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

by Matti Friedman

  Nothing was done. Two months later, with the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, the declaration of Israel’s independence, and the invasion of five Arab armies, the frontier with Syria was sealed for good, with the Crown out of reach on the other side.

  Jerusalem had housed the codex once, long before, only to have it seized by foreign marauders. It would have to wait awhile longer for the Crown’s return.

  7

  The Sack of Jerusalem

  Jerusalem, AD 1099

  THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHTS and foot soldiers serving under Duke Godfrey de Bouillon were encamped opposite one corner of the city wall, by the Jewish Quarter. Behind them to the northeast was Mount Scopus, where Hebrew University would sit many centuries later.

  The doomed souls trapped inside Jerusalem could certainly hear the soldiers shouting in unfamiliar tongues, the sound of their carpenters finishing the great siege machines. On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of that week in July 1099—170 years or so after the creation of the Crown in Tiberias, several days’ journey to the north—Godfrey’s men carted in timber from afar and prepared their assault tower. They suffered so badly from a shortage of water that “for one penny a man could not buy sufficient to quench his thirst,” according to one knight who left us a detailed account of those events, the Gesta Francorum, but not his own name. Another crusader force, this one under Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, was preparing to attack the fortress guarding Jerusalem’s western flank. The privations of the thirsty crusaders paled in comparison with the suffering of the people trapped in the city that week, and that suffering, in turn, would be rendered insignificant by what was coming.

  Three and a half years had passed since Pope Urban II preached the Crusade at Clermont, in France, and five weeks had passed since the Christian fighters reached the hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel and gained their first glimpse of the object of their quest. Jerusalem, home to the sepulchre of Jesus and yet ruled by the followers of Muhammad, must have seemed to them a modest enclosure, dwarfed in grandeur by Constantinople and other cities they had passed or sacked on the way. There were perhaps twenty-five thousand people within its walls. The dome of an Islamic shrine dominated the city from the Temple Mount. As the siege reached its climax on Wednesday and Thursday of that week, the anonymous knight tells us, bishops and priests preached to the Christian soldiers and instructed them to pray, give alms, and fast. Then, as the sky lightened on Friday, the crusader forces surrounding Jerusalem assaulted the city walls. They met savage resistance.

  “On Friday at dawn we attacked the city from all sides but could achieve nothing, so that we were all astounded and very much afraid,” wrote the knight serving under Godfrey. The attacking force found, according to another chronicler of the battle, that part of the Muslim garrison was actually made up of Jews.

  Mox gentilis adest, Judaeus, Turcus, Arabsque,

  Missilibus, jaculis obsistitur, igne, veneno.

  At nostri jaculis opponunt pectora nuda.

  This was the French monk Gilo of Paris, who wrote his poem some years after the events in question.

  Suddenly the heathen were there, Jews, Turks and Arabs:

  they were assailed with missiles and spears, fire and poison,

  yet our men presented their chests all exposed to the missiles and spears,

  bearing this hard scourging as a penance.

  According to custom, the residents of a city would be called up to defend the part of the wall closest to their homes. Godfrey’s assault came in Jerusalem’s northeast corner, opposite the Jews’ quarter, so Jews were among the defenders.† Today this area inside the walls is the Muslim Quarter, and Godfrey’s staging ground outside is a busy urban thoroughfare, an archaeological museum, and an Arab school.

  At sunrise on Friday, July 15, after the night had “left respite for the Jewish people,” wrote the monk Gilo, the Christians finally moved up their assault towers.

  Rocks coming down on the woven wicker coverings smashed through them

  and timbers, shields and men were tumbled from the top of the siege castle.

  Even on the point of death the enemy were not lacking in courage.

  The patchwork force defending the city fought off wave after wave of attackers, including the anonymous knight. “Yet, when that hour came when our lord Jesus Christ deigned to suffer for us upon the cross,” he recounted, “our knights were fighting bravely on the siege tower, led by Duke Godfrey and Count Eustace his brother.” The first crusader to leap from the tower onto Jerusalem’s wall was a knight named Lethold. The defenses finally collapsed, and the Christians surged into the Jewish Quarter and then the rest of the city. Many residents fled for safety toward the Al-Aqsa mosque, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon.

  “Our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as Solomon’s Temple,” wrote the anonymous knight, “where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood.” Here all of the Christian chroniclers compete to provide the goriest depiction: the accounts differ on whether the blood reached the fighters’ ankles, shoe tops, calves, or knees or the bridles of the horses. The crusaders butchered several thousand people on the Temple Mount. A group of men and women were cowering on the roof of Al-Aqsa, and in a singular act of mercy, two crusader commanders gave them their banners to protect them from harm. But later other Christian fighters made their way up onto the roof and killed them all anyway, throwing their bodies below. Elsewhere in the city, the crusaders decapitated soldiers and noncombatants and forced others, wounded by arrows, to leap from towers. Still others were tortured and then burned to death. Provençal soldiers who had missed the plunder on the Temple Mount took corpses that had already been stripped of valuables and clothes and disemboweled them, finding in the viscera money swallowed for safekeeping. Then they burned the bodies and sifted through the ashes looking for gold. The Christians seized horses and mules, commandeered homes, and ransacked houses of prayer. Many of the city’s Jews fled to one of the synagogues, according to one Muslim chronicler, upon which “the Franks set fire to it with them inside.”

  The Jewish people, at this time, were split by the most dangerous schism in their history, and there were two sects of Jews in the city. The first were Rabbanites, who followed the oral traditions and laws of the rabbis; these are the predecessors of today’s Jews. The second were their rivals, adherents of the Karaite heresy, who obeyed only the laws written in the Torah and dismissed the rabbis, their strictures, and their loopholes. The Karaites thrived in the lands of Islam, and Jerusalem was one of their centers. They are all but extinct in our times, but their strength, for a while, challenged the Judaism of the rabbis. For the Karaites, only the words of the Bible were sacred, and nothing was to distract them from the book. Their name meant “people of the text”; it was fitting, then, that they owned its most perfect copy.

  Sometime in the eleventh century, a wealthy Karaite benefactor had purchased the codex created by Ben-Asher, who was, many scholars now believe, a Karaite himself. A dedication recorded in the Crown tells us that this donor’s name was Israel, son of Simha, that he was from the city of Basra, in modern-day Iraq, and that he was “wise, clever, righteous, honest, and generous.” Israel gave the manuscript to the Karaite synagogue in Jerusalem, where it was to be kept by the “great leaders” of the Jerusalem Karaites, Josiah and Hezekiah. It was not to leave their hands. Three times a year, on festival days, according to the inscription, the leaders were to take out the treasure and show it publicly to the “communities of the holy city.” This appears, surprisingly, to have included even the rival Rabbanites; the importance of this codex was such that it transcended the Jews’ sectarian feud. On those days, the people were to “read it and look at it and teach from it as much as they want and choose,” and if at any other time during the year a scholar wanted to use the codex, the leaders were to “take it out to him so that he may see and become wise and understand.” />
  Even before the arrival of the Christian armies from the West in 1099, the Jews had experienced several bewildering and violent decades of turmoil. The power of the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, with its black banners, had shifted to the Fatimid dynasty in Cairo, and then marauding forces of the Seljuk Turks had arrived in Jerusalem with armies of mounted archers, controlling the city before being expelled by the Fatimids not long before the Christians arrived. Based in part on a calculation that one thousand years had now passed since the destruction of the temple by Rome, many Jews in the Middle East and Europe, looking in their prophetic books, concluded that the dark events of the last decades of the eleventh century meant the End of Days was near.

  “Stem of the son of Jesse, until when will you remain buried?” wrote the Andalusian Jewish poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol. This was a reference to King David, son of Jesse, from whose lineage the Messiah was to come. “Why should a slave rule the son of the nobles? It is a thousand years that I am enslaved,” he wrote. Another story from those years before the Crusades told of a man in France or Spain who climbed to the treetops at night and flew from one to the other, thus fulfilling a prophecy in the book of Daniel: One like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven. The local Gentile authorities had the imposter executed.

  “I saw the troops of the Westerners moving in their masses, and I do not know where they will turn,” a certain Menachem, son of Elijah, wrote from somewhere inside the Byzantine Empire as the crusaders advanced. A pretender claiming to be the prophet Elijah, harbinger of the Messiah, had revealed himself on the Dardanelles, he reported, and news had come from the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars that seventeen communities were traveling into the desert to meet the ten lost tribes of Israel. The Messiah was close. “When the Westerners, all of them, go to the Land of Israel, the threshing floor will fill up and then God will command, Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion,” he wrote, quoting the prophet Micah.

  If some saw portents of redemption, others saw catastrophe. When peasant crusaders hacking a bloody path toward Jerusalem in 1096 put to the sword entire Jewish communities in the Rhineland, one Jew wrote, “We hoped for peace but there is grief; we looked for redemption but there is terror.” Word of that slaughter reached Jerusalem perhaps two years before the crusader army arrived, and one can imagine the effect on those trapped inside the walls.

  The forces assaulting the city came driven by their own interpretation of the same divine books. According to one chronicler, the crusaders remembered God’s wrath at King Saul when he spared an enemy king instead of following orders to slaughter every living soul he found. “With drawn swords our people moved quickly through the town,” one crusader historian wrote, “nor did they spare anyone, even if he begged for mercy.” The anonymous knight saw bodies stacked “in mounds as big as houses” outside the walls. “No-one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of pagans, for they were burned on pyres like pyramids, and no-one save God alone knows how many there were,” he wrote. When the cleric Fulcher of Chartres arrived at Jerusalem in December of that year, five months after the fighting, to celebrate Christmas, he reported that the stench of the dead was still so strong that he and his comrades were forced to cover their noses and mouths. The crusaders destroyed the Jews’ quarter, including synagogues and, with them, we may assume, hundreds or thousands of holy scrolls and codices. They took some of the surviving books as loot, knowing the Jews would pay to redeem them. One of the surviving volumes was a Hebrew codex with three columns to a page, twenty-eight lines in each column.

  News of Jerusalem’s fate quickly reached the prosperous Jewish community in Fustat, on the Nile, beside the Islamic metropolis of Cairo. The community’s leader performed mourning rituals when he heard, rending his garments “and weeping for the dead and the desecrated scrolls of the law,” according to one witness. “The Franks arrived and killed everyone in the city, whether of Ishmael or Israel, and the few who survived the slaughter were made prisoners,” wrote another Jew in Egypt. Yet another described a “great disaster” that had befallen the Jews of Jerusalem: their synagogue was burned, he wrote, and many were killed or captured along with their Torah scrolls.

  The Jews of Fustat seemed nearly as preoccupied with the books as with the people, and the correspondence of the time regularly mentioned both. Responding to the pleas coming from the Holy Land, these Jews gathered in their synagogue, sent out letters, and raised money and within a month had dispatched 123 dinars with an emissary and instructions to “redeem the Scrolls of the Torah and to [attend to] the ransoming of the people of God, who are in the captivity of the Kingdom of Evil, may God destroy it.” The books, in that sentence, came first. One wealthy man from the coastal city of Ascalon took a loan and redeemed one hundred copies of the books of the Prophets, eight Torah scrolls, and 230 Bible codices. The captives purchased from the Franks were brought to Fustat overland through the desert because crusader warships now prowled the coast. Many Jews perished along the way.

  The codex from Tiberias, intact, left the sacked city and went into exile in Egypt. One of the Crown’s inscriptions ordered that it never be redeemed, a preemptive attempt to prevent it from being stolen in the first place. But this command was ignored, and of course ransom was paid anyway. Along with other flotsam of Jerusalem’s destruction, the book crossed the desert and reached safety in Fustat, where it was handed to a scribe. “Transferred by right of redemption from the spoils of Jerusalem, the holy city, may it be rebuilt, by the community of Egypt,” he wrote.

  † Gilo of Paris, the French Cluniac monk who wrote this poetic account of Jews resisting the crusaders, was not an eyewitness, but other crusader chroniclers give similar accounts. One was Albert of Aachen, who tells in his History of the Journey to Jerusalem of “a very stubborn defense” of the port of Haifa by “citizens of the Jewish race.”

  8

  The Jump

  THE SEXTON’S DAUGHTER, Bahiyeh, repeated the question to me as she heard it all those years ago—in a whisper. Informers were everywhere, she knew, though she was only twelve.

  “Fi tafeh?” Is there a jump?

  It was the fall of 1948. The new state of Israel, declared that May, was locked in battle with the combined armed forces of the Arab world, including the Syrian army. Bahiyeh knew that a “jump” meant a group leaving illegally for Israel. Escapees risked imprisonment or worse. Jews were not allowed to leave Syria or even to move between its cities; the regime did not want local Jews strengthening the Zionists’ numbers, and it appears to have seen them as bargaining chips and a useful outlet for public anger. Soon the government would be stamping their passports in red with the term mousawi—“Mosaic,” from “Moses,” meaning “Jew”—so they might be more readily identified. There were already stories about what happened to those caught fleeing, and there would be more and worse in the months and years ahead: Escapees were thrown into the regime’s prisons, where they were tortured and starved. Others simply disappeared en route. But there were good reasons to try anyway. In August 1948, a month or two before Bahiyeh began hearing in earnest about the secret “jumps,” a mob in Damascus killed thirteen Jews, including eight children. There were Israeli agents working secretly in Syria, and there were Syrian Arabs willing to help for money. There were ways out for those willing to take the risk.

  The sexton would not leave his home and his ruined synagogue. But Bahiyeh’s mother, Gratzia, wanted to get her three teenage girls—Frieda, Carmela, and Rachel—out of Syria because she feared they could be raped or kidnapped by Muslims. This would have been impossible not long before, when the old social order and the Jews’ place in it were secure, but the old order no longer applied. One of Bahiyeh’s adult brothers made the arrangements, and a smuggler transported the three older girls across the border into Christian-dominated Lebanon, which was still relatively safe. From there, they walked across Israel’s mountainous northern border to a frontier kibbutz. That left Bahiyeh and six of her siblings.

  Ba
hiyeh’s jump came at ten o’clock one night at the end of 1948. Packing nothing but a small purse and her jewelry, Gratzia Baghdadi loaded the children into the backseat of a taxi. Bahiyeh had nothing but the dress and shoes she was wearing. Her mother bribed a soldier to get through a checkpoint on the road south to Damascus, where the taxi dropped them off at the house of a Christian family that had somehow become a way station on the underground route to Israel.

  Bahiyeh remembered a woman coming out of the house, her finger to her lips: If they find you here, they’ll send you back, she told the children.

  Another taxi picked them up, ferried them across the Lebanese border, and dropped them off at a synagogue in Beirut. The floor was covered in mattresses and crowded with other refugees. Someone gave each of the newcomers a chunk of halvah and a slice of bread.

  Remember, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, an Arab man told the family the following evening as he took them and a few dozen others to a rendezvous point somewhere outside Beirut.