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

by Matti Friedman

  As a young man in Jerusalem, Schneebalg had been a follower of the Hasidic Rebbe of Vizhnitz and had learned much of what he knew about books in the Rebbe’s library. He later rejected the sect as too moderate and joined the more extreme Satmar Hasidim, moving to the sect’s stronghold in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Schneebalg was “good-hearted, a man of charity and compassion, who fed the hungry and helped brides and grooms to marry,” according to one newspaperman’s description of him. “He always spoke in a loud voice, he was stormy and never rested for a moment.” The collector William Gross remembered that the dealer would invariably show up at his apartment between midnight and one: these were his business hours. The Hasid was working, at the time, with an Israeli who lived in Vienna and whose other businesses, according to press reports, included brothels and slot machines. In the book partnership, the businessman brought the money; Schneebalg, the expertise. They split the profits.

  Schneebalg was said to have a photographic memory that enabled him to glance at a manuscript and immediately identify the scribe. In the unregulated world of rare books, where deals tend to be conducted in cash, far from the prying eyes of onlookers and income tax officials, trust is crucial. The Hasid was trusted. He dealt not in midrange books but in those that were rare and expensive and also, according to two prominent collectors I interviewed, occasionally of uncertain provenance. When he had something good to sell, he would make the rounds, pulling the book out of his shopping bag in a collector’s living room, leaving it there if he made a sale or putting it back and disappearing into the night.

  When they approached the collector and his daughter at the Jerusalem Hilton, Schneebalg and his partner had a simple briefcase that appeared to be made of straw, Tammy Moussaieff told me when I interviewed her later at her father’s hotel suite in Israel.

  Shlomo, come quick, we have something for you, the dealer said, in the elderly collector’s recollection.

  What do you have? Moussaieff asked.

  Quiet, the Hasid said. We know that you’ll be quiet and won’t tell anyone.

  The four of them ascended to a room upstairs, where the dealer opened the briefcase. Inside was a stack of parchment pages. Tammy, who was standing off to one side, heard Schneebalg say the words “Crown of Aleppo.” Her father, she remembered, was impressed.

  Moussaieff counted the pages, he told me in London, by measuring them between his thumb and forefinger. He estimated their number at about ninety. On top of the pile he saw the book of Genesis, which appeared to mean that what he was seeing was the most valuable part of all: the missing Torah.

  How much? Moussaieff asked.

  A million, the Hasid replied.

  The collector told me he believed this was too much. This was before the Crown became well known in Israel with the publication of the Ben-Zvi Institute’s book and the broadcast of the Channel 1 TV show. He offered $300,000. The dealer refused. The collector offered to take just part of the manuscript. The dealer said it was all or nothing. Moussaieff walked away, or so he told me.

  When I later spoke to Tammy Moussaieff, she said, “I think my father was very silly not to have bought it.”

  When Moussaieff’s story first became public, in abbreviated form, in the TV segment aired in the early nineties, the scholars involved with the Crown brushed it aside. This might have been because they did not believe that Moussaieff, who had no academic training, could have had the expertise necessary to identify the Crown. It might also have been because if the pages were indeed on the market, it meant someone had put them there. It was easier to continue to believe they had simply evaporated.

  Moussaieff’s version of events was backed up and elaborated on by his middle-aged daughter, who seemed to have an entirely reasonable attitude of fond and detached exasperation with many of her father’s stories. And the story, I discovered, also has support from an unrelated source: Amnon Shamosh, the writer behind the Ben-Zvi Institute’s book about the Crown.

  Shortly after the book came out in 1987, Shamosh told me, he received a call from a man in the leadership of the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem. The man told Shamosh he was sitting just then in his office with two book dealers who were offering pages of the Crown of Aleppo. The man knew Shamosh had written a book about the Crown and wanted his help in ascertaining the authenticity of the pages. Based on the man’s description, Shamosh believed the manuscript they were selling was not the Crown, and he told them so. In our conversation, though, he admitted he was not an expert and could not remember why he had decided this was the case or how he could have made that assessment over the telephone. One of the dealers was Haim Schneebalg.

  With three witness testimonies, it is possible to conclude with some certainty that in the mid-1980s the dealer Haim Schneebalg was offering for sale a manuscript that he claimed was part of the Crown of Aleppo. It is impossible to know if it really was, of course, though two points give some credence to his claim. The first was Schneebalg’s prominence as a dealer, which would have been undermined were he found to be peddling a lesser manuscript or a fake. The second is the existence since 1976 of a facsimile edition of the surviving pages of the Crown; this meant a potential buyer could check the authenticity of the pages against the facsimile before putting down the considerable sum of money the seller wanted.

  In Moussaieff’s London apartment, I asked him how much the part of the manuscript he had been offered would be worth today.

  “It has no price,” he said.

  We spoke some more, and he turned to me with a thoughtful look. “The problem with this story,” he said, “is that it could damage your health.”

  What happened to the pages after Schneebalg offered them to you? I asked.

  Moussaieff said he did not know—that was the last he heard of the Crown. Or at least that is what he told me in London. There would be one more meeting, and one more version of the story, after that. “What was pushing me afterward was only curiosity,” the collector said. “And for curiosity you don’t go deep. You understand?” I nodded.

  Exiting back onto Grosvenor Square, I sat on a wooden bench in the park. The sky was overcast again. I had found what I came for—a detailed version of the attempted sale at the Hilton, including the name of the dealer. Now, it would seem, all I had to do was track him down.

  § Neither Moussaieff nor his daughter Tammy Moussaieff, whom I later interviewed, remembered the precise year of the Hilton auction. There were three such book shows in the 1980s: in 1985, 1987, and 1988. Tammy Moussaieff pointed to the 1985 show as the most likely and remembered seeing “Yemeni artifacts” on display; catalogues show that Yemeni pieces were on display only in 1985. This also matches Moussaieff’s claim in his 1989 TV interview that the attempted sale had been “four or five” years earlier.

  28

  Room 915

  ON AUGUST 16, 1989, four years after the book fair at the Hilton, the phone rang in the modest apartment Haim Schneebalg kept in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea She’arim. It was a Wednesday. The lively streets were full of bespectacled men in black and their severely dressed wives and daughters. The dealer had arrived with his wife from Brooklyn two weeks earlier. He spent some of his time with contacts from the world of manuscripts—one of them was Meir Benayahu, a well-known collector and the former director of the Ben-Zvi Institute—as well as with friends and relatives.

  On the line was a man named Dan Cohen, who wanted to meet Schneebalg at the Plaza Hotel downtown. Cohen had checked in earlier that day accompanied by a woman and had given the reception clerk an ID card number and an address in the city of Herzliya: 2 Hatchelet Street. The investigation file kept by the Jerusalem District police remains classified, but a few writers for Israeli dailies at the time obtained leaked material and tracked down the friends and associates of the protagonists; it is thanks to these reporters that we know the details of the story.

  Cohen wanted to meet the dealer immediately. Schneebalg’s wife, who was in the kitchen, wa
rned him not to go, though later she would not tell investigators why. A few of Schneebalg’s associates told reporters that he seemed more nervous than usual in the days leading up to the phone call, and they thought this was connected to substantial debts he had incurred, some of them to black-market lenders. One recounted that Schneebalg had told him, in speaking of his debts, “Ich mach in meine hoisen”—Yiddish for “I’m peeing in my pants.” At the time, he and his partner from Vienna were running a book business worth millions of dollars. In his own community, the Hasid was known for walking around with rolls of cash in his pockets, but also for living modestly and making prodigious contributions to charity.

  That evening, Schneebalg caught a cab from his apartment to the Plaza, a ten-minute ride. He told his wife he would be back by 9:30 p.m. He walked over to the bank of elevators in the lobby, rode one up to the ninth floor, turned left down the corridor, then turned left again into room 915.

  The next day, a maid coming to clean the room after Dan Cohen’s scheduled checkout time saw a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob. She opened the door anyway. A window looked north over a park and the low stone buildings of downtown Jerusalem. Next to the window was a chair, and on the chair was a black hat. On the floor was the body of an obese man with a beard and side-locks, a thick, bloody liquid oozing from his nose.

  Police from the Jerusalem station arrived quickly with a pathologist in tow, but the news spread just as fast in the city’s ultra-Orthodox precincts, and soon dozens of men were mobbing the hotel and interfering with the investigation. Jews of the ultra-Orthodox sects are often opposed to autopsies; this is partly because of a belief that the dead have dignity and that damaging their bodies harms their chances of resurrection at the End of Days, and partly because of a closed society’s conviction that the truth in matters like untimely death might best be left to God. There have been riots in Jerusalem when police insist on going ahead. The pathologist managed only a superficial external check of Schneebalg’s corpse before the dealer was buried in the old cemetery on the Mount of Olives the next day. “The ultra-Orthodox world and the world of Judaica dealers are buzzing, inventing theories,” a reporter wrote two weeks later. “Murder is a possibility. A natural death is a possibility. The scenarios are generating fear. The Judaica market has never known a murder, at least as far as we know.”

  Investigators checking the hotel’s records found, unsurprisingly, that Dan Cohen did not exist. The address he had given was on a street that did not exist, and the ID number matched someone by the name of Shohat from one of the southern suburbs of Tel Aviv. The pathologist found no clear signs of violence on the dealer’s body but noted in his report, “Without an autopsy it is impossible to determine a cause of death.” An acquaintance of the dealer told police that the day before, Schneebalg had complained to him of chest pains. Based on that testimony and on the fact that the pathologist had seen no evidence of violence—and influenced, certainly, by reluctance to inflame thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews—the police attributed the death to a heart attack and closed the case.

  The complications that began to emerge later on were reported by several aggressive Israeli newspaper reporters, chiefly Ben Caspit of Maariv and Amos Nevo of Yediot Ahronot. The Hasid’s business partner in Vienna, the reporters found, had taken out an insurance policy on the dealer worth $6 million and had tried to cash in on the premium immediately after his death. The German insurance company, the Cologne-based Gothaer Finanzholding, sensed foul play and refused to pay, instead dispatching investigators to pick up where the Jerusalem police had left off.

  The insurance company’s lawyer in Israel began fighting to get the investigation reopened and to have the body exhumed. Meanwhile, the company’s investigators in Europe obtained details of the two physical checkups the dealer had undergone in order to have the policy approved, one in Vienna and one in Jerusalem. The Vienna checkup gave his height as 174 centimeters and his weight as 95 kilograms. The Jerusalem checkup gave his height as 170 centimeters and his weight as 90 kilograms. In reality, according to the insurance company, the dead man had been 180 centimeters tall and weighed 125 kilograms. In all likelihood he had never appeared for a physical, and it was possible, the company asserted, that he had not even known he was insured. The investigators concluded that the policy had been fraudulently obtained and linked the Hasid’s death to a possible injection of poison; they believed the hurried pathologist probably missed the needle prick. The Vienna businessman, they suggested, might have been involved.

  The businessman denied the charge and petitioned the court to allow an autopsy to prove his innocence. The case made its way through courts in Israel and Germany for a few years, but the body was never exhumed and the premium was never paid.¶ “Any detective novel would pale next to this story,” Michael Pappe, the insurance company’s lawyer, said in court. One reporter quipped that the story could have been written by Agatha Christie, if Agatha Christie were an ultra-Orthodox Jew. The case was never solved. Officially, in fact, there was no case, as the Hasid had died of a heart attack, in a hotel room that happened to have been rented by someone using an alias, who had then disappeared without a trace. More than two decades later, the death of the dealer at the Plaza Hotel remains the perfect symbol of the dark convergence of holy books and money.

  ¶ The Israeli lawyer for the insurance company, Michael Pappe, declined requests for an interview but told me that the details reported by the two newsmen were accurate. A spokeswoman for Gothaer Finanzholding in Cologne would confirm only that a German court ruled in favor of the company in 1997 because of “irregularities” in the policy, and that the $6 million policy was indeed not paid.

  29

  Money

  FOR WEEKS, I had been keeping it a secret that I had seen one of the missing pieces of the Crown. But I needn’t have bothered; I hadn’t seen one.

  Back in Israel, I met the scholar Raphael Zer, a white-bearded researcher with a knitted skullcap. Zer, who works for Hebrew University’s Bible Project, has encyclopedic knowledge of the biblical text, and because he is engaged in using the Crown to create the most perfect scientific edition of the Bible, he has better knowledge of the codex than nearly anyone else alive. Zer, too, had once carried out an independent investigation into the disappearance of the Crown’s pages, and he showed me a chart he had compiled with names, dates, and pieces of information. In 2006 he even managed to arrange a meeting with Israel’s president in an attempt to enlist him in the search, but nothing came of it. A decade before that, in 1997, he had contacted a private investigation company about taking the case, and the company agreed; for $50,000, they told Zer, they could locate at least one page. Using connections in the Ministry of Education and Culture, Zer was given a meeting with the minister himself, the Orthodox politician Zevulun Hammer, who was interested in the story and approved the expense from his own budget—on the condition that the Ben-Zvi Institute sign off on it. But when Zer called the institute’s director, he was not interested. Zer found this infuriating.

  My conversation with Zer followed the usual pattern for exchanges with people in the Aleppo Codex Underground: they would float vague pieces of information to see if I knew more than they did, and I did the same. Zer mentioned that there was someone he believed had pieces of the manuscript, but he would not tell me who the person was. When pressed, he said this person split his time between Israel and a foreign country.

  “Shlomo Moussaieff,” I said, used to this by now, and Zer grinned. I confided that I had visited the collector and that I had seen one of the missing pieces. Zer was visibly impressed, as I hoped he would be. After I left, Zer, displaying a rather journalistic forcefulness and speed rare in a university scholar, called the collector himself, found that he was back in Israel, and set up a meeting. He arrived at the hotel suite and chatted with Moussaieff for a while. Zer was not sure if Moussaieff understood that he was an academic expert; the collector, Zer said, seemed to have decided, based on Zer’s
appearance, that he was simply a rabbi. When Zer asked to see the piece, the collector produced it. The scholar knew immediately that it was not from the Crown.

  The parchment and the script indicated that the page was indeed from a valuable medieval manuscript, Zer said, but the notes of the Masora—the ones written by Ben-Asher in the Crown—did not match. Furthermore, the parchment was not the same and the writing was not that of Ben-Buya’a; it was sloppier, with letters that varied in size. Ben-Buya’a’s script was so precise it might have been run off on a laser printer.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “There is no question,” he said.

  My first reaction was to conclude that Moussaieff was unaware of what he had and must know less as a collector than he thought he did. But when I suggested this to Ezra Kassin, the amateur sleuth upon whom I had come to rely in navigating the more bewildering patches of the Crown’s story, he laughed at me. “You don’t get that rich by being stupid,” he said. “Moussaieff knows exactly what he has.” The collector would not keep a priceless fragment of the Crown in his living room cabinet, Kassin said: “He has it around to impress people who don’t know any better.” I was looking for the Crown, and Moussaieff was looking at me. I now felt that he had known what I wanted, and what I knew, and gave me something I was too ignorant to see was not that at all. I bought it. In the bazaar this would have been a merchant’s triumph.

  I called Moussaieff’s hotel suite in Israel, determined that he was in town, and drove there again. I found him wearing oversize Gucci sunglasses and a pinky ring, surrounded by his stockpile of lamps and jugs and bronze lions. His aide was there but no longer seemed interested in me. The collector’s daughter Dorit, the one married to the president of Iceland, was coming in and out of the living room, maneuvering nonchalantly around the jumble of priceless antiquities. It seemed for a split second that the collector was happy to see me.