The Aleppo Codex

by Matti Friedman

  When I interviewed David Bartov, Ben-Zvi’s old chief of staff, I asked why Benayahu had left the institute.

  He paused. “Perhaps we’ll put a period here,” he said.

  Ezra Kassin, the Crown sleuth, who was with me, said, “Maybe not, Mr. Bartov. We want to know the truth.”

  “May he rest in peace,” Bartov said, “and we’ll say, Amen.”

  I set up a meeting with Professor Yom-Tov Assis, the head of the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  The professor hesitated when I asked about Benayahu’s termination. The institute had a “fat file” on this, he conceded, but he said he had never read it. He would check, he said, and then ceased all communication with me. I never heard back from him, despite repeated requests over several months.

  In the meantime, while poring over a hoard of several hundred documents gathered by Ezra Kassin, I discovered a second missing manuscript. A piece of paper from the Ben-Zvi Institute, unsigned but seemingly written by Ben-Zvi himself, recorded the receipt of a damaged book of Esther that had been rescued after the Aleppo synagogue fire by a Jewish family, the Lerners, who brought it to him on February 18, 1955. Using the computerized manuscript database at the national library, I searched for this book in the institute’s collection. It wasn’t there. I e-mailed an inquiry to Professor Assis at the institute and received no reply.

  Finally, I filed an official request for the details of Benayahu’s dismissal under Israel’s Freedom of Information law, which applies to the Ben-Zvi Institute because it is a public, taxpayer-funded research institution. Three months had gone by since my meeting with the professor by the time the institute finally sent me a curt letter that seemed to have been written by a lawyer. The institute’s scholars had rejected my request, the letter informed me, because the information I wanted could violate Benayahu’s privacy and that of his family. A loophole in the law allowed them to withhold information on those grounds.

  But by this time I already had information from another source.

  Armed with the Silvera receipts, I had gone to the Ministry of Education, to the office of Zvi Zameret, who was the administrative director of the Ben-Zvi Institute for twenty-six years, until 2009. Where is this book? I asked.

  Zameret read the receipts, his expression darkening. When he was done, he said, “May I tell you something in the clearest way possible?”

  Please, I said, and then, speaking in measured, forceful words, he told me Benayahu was responsible for the disappearance of “dozens” of manuscripts from the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  THE INSTITUTE’S DIRECTOR, Zameret told me, was found to have transferred manuscripts from the institute’s collection to his own. Israel’s president at the time, Zalman Shazar, personally intervened on Benayahu’s behalf as the contentious and potentially explosive affair unfolded, thus ensuring that it did not become the subject of a legal inquiry, Zameret told me. Benayahu’s father was one of the country’s chief rabbis at the time and a trial would have been too embarrassing for the state. The missing books came to light during a broader affair that saw Benayahu leave amid a bitter legal battle with other academics over control of the institute. The books were not returned, he said. Their absence was never made public.

  Several years later, a young scholar named Joseph Hacker was brought in to serve as deputy director of the institute, which was still reeling. Hacker, today a professor emeritus of Jewish history at Hebrew University, was charged with helping to rehabilitate the institute and had access to all relevant documentation. Hacker agreed to speak on record when I contacted him, and he carefully confirmed and elaborated upon Zameret’s account. He had seen, and still remembered, a list of rare books the director had taken, Hacker said, and knew of more. “I told those who needed to be told,” he said, but nothing was done.

  “It seems that all of the sides wanted to finish this matter and swept these things under the carpet,” he said.

  When I presented the Silvera receipts to a veteran official still at the Ben-Zvi Institute, he, too, confirmed the details. I cannot claim to establish precisely what happened at the Ben-Zvi Institute, but one cannot hear these testimonies without concluding that people with direct knowledge of the institute’s internal workings had grave concerns about the safety of the books there at the time in question.

  Benayahu continued his career at a different institution, Tel Aviv University. He went on to win one of the country’s top academic prizes in 2004, and when he died five years later, an obituary in the daily Haaretz praised him as a combination of a traditional Jewish scholar and a modern academic.

  Benayahu was the man in charge of the Crown of Aleppo from the moment it arrived at the institute in 1958 until his departure twelve years later.

  It is not difficult to understand why the Ben-Zvi Institute would have desperately wanted to keep this incident quiet, and why it is still trying to do so. It was potentially devastating, not least because it would have raised questions about the mysteriously missing parts of the jewel of the institute’s collection. The institute’s archive, as we have seen, preserves no evidence of how many pages the Crown had when it arrived.

  When I sent a list of questions to Benayahu’s brother, Moshe Nissim, a former cabinet minister and a prominent Tel Aviv lawyer, I expected a threatening, lawyerly response or none at all. Instead, I received a five-page defense of Benayahu in typed, angry Hebrew. The charges against his brother were “lies” and a “pathetic conspiracy,” Nissim wrote. “I find it difficult to understand how you did not understand this fact and questioned me about this.”

  Benayahu could not have taken pages from the Crown because none had gone missing after the manuscript arrived in Israel, Nissim wrote. He seemed to have researched his answer, referring me for a proof to a 1958 article by Ben-Zvi and to specific pages in Amnon Shamosh’s book, which, he informed me, “includes important information backed up by solid facts.”

  My questions, he wrote, “gave off an evil odor,” but he had nonetheless decided to answer in the hope that I had made an honest error and was not driven by “impure motives,” and also “because of the honor of the deceased, who cannot stand and rebuff the conspiracies put forward in his absence.” He attached documents showing that the legal fight at the institute ended with his brother leaving voluntarily, called those making the charges “people of perjury,” and suggested Benayahu’s accusers were trying to cover up other instances of manuscript theft or might have stolen books themselves.

  “Why, for forty years, have they not gone to law enforcement authorities and complained?” he wrote, and he had a point.

  The institute’s approach to the possibility of a link between its missing books and the missing pages of the codex seems to rest largely on denial. In our interview, Zameret insisted that the pages of the Crown had gone missing before the manuscript arrived at the institute, meaning that no one there could be responsible for their disappearance. My investigation turned up no proof for this assertion, and we are left with this fact: In late January 1958, before the absence of any significant part of the manuscript was recorded, the Crown of Aleppo came under the care of a library in which books were not safe. By March, two hundred pages were known to be missing.

  Over the decades, the scholars of the Ben-Zvi Institute let it be known that they were searching the world for the missing pieces. They looked in old Aleppo, Brooklyn, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. They asked a psychic in Switzerland to look at maps of south Lebanon. They looked everywhere, it seems, but in the mirror.

  33

  Bahiyeh

  “I WAS BORN in 1936, in Aleppo, which is in Syria,” the sexton’s daughter told me. “Mind if I smoke?” She leaned forward and inhaled.

  “There are two doors to the synagogue,” she said, speaking of her childhood in the present tense, her eyes on a point somewhere in the air of her living room. One door is enormous: “The bolt is like this”—she held her hands a few feet apart—“and the key is like this.” She tapped her elbow and then her finger
tips. “We come in through the small door,” she said.

  “I can’t even describe the aura to you. Something gives you a sense of calm, a kind of divine beauty that you can’t—” Her voice caught. Her cigarette smoldered forgotten on the side of the ashtray. “It is impossible to describe how beautiful it was. You look at everything—the blessings, all in gold embroidery, the chandeliers, all of crystal and silver,” she said. Now her eyes were closed. “You go up three stairs, then come down another two stairs, and there’s a dark place, and then you’re in the cave where the safe is kept.”

  We were in a weathered block of apartments in a town south of Tel Aviv. The sexton’s daughter was seventy-four. She hadn’t seen her birthplace in more than six decades, and yet she spoke as if all of this still existed: She and her brothers and sisters lived at home. Their father tended to the synagogue. Inside, the great book was where it had been for six centuries, hidden and whole.

  The sexton’s daughter was the first person I interviewed for this project. I was taken with her story, with her memories of the great synagogue and its treasure. I expected to write a heartening story about the rescue of this book, but instead found myself like a person who innocently opens a cupboard and finds himself buried under a pile of forgotten things.

  As my inquiry stretched on and grew more complicated, I read and reread what is perhaps the classic account of the passions a book can elicit in men: the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. In this story, strange and violent events at a hilltop monastery are found to be connected to the existence of a forbidden volume in the library. It is the only copy of a work by Aristotle on comedy, hidden because the church considers the knowledge inside to be dangerous to its own teachings. The book becomes the focal point for the emotions and desires of the monks, some of whom understand what is written in it, and some of whom do not. When the story ends, the human actions unleashed by the contents of the book have destroyed it and have burned the monastery to the ground.

  The Crown was brought to Aleppo in the fourteenth century AD. It was kept in a secluded room in the great synagogue and was safe as long as it remained there. Over the years, in the care of its keepers, it became less a source of knowledge for the improvement of man, as its creators had intended, than a holy relic of great value, like a cathedral’s fragment of saintly bone or hair. After the riot that followed the United Nations vote at Flushing Meadow on November 29, 1947, the codex was removed from its hiding place by a mob. The synagogue was burned. The core of the book was lost, and the ancient community that guarded it was soon dispersed.

  Had the mob destroyed the codex, my story would have been simpler. It would have ended, perhaps, with an allusion to the crusaders’ attack on Jerusalem at the end of the eleventh century and to their theft of the Crown from its owners: in Jerusalem, the marauders were Christians bent on cleansing the holy city of infidels, while in Aleppo they were Muslims taking out their anger at their own weakness on a defenseless native community far older than their own. But if the analysis presented in these pages is correct, the destruction of this magnificent book was an inside job.

  The hunger for old and beautiful things is not new. Paintings and other works of art are routinely stolen and fenced for large sums. But here the object stolen is not a thing of beauty but a book that condemns theft. The page with the passage Thou shalt not steal was stolen. Also missing are the commandments not to bear false witness, covet another’s property, or commit murder, all of which have been violated in these chapters.

  The Hebrew Bible, of which our codex was the most perfect copy, the one used by Maimonides himself, was meant to serve humans as a moral compass. Its story is a tragedy of human weakness. The book was the result of generations of scholarship in Tiberias, of the attempt to arrive at a perfect edition of the divine word. It was a singular accomplishment and a testimony to the faith of the men who created it. It was desecrated. Maimonides would have reacted with dismay to this story, no doubt, but perhaps also with a sad smile of recognition: this is what men do. The story of this book, he might say, should come as no surprise to any who have read it. There is nothing new under the sun, reads the book of Ecclesiastes. Sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, “Look, this one is new”—it occurred long since, in ages that went by before us. Those passages, too, are among those that have disappeared.

  Those who understand the book’s meaning and those who do not; those who would protect it and those who would destroy it; and those who seek it for the right reasons and those whose desire for it is base and dark—the book contained all these people and their conflicting motivations before it succumbed to them. We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail: A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it. It fell victim to the instincts it was created to temper and was devoured by the creatures it was meant to save.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I BENEFITED WHILE writing this book from the assistance of many people, including some who appear in its pages and others who played crucial roles behind the scenes.

  I am indebted to the inimitable Rafi Sutton, who agreed to share his files, thoughts, stories, and suspicions with me, and who pointed me in the right direction. And I owe a great deal to Ezra Kassin, who walked me through some of the more complicated parts of the story, served as a partner and a sounding board, and told me, quite rightly as it turned out, to be less naïve. And thanks to all of those who agreed to share their memories with me—their names, too numerous to mention here, appear in the text and source notes.

  Thanks also to the scholars who lent their expertise as I navigated unfamiliar territory, including my friend Jonathan Rubin of Hebrew University, on the Crusades; Rafael Zer of Hebrew University’s Bible Project, on the Masora and the creation of the Hebrew Bible; Yosef Ofer of Bar-Ilan University, on the Masora and the travels of the codex; Gish Amit of Ben-Gurion University, on the arrival of ancient manuscripts in the young state of Israel; and Benjamin Richler at the National Library in Jerusalem and Angelo Piatelli, book expert and dealer extraordinaire, on the world of rare Hebrew books. I learned much about Maimonides from the work of Joel Kramer of the University of Chicago. Any mistakes, of course, are mine alone.

  This book would never have been written without my agent, Deborah Harris, whose encouragement and expertise propelled me forward through an endeavor that turned out to be far more interesting and complex than either of us anticipated. Thanks also to Judy Heiblum of Sterling Lord Literistic in New York for her work on the project and her keen reading eye. Very special thanks to Amy Gash, my editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, whose steady hand shaped the book and guided it to publication. I am grateful to Amy and the rest of the staff at Algonquin for their belief in this project and their willingness to gamble on a first-time author at a time of uncertainty in the book business. Whether it was Rachel Careau’s peerless copy editing or Kelly Bowen’s promotional energies, I could not have worked with more capable, professional, or pleasant people.

  I am also indebted to those who agreed to read the manuscript and who contributed suggestions and encouragement: George Eltman; my journalistic mentors David Horovitz and Gershom Gorenberg; Rabbi Shimon Felix; Mitchell Ginsburg; Tali Ginsburg; Aliza Raz-Meltzer; Amiad Meltzer; Brian Murphy; my sister, Sarah Sorek; and Jonathan Safran Foer. Thanks to my former colleagues at the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press for their encouragement and tolerance above and beyond the call of duty in allowing me time off to write, and to bureau chief Steve Gutkin, news editor Joe Federman, and bureau chief Dan Perry, who also contributed incisive comments.

  Thanks to Herb and Carol Ginsburg for their generosity in allowing me to write in the legendary Ashtray in Jerusalem for several critical months, to Paul Brykczynski for finding maps of Aleppo at the University of Toronto, and to Amir Zohar in Israel and Ellis Levine in New York for their legal advice.
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  Thanks to the staffs at the Central Zionist Archive, Israel’s State Archive, and the archive of Hebrew University at Mt. Scopus; to Michael Glatzer at the Ben-Zvi Institute, who always did his best; and to James Snyder, Adolfo Roitman, Galit Bennet, and Dena Scher of the Israel Museum, where this story started.

  I owe many, many things to my parents, Imogene and Raphael Zev Friedman, including my interest in writing and history. This book would not have been written without them. Thanks to my children, Aviv, Michael, and Tamar, who have spent most of their lives with the Aleppo Codex and who remind me, beginning before dawn each morning, what is really important. And lastly, and most significantly, thank you to my wife, Naama, without whose support, advice, and unfailing patience none of this would have been possible.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  Introduction

  The quote from Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, is from “Introduction to the First Part” in the English translation by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

  Chapter 1: Flushing Meadow

  Descriptions of the UN vote are based on footage from Day of Decision, a 1957 documentary preserved by the Spielberg Jewish Film Archive. Further details of the vote are from Mandate of Destiny: The 1947 United Nations Decision to Partition Palestine (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2008), and Benny Morris, 1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  Descriptions of Aleppo on the night of the vote come from interviews with Rafi Sutton at his home in Israel in 2009 and 2010. The description of the sexton’s daily rounds comes from interviews with his daughter Batya Ron (formerly Bahiyeh Baghdadi) at her home in Israel in 2009 and 2010.