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

by Matti Friedman

  President Ben-Zvi and a Hebrew manuscript.

  The state archive contains a letter written in 1953 by Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Ben-Zion Ouziel, in flowery Hebrew peppered with quotes from scripture and addressed to the heads of the Aleppo community in exile, pleading with them to send the Crown to Jerusalem. Like the president, the rabbi had been granted one glimpse of the book in the Aleppo synagogue and had never forgotten it. He believed the Crown was still in the hands of the Christian merchant, reflecting the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about the location of the manuscript, which had been moved to Jewish hands years before. “Since I learned of the destruction of the ancient synagogue in Aram-Tzova,” wrote the rabbi, “and the removal of the Crown from its place and from the faithful hands that guarded it—as I saw with my own eyes at the time, when it was kept in an iron box as a precious treasure, and so indeed it is, as it is said: She is more dear than pearls, and all of your possessions cannot compare—I have been filled with fear about the fate of this precious manuscript.” He continued,

  I have heard that it is now held by a Gentile and kept in a secret place. I would like to assume that this Gentile keeping it is a trustworthy man, but in the end he is no more than a transient person who even in his lifetime could change his mind in the circumstances of these times. I am thus afraid that the Crown will fall, during his lifetime or after his death, into foreign hands from whom we will be unable to rescue it. If this precious Crown, which our fathers and rabbis labored to pass on to the sons of their community so it would be kept and guarded in the hands of Israel, is lost, our silence would be considered a sin.

  After this introduction, the rabbi moved to what he believed was the heart of the problem: the curse on anyone who moved the book.

  I have heard it said that the sons of Aram-Tzova are afraid of touching this holy book because of what is written about anyone who moves the book from its place. But now, because the Crown has been torn from its place and taken from the hands that guarded it, this is a vain fear, and it is forbidden to leave it in foreign hands. There is no doubt that this was not the intention of those who wrote the book and that on the contrary their opinion and desire is for the Crown to be kept under zealous and careful guard by Israel. And if we do not do this, we are all responsible before God, the giver of the Torah, and before the writers of the Crown, for we did not do all that we might have done in order to save it.

  The letter did not help, and the rabbi died not long afterward.

  Ben-Zvi kept trying. He met with Isaac Dayan, the rabbi who headed the small community of Aleppo Jews in Israel, and pressed him unsuccessfully to get the book out. “We had the impression that Rabbi Dayan has the desire but does not see the urgency,” the president’s secretary wrote after the 1955 meeting. The president met with Isaac Shalom, a wealthy Aleppo Jew who lived in New York and owned a refrigerator company in Israel, hoping the businessman would pull strings in Aleppo, then followed up with a letter several months later. Since their meeting, Ben-Zvi wrote in July 1955, “I have not heard anything from you about the ‘Crown.’ I don’t know if you have already been in touch with Aleppo about this matter.” New information was trickling into the president’s office, and Ben-Zvi had now been told that the Crown was in the charge of four members of the Aleppo community. “In light of this information,” Ben-Zvi wrote, “I believe the time has come for the matter to be put into action. The responsibility for the Crown is in the hands of these four people, and there is a chance to influence them and demand it from them.” Israel would cover any expenses incurred, he wrote, and its ambassador in Paris would help get the Crown out through diplomatic channels.

  The president was prepared to go further. The Aleppo community depended heavily on funds sent by American Jews through an organization known as the Joint Distribution Committee. The president thought threatening this money—which meant threatening the community’s survival—might help pry the book away. “I am therefore asking you to use all your influence in this matter and renew the financial pressure on the Aleppo community,” the president wrote to Isaac Shalom in New York. “As I mentioned to you, the directorate of the Joint, which sends the Aleppo community’s budget, demanded this of the community. I ask you to be in touch with them as well.” Covert Israeli representatives in Syria were standing by, he hinted: “The people holding the Crown must know that after we receive their agreement, a person charged with receiving it will contact them.”

  Bartov, the president’s chief of staff, remembered thinking—but not daring to say out loud around the president—that the Aleppo rabbis would never agree to part with their book, and that even if they did, getting it out of an enemy country would involve more difficulty and danger than it could possibly be worth. He was underestimating Ben-Zvi.

  10

  The Merchant’s Mission

  THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, as millennia of Jewish life in Aleppo came to an end—the Crown’s guardians growing fewer and fewer, the remaining Jews subject to official discrimination and popular hatred and dependent on charity from abroad—the manuscript was hidden in the Old City, in the care of the wealthy merchant Ibrahim Effendi Cohen and his adult nephew, Edmond Cohen. Nobody knew this outside a tiny group that included a few of the community’s remaining leaders and the keepers themselves.

  Ibrahim Effendi was an Aleppo Jewish archetype. He had once had an important job at city hall and a trading office up a flight of stairs in the corner of the Aleppo souk known as Khan al-Jumruk, the Customs Caravanserai. His title of respect, effendi, was left over from the time of the Turks. He wore a vest with a pocket watch on a chain, and he had a great wooden desk and a gold letter opener. In one corner of his office was the telephone he used to capitalize on the Aleppo diaspora, one that had begun decades before the riot as the community’s sons began leaving the economically depressed Middle East for better lives in the West. Ibrahim Effendi traded with relatives and Aleppo emigrants in the cotton and textile exchanges of Manchester and in offices in New York, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. In an Aleppo business, a relative in Milan might keep an eye on what fashionable Italian ladies were wearing and send the specifications to Aleppo, where a different relative still in the mother city—Ibrahim Effendi, in this case—would arrange the purchase of cotton and have it shipped east to a relative in Calcutta for processing, then back west to another relative in Manchester for sale. Ibrahim Effendi, who never touched a piece of fabric, took a percentage; he was known as a commisionji. Now the merchant’s office was empty most of the time, as Jews were prohibited from moving freely through the country or doing business with the outside world. The great traders of an earlier age, like Ibrahim Effendi, with his pocket watch and obsolete Ottoman honorific, were gone or unemployed.

  In Aleppo the Jews were vanishing one by one, in pairs and in small groups, fading across the border, bribing and bluffing their way out. By the mid-1950s, some two thousand remained, a third of them destitute. They lived in the shadow of malicious government propaganda and in fear of the mob, forced into increasingly uncomfortable accommodations with the secret police, the mukhabarat, who set up their headquarters in the spacious house of a Jewish family that had fled. The Jews lived, “if not in terror, certainly in constant fear, bedeviled by the Syrian security forces,” wrote one visitor in 1957. With the benefit of hindsight we know that these were the community’s last years, but this was not immediately clear. It was never inevitable that if the state of Israel existed, the Jewish communities in the lands of Islam would not, and it took several years for this to become apparent. In the fall of 1957, when the Jews realized the end was close, the remaining rabbis finally did the unthinkable.

  Here, once again, the story returns to the cheese merchant Murad Faham, who had appeared on an Old City street on the morning before the riot and who much later remembered being the one who had saved the Crown from the synagogue. In 1957, Faham was nearing fifty. He had lost his father as a boy and had taken over the family’s c
heese business while still a teenager. In the years after the Aleppo riot, Faham would later recount, he helped distribute charity funds from America to the Jewish poor and also smuggled Jews to Israel. In the mid-1950s, the cheese merchant’s actions on behalf of the Jewish community led to his arrest and torture by the Syrian secret police in the notorious al-Mezze prison. (Al-Mezze retained its notoriety for another half century, until it was shut down by the regime in 2000.) Interrogators “put out cigarettes on my skin, and they lit matches and stuck them in my mouth until my throat burned,” Faham said in the oral testimony he recorded in the late 1970s. He protested that he had undergone an operation not long before, and they asked him where; when he pointed at the spot, they beat him there. Other beatings caused him to lose nearly all his sight in one eye. Faham dramatically embellished his recollections, and details of these events are impossible to confirm, but this account appears to contain at least a grain of truth and so is worth citing here nonetheless.

  Over the years, some of Aleppo’s Jews had managed to obtain foreign passports, which afforded them a measure of protection. Faham held Iranian citizenship, and it may have saved him from worse treatment. The secret police released him—he was a “broken man,” his son told me—and then expelled him and his family across the border into Turkey, allowing them to take only mattresses and a few personal belongings. Faham traveled to Iran, where he lobbied to return home, if not permanently, then at least to sell off his possessions and collect money from debtors. The Syrians agreed only to let him back in briefly, in that fall of 1957, to collect his belongings and then leave again for good.

  One night just before his departure from Syria, Faham went to the synagogue, where he met the community’s two chief rabbis, Moshe Tawil—the rabbi who had spoken against Zionism at Rafi Sutton’s synagogue years before—and Tawil’s colleague, Salim Zaafrani. As a rule, Jews were not allowed to leave legally, and the rabbis realized that Faham’s departure, under government orders and with a foreign passport, presented an opportunity that might not repeat itself.

  “Rabbi Tawil said he had secrets to tell me, but that he was afraid of the authorities,” Faham said in testimony recorded in writing the following year. “I told him not to be afraid, and that we should trust in God.”

  “The Crown that survived the fire must be taken to Israel,” Tawil told him, acknowledging, in effect, that the Jewish community of Aleppo was dead.

  It would be dangerous, the rabbi warned. The authorities wanted the book, and they had been told the lie that it was lost; if the Crown were discovered as it was being smuggled out, the courier and the community’s leaders would be imperiled. “This must be done in complete secrecy,” Tawil recalled telling the merchant, in the rabbi’s own testimony a year or two later. “We were afraid that the government would hear and we would suffer grievous harm.”

  “He told me that if I did not take it with me, no one else would be able to take it,” Faham remembered, and he agreed. The rabbis ordered the codex removed from its hiding place.

  Murad Faham.

  Faham’s wife, Sarina, was overseeing the final arrangements for the family’s departure at their home in the Old City when Edmond Cohen, who was something of a surrogate son to the unmarried and childless Ibrahim Effendi, arrived with a cloth bag. Inside were two books. One was the Crown of Aleppo, and the other was a smaller and less significant fourteenth-century Pentateuch manuscript known as the Little Crown, which had also been kept in the synagogue safe and rescued after the fire. Sarina did not look inside the bag, she remembered thirty years later in a videotaped interview, but wrapped it in a square of white fabric of the kind used for cheese and placed it inside their washing machine. She put bags of seeds and onions on top. When all of their belongings were wrapped and tied into large packages and loaded on a truck, the Faham family—the cheese merchant, his wife, and their four youngest children—drove out of their city in the direction of Turkey.

  When they reached the customs post at the Turkish border, Faham remembered, an official wanted to open the family’s packages. Faham proffered his Iranian passport and tried to talk his way out. The clerk would not budge at first, and the argument became heated, but then a more senior official intervened and waved the family and the concealed treasure through the checkpoint and out of Syria. The book was on the move for the first time in six hundred years.

  11

  Maimonides

  Cairo, circa AD 1170

  THE DOCTOR’S NAME, as it was known to the scholars, poets, and courtiers orbiting the royal court in Cairo—al-Ra’is Musa Ibn Maymun al-Andalusi al-Isra’ili—told much of his life story: He was a ra’is, a head of his people, and his name was Musa, Moses. He was the son of a man named Maymun. He was from Andalusia, Islamic Spain, born around the year 1138 on the Guadalquivir, among the 132 towers and thirteen gates of Córdoba, where, in the perfumed gardens of Muslim kings, courtier-rabbis composed with equal flair legal tractates in Hebrew and poetic Arabic paeans to the physical beauty of young men. He fled the religious terror of the camel-mounted Almohad fanatics of the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco and was forced to live, for a time, as a Muslim, reading the Koran and praying in mosques before traveling east and finding a haven in Fustat, Egypt, next to the capital in Cairo. His language was Arabic, and his life was lived, in its entirety, under the rule of Islam. And yet he remained, the last part of his title tells us, a Jew. Western civilization, which remembers him as one of its greatest thinkers, knows him as Maimonides. It is on his desk that the codex next appears, having been ransomed from the crusaders and brought to Fustat four decades before his birth.

  When Maimonides was in his thirties, the lands of Islam were being squeezed from both sides by Christianity. In the West, Muslims were slowly losing Spain to the Reconquista, while in the East the Holy Land was controlled by the crusaders and their Kingdom of Jerusalem. The warrior king Saladin took full control of Egypt in 1171, after a series of baffling alliances, intrigues, and double crosses finally ended two centuries of rule by the Fatimid dynasty, whose last scion—a twenty-year-old who had ruled Egypt since he was nine—died of implausibly convenient natural causes precisely when Saladin took over. The Assassins, a fanatic sect loyal to the old regime and based in a mountaintop redoubt in Persia, sent suicide squads to kill Saladin on several occasions as he waged his wars against Muslim rivals and the Franks. One group of killers disguised themselves as Saladin’s own soldiers. This was the world Maimonides knew.

  Saladin, upon taking control of Egypt, retained many of the previous dynasty’s officials, including a powerful and famously wily administrator named Al-Qadi al-Fadil. This master of intrigue, whose name literally proclaimed him the “Excellent Judge,” adeptly made the transition to the new regime, bringing along a coterie of talented protégés; the Spanish Jewish doctor was one of them. Maimonides commuted to the palace in Cairo from Fustat, just upriver, where he lived in a prosperous neighborhood south of the markets around one of the great mosques. There were three synagogues in Fustat—one for Karaites, one for Jews who followed the rabbis of Babylon, and the third, known as the synagogue of the Jerusalemites, for Jews who followed the rabbis of the land of Israel. It was in the last, the inscription tells us, that the Crown was kept after it was ransomed from its captors and arrived in Egypt.

  Maimonides was deeply involved in life at court, treating Saladin himself and members of his family and entourage. He wrote a treatise on aphrodisiacs, On Sexual Intercourse, for an amorous nephew of the king and penned another about a popular political tactic of the time—On Poisons and Antidotes—dedicating it to his benefactor, the vizier whose vast library, reading hall, and literary salons were at his disposal. Another man in the circles around the vizier was a poet, Ibn Sana al-Mulk, who once wrote fancifully that if the doctor Ibn Maymun were to use his knowledge to treat the present time,

  He would cure it of the disease of ignorance

  Were the full moon to ask him for treatment,

  It w
ould obtain the perfection it claims.

  Maimonides’s preoccupation, however, was not politics or medicine but the spiritual and political well-being of his scattered people, threatened everywhere by the lure and fear of the majority, by the pull of voluntary conversion or the threat—one he knew well from his brush with the Almohads in Morocco years before—of conversion by the sword. He corresponded with Jewish communities across the world, his missives carried by travelers leaving on the Nile boats from the piers at Fustat, trying to guide them with a steady, rational hand, to keep them from surrender and apostasy on one hand and from the dangerous illusions of false messiahs on the other. Maimonides saw the decline of Jewish scholarship as a threat to the survival of a people tied together only by their understanding of certain texts and laws, and in writing he bemoaned the fact that there were nearly no cities producing Jewish study of any quality. One of the few towns he did mention as exceptional was the Syrian trading center of Aleppo, where the doctor’s star pupil, Joseph, son of Judah, eventually ended up as a scholar-physician-courtier like his master.

  It was to Joseph in Aleppo that the doctor dedicated his most famous philosophical work, The Guide of the Perplexed. The Guide was an attempt to present—in an oblique and concealed fashion, in riddles and parables designed to confuse the ignorant—the true knowledge of God that was hidden inside the text of the Bible, and to help a wise student see that though laws were important, knowledge was more important. Much of the book’s first section is dedicated to an analysis of the language of the Bible. This was crucial, because by understanding the Hebrew precisely, it was possible to infer the book’s concealed meanings. The Bible was not an ordinary book, it was a labyrinth, and if you did not fully understand its language you would not find your way.