me he believed most of the pages had been taken by people in Aleppo. Of the Aleppo community, he said, “If it’s possible not to tell the truth, why tell the truth? The truth is a dangerous thing.”

  † The first Hebrew month corresponds to August–September 1957. The second corresponds to January–February 1958.

  24

  The Agent’s Investigation

  IT WAS 1989, and Channel 1 TV, Israel’s public television station, was planning a documentary about the Crown’s missing pages. The production team asked Rafi Sutton, the Aleppo Jew with years of spying behind him, to put his skills at their disposal.

  By now, Sutton had completed a successful spying career, including a stint with the Mossad in Europe beginning in 1969, at a time when the intelligence service had agents building networks among Palestinians and other Arabs abroad. Many of the Israeli agents were, like Sutton, Jews from Arab countries. He served in Europe in the aftermath of the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Mossad teams hunted down and assassinated members of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Rome, Paris, Cyprus, and elsewhere. I once asked him about a book I had read documenting the details of that merciless campaign, and he told me brusquely that it was “accurate.” But in all, Sutton revealed almost nothing about his Mossad work, except that it was similar to his work in Jerusalem; that meant running agents. An old friend of his told me that Sutton had spent much of his time in Europe living under an assumed identity as an Arab, showing up occasionally to visit his wife and children, who were parked discreetly elsewhere on the continent. He returned to Israel in 1975. After we had known each other for some time, Sutton confided to me that the memory of one prolonged stint undercover in an Arab country still woke him in dread in the middle of the night.

  Sutton’s interest in his roots in Aleppo had grown as he aged, and he immediately agreed to the request from Channel 1. He saw the job, he said, as an intelligence mission, though it happened to come from a TV station and not from the Mossad, and though the goal this time was not secrecy but maximum publicity. The result—about forty minutes of low-budget television, resembling an extended segment of 60 Minutes—was the closest thing to a methodical investigation of the Crown’s fate attempted up to that time. Though the results of the investigation were inconclusive, to this day the program is one of the most crucial troves of information available to anyone interested in the story. Nearly all the people interviewed have since died.

  I first saw the program, which I subsequently watched at least a dozen times, in Sutton’s living room. When he tried to show it to me, he couldn’t get his DVD player to work, and stood stooped, in flip-flops, staring with uncomprehending hatred at the remote.

  “Didn’t you operate technology back in the Mossad?” I ribbed him. By this time we were friends. He didn’t look up.

  “I operated people,” he muttered.

  Sutton’s objective was to nail down the chronology of the Crown’s history after the riot—at which time, it was assumed, the pages had gone missing—and to determine when, exactly, it was recognized to be incomplete. Going through his memory and his contacts in the Aleppo community, he submitted a list of targets, noting with impatience how many of the central players were already gone: the cheese merchant Faham was dead, and so were the sexton and the two Aleppo rabbis, Tawil and Zaafrani.

  Sutton, like other old spies I have met, is torn between a tendency toward secrecy drilled into him over decades and an urge to tell his stories, which he knows are very good. He clearly loved the spotlight, the TV footage showed: he played up the role of the Mossad man, crossing streets and hotel lobbies in a black trench coat and sunglasses, impaling his subjects with interrogator’s eyes from behind the large frames perched on his nose.

  One of his on-air interviews was with a man identified in the program only as “the tourist” and filmed from the back so that his face could not be seen. A voice-over at the beginning announced that Sutton and his subject were in “a European country.” They were, in fact, in Tel Aviv. The man was Edmond Cohen, whose family had hidden the Crown and who was the one to personally bring it to the courier Faham as he prepared to leave. Cohen had stayed in Aleppo until almost all the other Jews
were gone and had finally left only a short time before, and his anonymity and the false location were meant to address his fear that he might endanger relatives still in Syria if it became known that he was in Israel. Like nearly everyone in the Aleppo community connected to the manuscript’s rescue from the synagogue and transfer to Israel, Cohen was evasive. They spoke in Syrian Arabic.

  SUTTON. From the day of the fires until the Crown was found, can you tell me who had it and where?

  COHEN. For a time, not a long time afterward, I don’t remember exactly, they said they brought the Crown. A certain person had it and hid it in his store, in his storeroom. I had the privilege of seeing it.

  The “certain person” whom Cohen would not name was his uncle, Ibrahim Effendi Cohen.

  SUTTON. When you say they brought it, who brought it?

  COHEN. I don’t quite remember. They hid it with him, and I saw it. It arrived incomplete.

  SUTTON. It was incomplete.

  COHEN. This man wrapped it up. It was in his storeroom, in a room within a room, a dark room.

  SUTTON. When you say it arrived incomplete, is it known how much was missing?

  COHEN. I don’t remember.

  SUTTON. But you saw it was incomplete. Did people speak among themselves about how much—

  COHEN. It was missing mostly from the Torah.

  SUTTON. From the Pentateuch.

  COHEN. Yes. That’s what I remember.