The Aleppo Codex

by Matti Friedman

  I don’t want to take it home, he said. Take it and give it tomorrow to one of the elders of the community.

  This account, the most dramatic and detailed of them all, is the one I quoted credulously in my first article about the Crown. It remains my favorite. Like the others, however, it is fiction.*

  I heard another version from a rabbi I met six decades after these events. He was hunched and weak, drinking tea over a book of Talmud in a synagogue outside Tel Aviv. I was with Ezra Kassin, the former military investigator and amateur Crown sleuth, who warned me that the rabbi had suffered several strokes and might not be lucid. Ezra introduced himself as the grandson of a man from Aleppo whose name was also Ezra Kassin. The rabbi mumbled something, and I motioned to Ezra that we should leave; the man was clearly infirm. Ezra ignored me. The rabbi spoke another sentence that I could not make out, and then said, “Your grandfather was a tailor in Aleppo.” Ezra nodded. “He was a simple, pure man,” the rabbi said. “There are no people like that anymore.” Then he started talking as if he had been waiting for us to come. His good eye looked at me sharply, and I imagined that his other eye, milky and blind, was peering back in time.

  “They attacked synagogues,” he said, pausing to cough violently, “study halls, the Jewish school. They burned Torah scrolls, and they came closer and closer. We stayed at home for three days.” But on the third day, he wanted to go to the great synagogue. “We felt so much sorrow that we cried and read songs of lamentation,” he said, referring to poems Jews read to commemorate the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem. “We saw Torah scrolls torn into pieces, pieces, pieces in the synagogue . . . I—I myself—saw the Crown, on the floor . . . I drew close and picked up the Crown. I put it in a bag,” he said. Then he gave it to one of the men in charge of the synagogue. “Afterward, the goyim thought it was burned.”

  Some of the stories—and there are others—overlap in places, and some contain grains of truth. Some might be explained by the simple fact that there were many holy books in the great synagogue and almost no one had ever seen the Crown or knew what it looked like: what they thought was the great book might have been another manuscript. But the proliferation of stories, it seems clear, is rooted in the role of the Crown as the talisman and symbol of the Aleppo Jews. If the book was safe, so were they, and if it was not, they were not either. Now it had come to symbolize the moment of their community’s destruction, and everyone wanted to be part of the story.

  The most trustworthy account, the only one corroborated by numerous other sources—and the one that simply makes the most sense—credits a man who never bragged about it or thought to write it down. This was the sexton himself.

  Asher Baghdadi was not just the man in charge of the synagogue’s upkeep but also the person who lived in closest proximity to it, and could thus reach it with relative ease. Early in the morning after the riot, the sexton took one of his adult sons, crossed the alleyway between his house and the synagogue, and entered the courtyard, finding it full of charred books and pieces of parchment. He got down on the ground and began looking through the pages to find pieces of the Crown.

  “I saw my father crying like a baby,” his son Shahoud recalled in a TV documentary forty years later. “I said, ‘Abba, what happened? Get up, why are you sitting there?’ ” Shahoud bent over and began to help his father sort through the piles. What he found will be a matter of interest to us later on.

  At the sexton’s home, which had been looted but not burned, his daughter Carmela—the one who had been hit on the head with a stone during the riot—woke up that morning and saw that her father was gone. She remembered him returning with a burlap sack. Shaking with emotion, he said, Hear, O Israel, repeating the prayer Jews say in times of great danger or in the moments before death.

  Look what they did, he told his children, and he opened the sack. Inside were parchment leaves.

  I saved what I could, he said.

  After a period that might have been several days or several weeks, Baghdadi gave the book to one of the community’s remaining leaders, who gave him a modest sum of money for his trouble. The elders secretly passed it on to a Christian merchant whom they trusted and thought no one would suspect. At the same time they spread the story of its loss. When the city regained a semblance of normalcy, four or five months later, the leaders moved it to a storeroom owned by a Jewish textile merchant, Ibrahim Effendi Cohen, in one of the Old City bazaars. The Crown would remain there, undetected, for a decade.

  * In 1958, Faham testified that in the fall of 1957, ten years after the riot, he had not even known the Crown had survived the synagogue fire, contradicting his claim much later to have saved it himself.

  6

  The Jerusalem Circle

  BY THE TIME two months had passed since the United Nations vote, the Jewish sector of Jerusalem was strangled by Arab ambushes of the supply convoys coming up the highway from the coastal plain. Communication links with the outside world were spotty, and food supplies scant and shrinking. Jewish and Arab terror squads waged bombing campaigns against civilians of the other side. “Jerusalem is becoming virtually isolated behind a curtain of fear,” wrote a New York Times reporter.

  “Every time we go to sleep, we are not sure we are going to wake up,” an Arab mother confided in a letter to her son. “It is not the bullets we mind so much, but the dynamiting when you’re asleep. People wake up in the middle of the night under the debris of their houses.”

  On January 17, men from the Jewish Irgun militia rolled an oil drum packed with dynamite into a crowd of Arab commuters waiting at a bus stop, killing seventeen. At dawn on February 22, six British army deserters and former policemen working for the Palestinian Arab command left four stolen army vehicles parked on Ben-Yehuda Street, in the center of the Jewish part of the city. The explosives inside, prepared by an Arab bomb maker trained by the SS, went off at 6:30 a.m., destroying four buildings and killing fifty-eight people.

  Less than three weeks after that, and less than a week before another deadly bombing in the Jewish sector, three scholars at Hebrew University held an urgent meeting. The subject was the Crown of Aleppo and, specifically, dramatic news that had just arrived from Syria with a woman who had fled. “The entire community there has been destroyed and only the remains are left, the poor people, without a leader or a steward,” read the minutes of the March 5 meeting. The woman, whom the scholars clearly considered a trustworthy witness, “happened to visit the synagogue, and the sexton revealed to her that he managed to save remains of the Crown, and they are now in his hands.” The book had survived.

  The Aleppo Jews and the Syrian government were not the only ones with their eyes on the codex. Jerusalem, too, was home to a circle of men who were preoccupied with the same book and had already tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain it.

  The leader of the Jerusalem circle was Itzhak Ben-Zvi. Born Isaac Shimshelevich in Ukraine, Ben-Zvi was a Zionist leader and would later become the second president of the state of Israel—an influential, if largely ceremonial, position. He was also an ethnographer and anthropologist. He is remembered today as one of the giants of Israel’s history. Nearly every town in the country has a street named for him, and his image appears on the 100 shekel note. In 1935, on a visit to Aleppo, the future president had been allowed a brief glimpse of the codex by the community elders and had never forgotten it.

  By the early 1940s, scholars at Hebrew University in Jerusalem—then still firmly under British rule—had decided to produce a new edition of the Hebrew Bible, the most accurate ever, ending the enduring disgrace that other modern editions had been published by Christians. For this, they decided, they needed the Crown, the most accurate version of the text. As there were no copies, they needed the original. Because they were not just scholars but also Zionists, Ben-Zvi and his colleagues believed Judaism’s greatest book belonged in Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the Jews’ national renaissance. They also feared that Syrian authorities or collectors mig
ht get their hands on the book—in those years before the riot, it was common knowledge in Aleppo that would-be buyers had offered the community a fortune for it—or that it could be lost in the upheaval of the Second World War, which was then at its height. Not understanding the intensity of the Aleppo Jews’ connection to the book or their belief that it could never be moved, the scholars hoped it would be enough to send someone to Aleppo and simply to ask for it.

  In early 1943, Isaac Shamosh, a young lecturer on Arabic literature from Hebrew University, stepped off a train in Aleppo. Shamosh must have been aware that he had little chance of success. He had been born and raised in the city, which is why he had been chosen for the mission. He had once been, simultaneously, an avid Zionist and a Syrian nationalist (there was a brief time when this actually made sense) and had moved to Jerusalem to assume his teaching position after an Arab gunman killed the previous lecturer with a bullet shot through the window of his home during an earlier period of unrest.

  When he approached the Aleppo elders, he received the blunt answer he no doubt expected: the book would never leave the great synagogue. As he prepared to return via Beirut to Palestine, however, several of the lecturer’s old friends from Aleppo, young men in modern suits and with modern ideas who saw the community’s traditional leadership as hopelessly backward, came to see him. Shamosh later recounted their conversation repeatedly, his younger brother told me many years after Isaac’s death, because he came to see it as one of the pivotal moments in his life.

  We know the Crown is in danger here, the men said, and we know the identities of the two men who have the keys. Tell us the number of your carriage on the Beirut train and the time of your departure and bring along an empty suitcase.

  Perhaps Shamosh thought of the inscription on the Crown—“cursed be he who steals it”—or of the tradition that promised the community’s doom if the book were moved. Perhaps he was simply afraid. He returned to Palestine empty handed, and when he told the other scholars in Jerusalem what had happened, Ben-Zvi replied with a wry sentence that the scholar always remembered: Too bad we sent an honest man. Those words haunted the envoy afterward, when news of the book’s destruction arrived, because by stealing the book he could have saved it.

  A few months after arriving back in Jerusalem, Shamosh returned to Syria, this time accompanied by the secretary of Hebrew University. The Jerusalem scholars had adjusted their expectations and now hoped only to get the Aleppo elders to agree to allow them to photograph the codex. In the previous century the predecessors of these same rabbis had allowed two men, an Oxford scholar and a Christian missionary, to photograph individual pages of the book, but now even this was out of the question. Allowing a copy to be made, they believed, would render their treasure worthless. “I had a very hard week, which is not what I had hoped,” the secretary complained on hotel stationery to the university’s president. “Why? Our Jews in Aleppo have not decided to allow us to copy and compare, and only after many efforts did they call a meeting of the community council and agree to say yes, but—but they are not satisfied with the matter of security to prevent theft.” He suggested in a memo marked “Top Secret” that even if permission to take photographs was denied they might try to do it anyway, in a covert fashion. During the exchange the Aleppo Jews told the scholars they were unwilling to receive any letters postmarked from Palestine, concerned they could be singled out as Zionist sympathizers; this, sniffed the secretary, was the “fear of Diaspora Jews.” In the end the Aleppo elders agreed only to allow one of the scholars access to the manuscript without photographing it or removing it from the synagogue.

  The two envoys returned to Jerusalem, and another member of the Jerusalem circle, Professor Umberto Cassuto, an Italian-born Bible expert who had once been chief rabbi of Florence, traveled to Aleppo that December. An old photograph of Cassuto shows a man with a pointed white beard and a mustache curled extravagantly at the ends, peering at a book through round spectacles.

  Cassuto’s reception was of a type that will be familiar to many who have tried to do business or report a story in the Middle East. “When I arrived there,” Cassuto wrote later, “they did receive me graciously, but with regards to the Crown they told me right at the beginning: If Your Honor wants to see the Crown—certainly, we will gladly display it for a quarter of an hour.” More wrangling and pleading followed. He set up a meeting with one of the elders; the elder did not show up, then apologized and promised to come the next morning but did not, and so forth, until Cassuto threatened, rather unconvincingly, according to his diary, to “look for another community that wants to help with this sacred work.” Of course, no other community had the Crown. He said he would have to tell his colleagues at the university that the Jews of Aleppo “refused to offer us any help.” He was finally led through the Old City to the great synagogue, where he was met by the two elders with the keys. Each opened one lock, and then one took out the Crown. The visiting scholar was accompanied by several guardians, he wrote later, men who were there “in order to guard the Crown, and maybe, who knows, also to guard me so I would not take photographs, God forbid.”

  The guards, young rabbis, had themselves never seen the Crown before, and remembered the stranger’s visit long afterward. One of them was the ancient rabbi with one blind eye whom I met in the synagogue near Tel Aviv almost seventy years later and who had recounted his own version of the codex’s rescue. “We guarded him,” the rabbi said of Cassuto. “What did we do? Opened the Crown, the fabric covering, I remember that.” He saw the Crown was special, he said, because of the unflagging precision of the scribe’s work. “The beauty of the Crown was not that it was a splendid manuscript—there are more beautiful ones—but its beauty was that from beginning to end, from Genesis to Chronicles, it was the same writing. The same shape. That was the beauty.”

  The professor sat in the synagogue taking detailed notes, noting words in the text whose spelling was a point of argument. The Crown, he wrote in his diary, was in a wooden box covered in red leather, the covers of the codex attached to the two halves of the box. “The sewing of the folios has come apart in several places and the book is separated into different pieces,” he wrote. On some of the pages, he saw, the words had faded and had been reinforced with new ink by nameless scribes over the centuries.

  Professor Umberto Cassuto.

  The elders had eventually agreed to allow Cassuto several hours with the manuscript, instead of fifteen minutes. When his time was up, the men with the keys came back and returned the codex to the safe. This routine was repeated over the better part of a week before the scholar returned to Jerusalem, having gone over only a small portion of the text. Other matters weighed on him. In November 1943, weeks before his arrival in Aleppo, the SS had begun the liquidation of the Jews of Florence, where Cassuto’s son, Nathan, served as a rabbi. Nathan and his wife, Chana, were sent to Poland and interned in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Nathan eventually died there. As the professor studied the Crown in Aleppo, his three small grandchildren were hidden in Florence to evade capture, his two grandsons by Catholic families and his granddaughter by the nuns of the convent of La Calza.

  After the Aleppo riots, when news of the book’s destruction reached Jerusalem, it was Professor Cassuto who penned the newspaper obituary. His distress over the book’s loss can only seem more poignant when one understands that Cassuto was a man who knew real grief. The Jews of Aleppo, he wrote, had lit candles in front of the Crown’s safe and had prayed there for the healing of the sick, and believed it protected them and their community from harm. He described the safety measures—the two locks, the men who guarded him at all times. “The cloak of legend was unfurled over this book, as if it were surrounded by clouds of honor and the fog of purity,” the article read. “But secret wisdom and hidden treasure are of no use, and all the care and zealousness of the local people made it impossible to learn from the book or enjoy the wisdom inside.” The stringent security measures, he wrote, his pique
apparent in the old newsprint, were “more than enough to distance those who wanted to learn, or to make their work harder, but unfortunately were apparently no good whatsoever against the gangs of rioters.”

  When the Hebrew University scholars met in March 1948, two months after that article was published in Haaretz, to discuss the news of the book’s survival, Cassuto was present; it was now apparent that his sorrow over the Crown’s loss was premature. Ben-Zvi, who as a political leader was preoccupied with the growing ferocity of the war against the Arabs, was not there but was informed. The scholars held a second meeting a few days later to discuss the same news, all of this as the university was engulfed, quite literally, in violence. Students and professors from the physics and chemistry departments were manufacturing gunpowder and explosives. Two months before the meeting, in mid-January, thirty-five Jewish fighters, most of them students from the university, had been ambushed and killed as they tried to reinforce a group of besieged settlements south of Jerusalem. Ben-Zvi’s son, Eli, who was defending a kibbutz in the north, fell in combat that month. Five weeks after the meeting, on April 13, Chana Cassuto, the professor’s widowed daughter-in-law, who had survived Auschwitz and reached Israel, would be in a Jewish convoy ambushed as it tried to get through an Arab neighborhood to the hospital on Mount Scopus, next to the university campus. She would be among the seventy-eight dead.

  The scholars weighed the possibility of making another attempt to bring the Crown to Jerusalem. The border between Palestine and Syria was still open, most of the stubborn Aleppo elders who had foiled the 1943 attempt were now gone, and the scholars thought the sexton Asher Baghdadi still had the manuscript and might be persuaded to turn it over. The scholars had old information; by this time the sexton had already given the codex to the remaining community leaders. In any case, Professor Cassuto was opposed. “It must not appear as if the university is interested in exploiting the Aleppo community’s disaster and is trying to obtain what it failed to obtain in a time of peace,” he said. Furthermore, “The sexton is only a temporary guardian of these remains and is not authorized to turn them over to other hands, and we have no permission to receive them from him.”