The Aleppo Codex

by Matti Friedman

  The president had been trying to obtain the Crown for years, but Shragai testified that he kept the manuscript for two weeks without even telling Ben-Zvi that it had arrived. Four more days went by before he turned it over. The story was soon neatened up, as we have seen, and Shragai was eventually airbrushed out altogether; the book published by the Ben-Zvi Institute mentions him only in passing and without explaining his role. Shragai’s removal allowed a simple narrative: the Aleppo Jews sent their book to Israel and gave it to the president. This became the official story, allowing the keepers of the Crown’s history to sidestep the embarrassing “religious man” episode and the trial and to obscure the way they had obtained the book. It also erased the mysterious seventeen-day period in which Israel’s immigration chief kept the Crown from the country’s president.

  The documentary record gives us a strong indication that Shragai, along with other high-ranking government officials, knew something they were not telling. “There are complications in the matter of the Crown of the Torah,” Shragai wrote in a 1964 letter to the president of Hebrew University, with a copy to the president of Israel.† “The man who brought the book of the Torah, and who is in the United States, can no longer control himself despite all my calming letters and despite my oral conversations with him.” The man in the United States was Faham, and he was threatening to go public with something he knew. “I am very afraid that the matter will be made known and turn into a worldwide public scandal,” the immigration chief wrote, adding that his letter was driven by “desperation.”

  There are no details in the letter, no explicit indication of what he means. Shragai was too canny for that, and the recipients of the letter obviously did not need to be told. Shragai, who had spent decades immersed in Israel’s full-contact politics and who had helped engineer the immigration of hundreds of thousands of people, was no amateur and was not easily rattled; he would not have used words like “worldwide public scandal” and “desperation” lightly. Something had happened to the codex while the cheese merchant had it, something that was of enough concern to warrant the attention of the most important figure in Israeli academia, the president of Hebrew University, and the president of the country. It was something that could not become known, and people at the highest levels were involved in ensuring that it did not. They were successful, which leaves us to guess what they were talking about.

  It may be that Faham’s secret was one we know already: his collusion in the seizure of the book by the government. It is hard to believe, though, that the merchant would have implicated himself by drawing attention to his actions, and though this story was successfully covered up in subsequent decades, it was not really a secret at the time, certainly not in the Aleppo community. It is more likely, I believe, that Shragai was referring to something that happened to the book while it was in Faham’s care—that is, in the three months that elapsed from the time it was handed to him in Aleppo to the time he gave it to the Israelis at the Haifa port. We may also deduce that whatever happened somehow involved Shragai: why else would the immigration chief be the one trying to calm Faham down, and the one writing the letter? Shragai’s responsibility for the codex, we now know, effectively began shortly after it crossed into Turkey.

  Going through a dusty file in the state archive in Jerusalem, I found three pages of handwritten notes. The document was unsigned, but its contents showed it to be the first testimony given by Faham to President Ben-Zvi after his arrival. I had not seen a reference to this testimony elsewhere. Before Faham related anything about the codex, or about Aleppo, or about his treacherous journey, according to the notes, he wanted to tell the president something else.

  “What is known about Qamisli,” the document opens, referring to one of the towns on the Syria-Turkey border, “and about the robbery of immigrants by a Jew named [Silo] and by a Jewish Agency worker.” Silo, it goes on, “took 11,000 Turkish pounds from Faham, in addition to what he took from the others.”

  The man who carried the treasure to Israel claimed to have been robbed en route by an Israeli agent. There was nothing Faham deemed more important to tell the president when they first met. Whoever wrote the minutes drew a line under those brief phrases, and Faham’s testimony continued for another two and a half pages with no further mention of this incident. There was no reference to any theft of a part of the codex. None of the documents suggest that Faham ever brought this up again.

  I began making queries about Silo. Yitzhak Zaafrani, the son of one of the Aleppo rabbis who had sent the Crown to Israel, identified him as a kosher butcher trained in Aleppo and sent to serve as a ritual slaughterer for the Jews of Alexandretta. There were questions about his religious observance, Zaafrani said, and about the sharpness of his blade—a crucial matter for a kosher butcher, who is supposed to kill animals painlessly—and some would not agree to eat animals he had slaughtered. An elderly Aleppo woman who fled Syria in 1956 and now lives in Tel Aviv told me the same thing. Silo had helped many Aleppo Jews escape, and yet the community seemed not to remember him with the appreciation one might expect. Among traditional people, it seemed to me, talk of his religious observance was a way of saying he was a man with a bad reputation.

  One evening I was on a street corner in Tel Aviv with Ezra Kassin, the amateur Crown sleuth. We were in the habit of spending hours constructing scenarios for the disappearance of the pages and then trying to poke holes in them, and on this occasion we happened to be talking about Alexandretta. The passersby were the usual Tel Aviv gallery of young men with goatees and flip-flops and women in tank tops. The elderly man who passed us in an old blue suit and a little black hat looked like a visitor from another world. He was from Aleppo, and Ezra knew him from synagogue. The man’s name was Leon Naftali. He was seventy-four years old and came up to my shoulders.

  “Remind me how you got out of Aleppo,” Ezra said after the man stopped to talk. Through Alexandretta, he replied, at the end of 1949.

  Did you encounter a man called Silo? Ezra asked.

  “Of course,” Naftali answered.

  Naftali and his mother were relatively well off and managed to get passports allowing them to leave Syria legally, he told me when I later interviewed him at his apartment. His brothers had already escaped, and his father was dead. The two of them took a bus in December 1949 from Aleppo to the Syria-Turkey border and then on to Alexandretta, where they asked for Silo’s store. They had been told the Israeli representative would put them up for a few days and book their passage to Haifa. Naftali’s mother was carrying a bag with her gold jewelry and several silver kiddush cups, used on the Sabbath for the blessing over the wine, which had long been in their family. Silo told them they risked having the valuables seized by Turkish officials and suggested leaving the bag with him, saying he would bring it when they were onboard ship at the port and ready to leave for Haifa. They agreed, Naftali recounted, and they waited for Silo as the ship prepared to sail. He never showed up. Neither Naftali nor his mother ever forgot it.

  “There wasn’t a Jew who passed through Alexandretta who did not complain about him,” Naftali said. He and his mother never filed an official complaint after arriving in Israel, assuming there was no chance of anything being done.

  There appear to have been more reports of this sort in the years after Faham’s passage. One, which reached the Jewish Agency in 1962, is mentioned in a letter from an Israeli immigration agent in Turkey dated November 29 of that year: an immigrant who passed through Alexandretta had complained of the loss of two pieces of luggage and clearly blamed Silo. The agent wrote to his superiors defending Silo, saying he did not have access to baggage in transit and thus could not be responsible.

  These stories, if true, would hardly be surprising. After all, refugees fleeing across borders, carrying their valuables, are vulnerable to robbery. And as any experienced spy handler will tell you, the best agents are often people without the scruples that would prevent them from operating comfortably on both sides of the law.r />
  Silo continued to serve as the Jewish Agency’s man in Alexandretta for years afterward, transferring several thousand Jews to Israel, according to a tally kept by a close relative, whom I interviewed in the United States. He was clearly useful, and this must have trumped other considerations. It might also have trumped the disappearance of part of an old manuscript that passed through his hands and that he, an Aleppo Jew himself, would certainly have recognized as an object of immense value.

  There is no indication in the archives that Ben-Zvi did anything with the information from Faham, but he must have been asking around. In the summer of 1960, in one of his notebooks, now in the state archive, Ben-Zvi scrawled the following brief sentence:

  From David Sasson: [Silo] has several parchment pages from the Crown of Aleppo.

  “Silo” is written without explanation, indicating that Ben-Zvi now knew who he was. The identity of David Sasson is not clear; it is a common name. That sentence is the only surviving contemporary indication, however fragmentary, that one of the people through whose hands the Crown passed was thought to be in possession of some of its missing pieces.

  Silo’s relative denied that Silo had ever taken money or belongings from refugees, and he said he did not know what the “David Sasson” note might refer to. Faham’s complaint against Silo was rooted, he said, in a business dispute between the two men involving the purchase of textiles; Faham’s son, whom I interviewed in Israel, remembered a similar disagreement. Both denied the possibility that Silo had taken part of the codex from Faham.

  The Silo theory presents one way of explaining why the Israelis were so eager to cast a fog over where and when the pages went missing. Making the story public would have reflected badly on the Jewish Agency—causing, perhaps, “a worldwide public scandal”—and endangered one of its key operations, exposing an agent who was a citizen of a foreign country and who knew a great deal. The theory would explain the involvement of Shragai, the immigration chief, who was directly responsible for Silo and the Syria-Turkey-Israel smuggling route. The missing seventeen days might also fit into this scenario: the immigration chief received the manuscript from Faham, along with a report of what had happened, and perhaps needed time to investigate and decide how to proceed before bringing the book to Ben-Zvi. Written records from Shragai might help clarify these suspicions, but he appears to have left none on this subject. The Jewish Agency’s archive in Jerusalem preserves records from his office at the Aliya Department, but the records from the years around the Crown’s arrival are missing.

  When Amnon Shamosh wrote the official history of the Crown in the mid-1980s, his research assistant was Yosef Ofer, a young university student who later went on to be a Bible professor and one of the foremost experts on the Crown. Ofer spent months in the archives. He found Ben-Zvi’s note about Silo and the pages of the Crown, and the other references to the Alexandretta agent. He passed them on to Shamosh, who left them out of the book. Silo is not mentioned in its pages at all.

  When I asked the elderly Shamosh about this, he said he did not remember seeing any such documents pertaining to Silo. But he knew exactly who Silo was. The Alexandretta agent was his first cousin.

  Up to this point, my examination of the record had raised questions about the codex’s time in Aleppo and offered indications that it might have been tampered with in Turkey—though judging from Ben-Zvi’s note, even the source of his information believed Silo was holding no more than “several pages” of the Crown and not, it would seem, all the missing pieces.

  From Alexandretta, the manuscript traveled to the final station of its journey in Jerusalem.

  † This was Zalman Shazar, who had replaced Ben-Zvi after the latter’s death the previous year.

  32

  The Institute

  IT HAS LONG been accepted as truth by those interested in the extraordinary history of the Crown of Aleppo that the book was safe once it reached the hands of scholars in Israel and that anyone seeking to solve the mystery of the missing pages should look elsewhere. I found no reason to believe that assumption is true, and one good reason to believe it is not. Here lies, perhaps, the most potent secret at the heart of the case of the Crown, and the reason for much of the ambiguity and obfuscation I encountered.

  I came upon the key that unlocked this part of the story one morning, quite by chance, in a Manhattan synagogue a few steps from Central Park.

  The Ben-Zvi Institute has always insisted the pages were lost during or immediately after the 1947 Aleppo riot. This is unsupported by the evidence; indeed, it is contradicted by the evidence. When I interviewed Amnon Shamosh—who, after the institute’s book about the codex was published, had gone on a high-profile tour of Aleppo communities worldwide looking for the missing pages, sponsored by the institute—I asked him why he believed the missing pages disappeared before the Crown reached Israel. He thought for a second. “Out of politeness,” he said, “and caution.” There was, he admitted, no proof to support this supposition. I found no documentation of the parts missing from the Crown dating from before March 1958, by which time the book had been in Israel for three months and at the Ben-Zvi Institute for much of that time.

  When the Crown arrived, the day-to-day running of the institute was in the hands not of the president, who was preoccupied with matters of state, but of his secretary and the institute’s director, Meir Benayahu. It was Benayahu, not the president, who was directly in charge of the Crown. Benayahu, whom I have mentioned earlier, was from a well-connected family, the son of a chief rabbi and the brother of a future cabinet minister. A remarkable scholar by all accounts, he died in 2009 after a long and prominent academic career. Parallel to his university pursuits, Benayahu bought, sold, and collected rare books. He left behind an important private collection of around one thousand Hebrew manuscripts, now kept by his family in Jerusalem.

  One day in May 2010, I attended morning prayers at an Aleppo synagogue just off Fifth Avenue in New York. The synagogue had a striking sanctuary of wood and stone for Sabbaths and festivals, and a simpler room downstairs for daily use. There I found a few dozen men conducting the weekday service in the old Aleppo style and sipping black coffee from little china cups, savoring a bit of Syria in the morning before heading out into America. Afterward I met Maurice Silvera, the son of a prominent Aleppo family, a businessman in his seventies who had spent twenty years of his life in Japan, where Aleppo Jews have established a small outpost. He had heard I was researching the story of the Crown and thought I might be able to help him.

  In 1961, he told me, his father, the banker and trader David Silvera, brought a valuable biblical manuscript from Aleppo to Israel and entrusted it to the Ben-Zvi Institute. This codex, which was also known as a crown, appeared to have been written in the fifteenth century, or about five hundred years after the Crown of Aleppo. The family was not sure where it was now, he said, though he thought it might have been sent on loan to Israel’s national museum. He wondered if I might be able to locate it. When we met again later that day at a coffee bar a few blocks away from the synagogue, he produced two photocopies of receipts that the family had preserved for fifty years. The first, dated May 15, 1961, was signed by President Ben-Zvi himself.

  I was happy to receive you today in my office and to meet you. You came bearing a book, an ancient “crown of the Torah” on parchment, which was written, it seems, in Corfu by Rabbi Yitzhak Zahalon, may his memory be blessed, and which includes the five books of the Torah and the first books of the Prophets.

  I am very grateful to you for turning this important manuscript over to me so it may be kept under excellent guard along with the archived manuscripts kept in the Ben-Zvi Institute, which I founded and expanded.

  The ancient and important community of Aleppo is disappearing. The sons of the Silvera family have been known in this community for their deeds over many generations. You, a scion of this great family, performed a great deed when you gave this beautiful and important piece from the Silvera libr
ary in Aleppo to a scientific institution in Jerusalem, the holy city. We will guard this manuscript well, and we will allow sages and scholars to read it and study matters of Torah and the textual traditions.

  The second receipt, in a similar vein and from the same day, was signed by David Silvera and Meir Benayahu.

  I took the receipts back to Jerusalem and called a veteran manuscript expert who has spent decades working for the national library’s vast microfilm project, which aims to photograph every Hebrew manuscript on earth. The project’s staff put the entire collection at the Ben-Zvi Institute on microfilm beginning in the late 1970s, and their records would be the quickest way to find Silvera’s book. But when the expert, Benjamin Richler, ran the details through the database, nothing came up. He tweaked the spelling of the scribe’s name, Yitzhak Zahalon, and again came up with nothing. Next I went across town to the Ben-Zvi Institute, where by this time I was a familiar face, and showed the receipts to an official there. He confirmed what I suspected: the manuscript that Ben-Zvi had promised would be kept forever “under excellent guard” had vanished without a trace.

  The disappearance of the Silvera manuscript from the Ben-Zvi Institute did not appear to be recent; had it been in the institute’s collection in the late 1970s, it would have been photographed by the national library’s microfilm staff. It must have disappeared before that time. At the same time, I found a document in the institute’s archive containing an oblique reference to the termination of Benayahu’s employment in October 1970. This was surprising, since academics of his rank are rarely fired, and it would have been highly unusual for an institute to dismiss its founding director.