The Aleppo Codex

by Matti Friedman

  We talked for a long time. He showed me some of his collection, moving a poster that was leaning against a wall to reveal an ancient stela that he said was from the biblical land of Sheba. The president of Yemen, a personal friend of his, helped him obtain it, he said. His purchases, he explained, were driven by a desire to prove the historical accuracy of the Bible.

  I asked to see the manuscript fragment again, and when he brought it out, I asked why it seemed so different from the rest of the Crown. He did not blink. The Crown was written by several different scribes, he explained, and then he changed the subject.

  There was no longer any point in going in circles; I was tiring of Moussaieff and his kaleidoscope of facts and was not sure I was making progress. I thought I might be familiar enough by now for him to reveal more of the truth. While I had come to believe it likely that he had indeed been offered pages of the Crown, I did not believe he had turned them down. A million dollars was not too high—a million dollars was nothing for Moussaieff. This part of the story did not ring true.

  Where, I asked, are the missing pieces of the Crown?

  Now his aide was paying attention. “He’s writing a book about this, you know,” he warned the collector.

  “What do I care?” Moussaieff said. “I’m eighty-seven, what do I care? What are they going to do, put me in jail?” The aide wandered away.

  “Today there is only a small part of the book of Deuteronomy,” the collector told me, accurately. And then he said, “The rest—I know where it is.” He said this as if it were perfectly natural, as if he had not told me in London that he had no idea where the rest of the pages might be.

  “And I am prepared to tell you everything,” he went on. There was just one condition. “Take out a million dollars and show it to me. Without a million dollars, don’t waste my time. You just want to write a book. Book, no book—do you have a million dollars?”

  I confessed that I did not.

  “In front of my eyes,” he said. “I’ll show you, I’ll introduce you, everything. They are all robbers,” he added. I wasn’t sure whom he meant, but I agreed that he was probably right.

  “Today, only I know where it is,” he said.

  “How many pages can be bought for a million?” I asked.

  “About sixty or seventy,” he said, and then he distanced himself somewhat. “I have to give them a million dollars, and afterward they’ll give it to me.” He would not say who “they” were, and I was left to conclude that “they” were people close to Moussaieff, if not simply Moussaieff himself, ensuring deniability and throwing a bit of sand in my eyes. The money, he was saying, was not for him—he hardly needed it—but for “them,” the mysterious holders of a large section of the Aleppo Codex, from whom he could easily obtain it if only I came up with a sum he knew I did not have.

  If I understand correctly, I said, there are individual pages circulating on the market, as well as a large piece of the manuscript. That was the Torah, the part offered to him in the 1980s.

  Correct, he said. “Come with a million dollars. No one is going to do you a favor.”

  That seems clear, I said.

  “Then I’ll open the door for you. Otherwise nothing can be done. They won’t even talk to you if you don’t have a million dollars in your hand. I don’t just mean saying you’ll pay. In your hand.”

  A few sentences later he returned to the same theme, in case I still had not understood what the Crown of Aleppo had become. “Money,” he growled, thumping on the table. He said no more on the matter.

  Without a million dollars, a court order, or a clear sense of whether I was being given a glimpse of the solution to a great mystery or being taken for a fool, I saw no further use in pursuing the collector after that.

  PART SIX

  30

  The Missing Pieces

  DURING NIGHT MANEUVERS in the desert as a young infantryman, I was taught that if I could not find Polaris, the North Star, I was to look for a group of bright stars, the belt and sword of the constellation Orion, which together formed an arrow pointing north.

  Facing the questions raised by this inquiry—what befell the Aleppo Codex, and if a theft occurred, who was the thief, and when did he act?—I was forced to come to grips with the fact that the story’s main characters were dead and didn’t talk when they were alive, and that the opportunities that might have existed to discover the truth were squandered by those who chose instead to replace the story with half-truths and vague formulations designed to raise as few questions as possible. No criminal investigation was ever launched into the Crown’s fate. Authoritative answers to all the questions raised by this story will, as a result, remain elusive. And yet, by the end, I found myself in possession of hard-won pieces of information that, like the stars I remembered from nights spent crossing hills and riverbeds on foot, were not themselves the answer but pointed to an answer, or to several possible answers. These were very different from the ones I expected at the beginning.

  Rewind past the octogenarian collector and the dead dealer, past the museum restoration lab, the exiles on Ocean Parkway, the trial in Jerusalem, the disintegration of one of Jewry’s most venerable outposts, the escapes by sea from the Lebanese coast, and the founding of a Jewish state, to the very beginning of this story—to November 1947 and to the great synagogue in the heart of old Aleppo. All previous attempts to look at the question of the missing pages have been based on a narrative that was false. Now, having stripped away the layers of wishful thinking and trickery coating the story of the Crown, we are left with the following account of what happened.

  On the day of the riot in Aleppo, looters ransacked the synagogue, breached the Crown’s safe, and threw the codex on the ground. Many of the pages scattered. The looters considered them worthless and seem to have ignored them as they torched the synagogue. Contrary to what was long believed, there is no evidence that any significant portion of the Crown was lost in the fire.

  Early the next day, the synagogue’s sexton, Asher Baghdadi, arrived with his son. They collected the pages they found and removed them from the synagogue. But they did not find all of them. A small number of pages, perhaps a dozen out of a total of nearly five hundred, either were gone already or were left behind.* Some were picked up later that day or in the days that followed by Jews who came to the synagogue, like Samuel Sabbagh, who kept an Exodus fragment in his wallet, and Leon Tawil, who took a page from Chronicles to Brooklyn. These two pieces have long been thought to point to the location of the rest of the missing pages, but it is safe to say they do not. The Brooklyn fragments are exceptions.

  Asher Baghdadi in Israel, sometime before his death in 1965.

  The sexton turned the nearly intact codex over to the community leaders, who placed it in the care of a Christian merchant and spread the story of its supposed loss. The codex remained in the merchant’s custody for several months before it was transferred to the Jewish textile trader Ibrahim Effendi Cohen. The Buenos Aires rabbi saw the book—whole but for a small number of pages—in Cohen’s storeroom in 1952, five years after the riot. Five years after that, in the fall of 1957, the Crown was sent with the courier Faham out of Syria to Turkey, where it remained for approximately three months before arriving at Haifa on December 16 of that year. It was released from customs and sent to Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the Israeli immigration chief, on January 6, 1958, and reached President Ben-Zvi and his institute on January 24. No one who touched the codex between the date of the riot in 1947 and March 1958 came forward to say that a huge part of the book was missing. No one, including the academics of the Ben-Zvi Institute, appears to have left any record of the state of the book when they received it or when they passed it on. Only three months after the codex’s arrival in Israel do we find documentation indicating that significant parts were gone, including the Five Books of Moses.

  Whatever happened to the book, then, happened between 1952, when the rabbi saw it nearly whole, and March 1958. Anyone who touched it in th
ese six years is, at least in theory, a suspect. Because the missing pieces include a large section from the beginning, a large section from the end, and individual pieces from the middle, it is possible that there was not one theft, but several thefts. In the period in question, the book was hidden in Aleppo, moved to Turkey, brought to Israel, and kept in the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  The first station was Aleppo.

  “LAU KAN EL-KALAM min fida, as-skoot min dahab,” goes an old saying of the Jews of Aleppo. If words are of silver, silence is of gold.

  An Aleppo-born bookseller in Jerusalem described a “conspiracy of silence” about the Crown in the Aleppo community. This is true. The silence began with the riot and continued through the late 1950s and the Jerusalem trial, where there is no record of any of the Aleppo representatives—or of anyone else—mentioning the fact that approximately 40 percent of the Crown’s pages, including the most important ones, were now gone. The silence among the Aleppo rabbis involved in hiding the book and smuggling it out of Syria appears to have been violated just once, by the rabbi in Buenos Aires, who spoke to Rafi Sutton on camera four decades after the riot and shortly before his own death.

  A close look at the existing testimonies about the Crown’s sojourn in Aleppo in the years after the riot reveals contradictory descriptions of the state of the manuscript. The rabbi in Buenos Aires, the global Aleppo community’s most respected religious authority at the time of the interview in 1989, said that almost none of the pages were missing when he saw the Crown in 1952 in the keeping of the Cohen family. But Edmond Cohen has given different accounts. Cohen seems to have been the person most responsible for the Crown while it was in his family’s care—his uncle, Ibrahim Effendi Cohen, the official guardian, was already an elderly man—and it was Edmond who removed the Crown from its hiding place and brought it to Faham for its journey out of Syria. When Rafi Sutton interviewed him on camera, also in 1989, Cohen said he could not remember exactly what had been missing, only that part of the Torah was gone. The phrase “I don’t remember,” as Sutton noticed, recurred in the brief recorded segment no fewer than eight times.

  I found another version in a profile of Cohen that appeared in an ultra-Orthodox paper in Israel in 1994. According to this article, which was based on an interview with Cohen, after the riot the manuscript was missing up to the Torah portion of Ki Tissa in the book of Exodus. That is a striking departure from all other accounts, because it would mean that one and a half books were missing from the beginning of the manuscript—perhaps several dozen leaves, more than the handful of pages mentioned by other witnesses, but far less than the two hundred leaves that were missing by 1958. Yet another account came from Edmond Cohen’s son, Moshe Cohen, who told me he understood from his father that all the pieces missing today had been missing since the riot. In other words, the Buenos Aires rabbi said explicitly that the Crown was nearly intact when it was in the Cohen family’s care, but Edmond Cohen said it was not.

  In his report summing up his Crown investigation in the early 1990s, Rafi Sutton listed the people who had access to the manuscript in Aleppo in the years in question: Ibrahim Effendi Cohen, the rabbis Tawil and Zaafrani, the Christian merchant who cared for it briefly after the riot, and Edmond Cohen himself. “The question is,” Sutton wrote, “is it possible to point to one of them as the person who took or helped take the parts of the Crown? The answer is absolutely not. We cannot suspect one of them because they did not give testimony before their death.” Still, he went on, and here it is possible to see his spy’s mind at work, “It must be said that of all five mentioned here, only Edmond Cohen is still alive (may he be granted long life), and in the interview with him it could be felt that he was not freely and openly recounting the story of the Crown.”

  The Mossad man’s language was cautious, but his reasoning was apparent. Edmond Cohen would certainly have known if the manuscript was nearly whole when it was in his care, or if it was already missing large sections. He thus knew if the pages had disappeared before he received it or after he gave it to the cheese merchant—or possibly while he had it. In any case, he had to know more than he had volunteered. Later in his report, Sutton returned, again, to Cohen.

  In light of the above conclusions, it is necessary to try to persuade Edmond Cohen to agree to another interview in order to try to clarify points that were revealed and raised in this attempt. If he is opposed to an on-camera interview, we must conduct a recorded interview. Because Mr. Edmond Cohen is now becoming a key player in the whole matter.

  Sutton did not get a chance to interview Cohen again before Cohen’s death.

  Anyone looking at the spotty record from the period after the riot, when the Crown was still in Aleppo but no longer in the synagogue, cannot help noticing the differing descriptions of the book given by some of the men who hid it, as well as an unwillingness to talk on the part of others. If the Aleppo Jews were certain they sent a nearly complete manuscript to Israel, it is logical to expect that they would have said so publicly. They never did, and one explanation for the silence could be a suspicion or certainty that one of their own was responsible for the theft. If this is true, the fictional account of the Crown’s fate in Michel Ezra Safra and Sons, Amnon Shamosh’s novel about an Aleppo family, might not be so far from the truth. In the book, the dying patriarch of a fictional Aleppo clan leaves his firstborn son a mysterious safe that he is to open only three years later; in the meantime, the son knows only that the safe contains a treasure linked to a “terrible secret.”

  In the car, on the long way home, Rahmo closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and thought of the terrible secret bequeathed him by his father. He would not have been more afraid had he known that a monster awaited him in that safe. The worst was that he would have to bear the burden of the terrible secret and the sin for three whole years . . .

  Now it was clear to him that the feeling of sin was what had slowly destroyed Michel, from the day he left his city and took with him that holy object. What that object was, Michel had not wanted to say. He said only that it was holy and valuable, and millions could be had for it. It was not to be sold except in a time of crisis. He had not stolen it, he said, he had saved it. And yet his conscience had not given him rest for all those years and his hidden treasure dimmed the light of his life.

  When I interviewed him, Shamosh said he believed Aleppo Jews were responsible for taking most of the Crown’s missing pages. “It was passed among merchants,” he said. “And a merchant, if such a treasure falls into his hands, won’t he put aside a piece for himself?”

  In the fall of 1957, after a decade in hiding, the Crown was removed on the orders of the chief rabbis and given to Murad Faham, who was preparing to leave Syria. The merchant packed it along with his possessions and smuggled it across the Turkish border.

  * When the fragment kept by Samuel Sabbagh was sent to Israel in 2007, it was found, unlike the rest of the manuscript, to have evidence of fire damage. Nearly all the pages were accounted for after the fire, but the Sabbagh fragment raised the possibility that of the small number of pages that were not, some might have been burned.

  31

  Silo

  FAHAM ARRIVED IN the frontier town of Alexandretta in or around September 1957. The Israeli agents running the immigration route through Turkey knew who Faham was and what he was carrying. Faham remained in Turkey until he sailed for Israel in mid-December.

  When Faham arrived, he contacted a local shopkeeper and kosher butcher who worked for the Israeli government as an agent in charge of arranging the escape of Syrian Jews. Here I have referred to this man by the pseudonym of Isaac Silo. Silo, the Jewish Agency’s archive makes clear, was a crucial agent on an important smuggling route, entrusted with secret information about the identities of smugglers and with large sums of money, some of it intended to bribe border guards and customs agents. He was a middle-aged man at the time and died in the 1970s.

  During this investigation, I learned to note not only what wa
s said by the story’s protagonists but also what was not; on occasion, the latter was more important. The strange silence about the missing pieces that I noticed in the letters and transcripts of the time appears to have been observed not just by the Aleppo Jews but by the Israelis as well. The silence began immediately after Faham’s arrival in Israel, when he twice gave testimony to President Ben-Zvi about the Crown and also wrote a letter about the manuscript to the immigration chief Shragai. Nowhere is there any sign that the Israelis asked for information about the missing pieces or that Faham volunteered any. At the trial in Jerusalem, the witnesses hashed and rehashed the story of how the Crown was given to Faham and taken to Israel. But like Faham himself, not one of them mentioned the fact that the world’s most famous Hebrew Bible had somehow arrived in Israel with its most important part missing. The silence in the archives fifty years after the fact most likely does not reflect an actual silence at the time: the matter, it is safe to assume, was discussed, but these discussions were not written down, or if records did exist, they were subsequently destroyed or stored out of reach.

  Along with what was not said or recorded, an observer might also notice what was not done. The man who knew for a fact that the Crown had been rescued nearly intact from the synagogue and had not, in fact, been significantly damaged in the riot—Asher Baghdadi, the sexton—was never questioned, even several years later, when Israel’s president was supposedly turning the world upside down in the search for the missing pages and Baghdadi was living just down the road in Tel Aviv.

  This silence is one of the most striking characteristics of the Crown’s first months in Israel. Another is the unusual behavior of Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the head of the Aliya Department. In the official version of the story, Shragai received the Crown on January 23, 1958, and brought it to the president the next day. Both men explicitly put forward that amended chronology later on, and it was enshrined as fact in the book published by the Ben-Zvi Institute. But while it is true that the codex reached Ben-Zvi on January 24, it is not true that it reached Shragai only the day before. According to his own testimony in court, Shragai was given the manuscript not on January 23 but on January 6, seventeen days earlier.