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

by Matti Friedman

  The Guide was meant for an Arabic-speaking intellectual elite, but it was to strengthen the flagging minds and souls of ordinary people that the doctor wrote his greatest work of law in Hebrew, the Mishneh Torah—literally, the “Repetition of the Torah”—fourteen books that would become one of the central pillars of Judaism. Jews could no longer be expected to know about the arguments between rabbis or how they had reached their decisions on points of law; they needed a simplified version of their laws and rituals and a book that would tell them, in a straightforward fashion, how to conduct their lives.

  Around 1170, as Maimonides worked on his legal project, his only brother set out on a business trip. David, who was about twenty years old, took a boat 350 miles up the Nile, stopping before the great tombs and temples of the pharaohs at Luxor, then traveled east by caravan across the desert, braving thirst and brigands, to a Red Sea port. Arriving there, he found nothing to buy but indigo, so he decided to press on across the sea to India. He wrote a letter home to his brother, recounting the story of his journey thus far and asking him to reassure his wife, whom he called “the little one.” Then he boarded a boat bound for the port of Aden and was never heard from again.

  “The worst disaster that struck me of late, worse than anything I had ever experienced from the time I was born until this day, was the demise of that upright man—may the memory of the righteous be a blessing—who drowned in the Indian Ocean,” the doctor wrote later. For a year after receiving the news, he wrote, he was “prostrate in bed with a severe inflammation, fever and mental confusion,” and was thereafter inconsolable. Here is a description of a scholar’s grief: “He had a ready grasp of Talmud and a superb mastery of grammar,” the doctor wrote of his brother. “Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his books, my heart is churned inside me and my sorrow is rekindled.”

  Books also helped him find solace, and he completed his legal compendium. The Mishneh Torah included a section on the rules governing the writing of the Torah, the foundation text upon which generations of scholars like him had erected the Jewish religion. Here, from all of the many Bible codices that must have been available to the leader of a rich and long-established community, he chose the one he clearly considered the authoritative version of what he called “the book that has illuminated the darkness of the world.” It was one the Jews of Fustat had ransomed from the crusaders decades before. “And the book we relied upon in these matters,” he wrote,

  is the well-known book in Egypt, which contains twenty-four books, which was in Jerusalem some years ago, to revise the books from it, and everyone relied on it, since it was revised by Ben-Asher, and he worked meticulously on it for many years and revised it many times.

  Maimonides died in 1204, evidently leaving the codex in his library and in the possession of his descendants. Sometime in the latter half of the fourteenth century, a rabbi named David, son of Joshua—the doctor’s great-great-great-grandson—left Cairo at a time of political upheaval and traveled to Aleppo. He brought along much of his illustrious ancestor’s library. The codex appears to have been among the collection that reached the Syrian city.

  Travelers in the centuries that followed mentioned the city’s great Bible. One account from 1479 says, in a reference to Maimonides, “The book upon which the great sage relied is today in the city of Tzova, called Aleppo, and it is written on parchment, with three columns on a page, and at the end it is written, ‘I, Aaron Ben-Asher, edited it.’ ” Over the years, it came to be venerated less as a source of wisdom than as a precious possession of great age and worth, like a jewel or an ornament. The value of the Crown of Aleppo was such that even individual pages were seen to have great worth. This, much later on, would be its undoing.

  The codex had traveled from Tiberias to Jerusalem, then to Cairo, and from there to Aleppo. It witnessed the devastating sack of the city by the Mongols in 1401, and then the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the following century. It survived an 1822 earthquake that killed more than half the city’s inhabitants.

  It would remain there for six hundred years, until the Jews in the lands of Islam—the world of Maimonides—disappeared.

  EIGHT CENTURIES AFTER the death of Maimonides, I descended in a passenger jet into the perpetual dome of smog that covers the modern descendant of his city. Barred from Aleppo by the state of war that exists between Syria and my country, Israel, I wanted nonetheless to see the traces of Jewish life in places where today such life is unimaginable. In Cairo, I thought, I might find a remnant that would evoke something of Maimonides, that would allow me to imagine him seated at his desk with the Crown, which I felt tied me to him in some intangible way.

  Ibn Maymun is still known to some Egyptians as a philosopher and physician from Saladin’s court, a figure from a time when Muslim societies tolerated Jews in their midst. The Jews have left, driven out by the riots of the 1940s, the fatal bombings in Cairo’s old Jewish Quarter, the rise of the pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, state-sanctioned persecution, and the theft of property. Two generations ago the Jewish community in Cairo numbered about sixty-five thousand people; today there are a few dozen, all of them elderly. Within a few years there will be none.

  The grand synagogue in downtown Cairo is kept open by the government and guarded by squads of lethargic troops in white uniforms. When I visited one Sabbath morning, half hoping to find even a handful of people praying, no one was inside but an Arab maintenance man. He took me by the hand and showed me a scroll on a table in the middle of the sanctuary. “Torah,” he said, and he stuck his hand out for a tip.

  In Fustat, which has been swallowed by Cairo and was a short subway ride from my hotel, I visited the synagogue where the Crown was once kept, now open as a tourist site. Upstairs, in a hollow space behind a wall in the women’s gallery, is the place where Jews secreted centuries’ worth of handwritten documents—contracts, letters, holy books, anything that contained the name of God and thus could not be thrown out. When the Cairo genizah, as it became known, was discovered in the nineteenth century, in one of the great scholarly finds of our time, the documents included many of Maimonides’s writings in his own hand.

  In central Cairo is an area of market streets still known as the Jewish Quarter, though there are no Jews there. The quarter was packed with shoppers buying clothes, and toy tanks with cannons that lit up, and stuffed birds in unnatural shades of yellow. Further into the slum alleys, the bustle receded and the streets grew dirtier. There was an abandoned synagogue somewhere here, on a site where some traditions said Maimonides used to teach or treat patients. It was named for him: Musa Ibn Maymun. The regime of Hosni Mubarak, who was deposed not long afterward, was renovating the building and planned to open it for tourists, a peculiar act of concern for the country’s Jewish heritage that came just as Egypt was trying to get one of its top cultural officials elected head of the culture arm of the United Nations. This attempt had been complicated by the same official’s past statements in favor of burning Hebrew books.

  There were no signs for the synagogue, and the people I asked for directions responded with unhelpful shrugs. Within a few minutes I was lost. Walking down one alley, I peeked into an open door and saw an older man and a teenager sitting in a dark workshop.

  “Sorry—where is Musa Ibn Maymun?” I asked. They looked surprised. The teenager said, “Would you like some tea?”

  It was the middle of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, and I was avoiding eating or drinking except in my hotel. I thanked them and shook my head. The young man pointed to a picture on the wall depicting Mary and baby Jesus. They were Coptic Christians, he said. Some Copts were left in the Jewish Quarter, but the Jews were gone, except for one eighty-year-old woman, the older man told me, but the teenager corrected him: she was gone, too. He waved his hand to sum up the whole situation. “Gamal Abdel Nasser,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was explaining the cause of the exodus or merely the time frame.

  The teenage
r’s name was Emad. After a brief discussion with his father, who looked about sixty and seemed to remember the Musa Ibn Maymun synagogue, he declared that he could take me there. He led me farther into the Jewish Quarter, depositing me at my destination a minute or two later. I had imagined a building that would bring Maimonides to mind, but instead I found a roofless shell—a stone wall around dirt-floored rooms. I snapped a few pictures until a man who wore a pink civilian shirt but spoke with military authority appeared and told me to stop. I put the camera away, and when he went back around a corner, I slipped inside and found myself in what had once been the sanctuary. A young man looked up at me through blue-tinted sunglasses. His name was Muhammad, he said, and he was the engineer in charge of the renovation. He offered to show me around. This is the bima, he said, pointing to a low stone rectangle under a tarpaulin and carefully pronouncing the Hebrew word for the stand on which the Torah is read. And this, he said, pointing to a niche in the northern wall, is the ark in which the scrolls were kept. He took me into an adjacent room where steps led down to a floor flooded knee-deep with foul greenish water. This was Ibn Maymun’s hospital, he said.

  In this room were a few members of a teenage work crew. One of them, a boy of no more than fourteen in rubber boots and surgical gloves, spotted me and splashed over, much to his comrades’ amusement. He grinned an endearing grin of brown teeth, put down the wooden plank he carried, bowed, and shook my hand with exaggerated warmth. “Welcome,” he said in English, and then, his vocabulary exhausted, he pointed at his grubby white undershirt and introduced himself.

  “Musa Ibn Maymun,” he said, and his friends cracked up.

  The book was gone. Maimonides was gone. His people were gone. Nothing was left but this: Walls around empty rooms. An absence.

  12

  Alexandretta

  ONCE ACROSS THE border between Syria and Turkey, it took the cheese merchant and his family about half an hour to reach the rough Turkish frontier town of Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean coast.

  In the center of town stood a clothing store that doubled as a transit station for Jews fleeing to Israel. It was run by a man we will call Isaac Silo, one agent in a far-flung network directed from Jerusalem by an outfit known as the Aliya Department, a sister agency to the intelligence-gathering Mossad. Aliya, which literally means “going up,” is the poetic Hebrew term for immigration to Israel. The department, equal parts spy service and travel agency, was in charge of what the nine-year-old state saw as the reason for its existence and guarantee of its continued survival: the ingathering of the Jews.

  Behind that lofty end lay the technical minutiae of tens of thousands of people in transit. Agents were chartering boats and airplanes, putting immigrants on buses and trains, paying their fare, arranging hotels, lying to local authorities, forging passports, bribing police, wiring money into the bank accounts of cabinet ministers in dozens of countries, working with smugglers and criminals, and generally doing whatever was necessary to speed Jews from their homes in the Diaspora to their new homeland in Israel.

  The immigration agents of those first years sometimes received secret instructions from their controllers in a song-request program aired on Israeli radio. At the time, the Israelis were often paying cash in return for Jews—the Bulgarians were given $50 a head, the Hungarians $300. “We opened Swiss bank accounts for the Moroccan cabinet ministers. The Sultans of Yemen preferred dollars in cash. The Romanians, too, wanted cash,” Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the official who ran the Aliya Department at the time, said of these early years. It was, another agent said, “a mad operation at a mad time.” By 1957, when Faham and his family pulled up outside Silo’s store, one tiny corner of the Aliya Department’s worldwide operations, the wave of incoming Jews had ebbed since those first days but was far from over.

  Isaac Silo was a Turkish citizen, a Jew who was born in Aleppo, a shopkeeper, a trained kosher butcher, and a prominent member of Alexandretta’s tiny Jewish community, made up of a few dozen families. He had first encountered refugees during the world war, when groups of Jews fleeing the killing in Europe and trying to get to Palestine found themselves in this remote corner of Turkey. Silo began independently taking them in. By the 1950s he was receiving orders and money from Israeli agents in Istanbul and was the first stop for Jews coming out of Syria—the ones exiting legally, with foreign passports or legal permits obtained by bribes, and the ones leaving illegally, brought across the frontier by Silo’s network of smugglers. From Silo’s store the refugees were usually taken to a hotel, where they remained until Silo could book them passage on the Marmara, the boat that left once every few weeks from Alexandretta and sailed southward down the coast to the Israeli port at Haifa. Sometimes he would bus them to Istanbul, where they were put on El Al planes and flown to the airport at Lod, outside Tel Aviv.

  The Israelis covered Silo’s costs. Some of his Turkish neighbors seem to have been unhappy about Silo’s work—the Jewish Agency archive preserves two threatening letters sent to Silo—but although his activities were technically illegal, the Turkish authorities, who had generally good ties with Israel, tended to leave him alone. From Alexandretta, Silo maintained contacts in Aleppo, feeding his Israeli handlers information on that city’s Jews. According to one report sent by Silo at about this time, of some two thousand Jews left in Aleppo, more than 90 percent wished to leave for Israel. The Israelis wanted them out quickly. “We are certain that you will do everything you can to achieve the holy and longed-for goal: to save our Jewish brothers rotting in the exile of Ishmael,” two of the immigration agents in charge of Silo wrote him during this time.

  The correspondence of the agents tasked with getting Jews out of Syria combined that almost biblical tone with an exacting attention to detail. In one letter to Silo, the Israelis sent him a list of Aleppo Jews about whom they wanted information. They included one Avraham Intabi, seventy-five; his wife, Mazal, sixty-five; and their daughter, Betty, twenty-three. They also wanted to know about Rahamim Dishi; his wife, Haviva; and their children, Shaul, Isaac, Moshe, Jacqueline, Linda, and Yvette. The Israelis were spurred on by pleas from Aleppo Jews who had already made it out. The Jews of Aleppo, one rabbi in Buenos Aires wrote the immigration officials in Jerusalem, “are sorely pressed by the cruel enemy, and every day letters of warning arrive here pleading, ‘Help, help, before it is too late.’

  “We are certain that you will quickly answer our appeal,” the rabbi wrote, “and just as you have saved other communities all over the world you will move quickly to save these prisoners, and you will be blessed.”

  The messages among the Israeli agents took on a tone of desperation. “There is no need to emphasize, of course, that the problem is painful and extremely urgent,” the immigration envoys in Turkey wrote to Jerusalem headquarters, asking for more money to get Jews out. They mentioned the hostility of Syria’s population toward the Jews and “wild incitement” on the part of the Syrian government. “We must look at these matters with our eyes open, because our brothers’ lives depend on it,” they wrote.

  Amid all this, in the fall of 1957, the Aliya Department and its agents were paying special attention to one immigrant: Murad Faham of Aleppo. Unusually, the cheese merchant and his family were put up not in a hotel but in Silo’s home, a close relative of Silo’s told me when I met him in the United States. He did not know why Faham received this special treatment at the time, he said, and he heard about the Crown only much later.

  The Israeli agent responsible for Silo and the immigration route through Turkey—and, it seems, for other intelligence functions as well—was Yitzhak Pessel, a stout, efficient officer requisitioned from the military and sent to live with his wife and young children in Istanbul. When the cheese merchant arrived, Pessel made sure to inform Jerusalem, sending a letter not to his immediate superiors but directly to the top—to Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the immigration chief.

  The telegram sent by the agent Pessel from Turkey, informing his superiors that Faham was
en route to Israel with the Crown.

  Shragai, a Polish-born political operator and a former mayor of Jerusalem, was a member of Israel’s frugal, unyielding, and humorless elite, the kind of man you want on your side if you are trying against long odds to will a country into existence. He was a tireless writer of newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and crucially for this story, he was an Orthodox Jew, a rare specimen in Israel’s ruling class, a leading member of a minority in Israel that had not replaced Judaism with Zionism but had instead combined the two. Nearly forgotten today, Shragai was an influential official at the time, overseeing one of the twentieth century’s great movements of people from his office in the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem. He was a man involved intimately in the mechanics of dismantling Jewish worlds. Among his concerns at this time were the Jews of Cochin, India, 350 of whom were left, he told a meeting of the Jewish Agency leadership, their departure to Israel held up by difficulties in selling their synagogue. Despite his many preoccupations, the head of the Aliya Department promptly responded to the agent Yitzhak Pessel’s letter in the fall of 1957 informing him that the codex had arrived. Although Silo typically handled direct contact with the refugees, this time Pessel personally met with the merchant in Istanbul. This meeting would become key to the battle that was about to erupt for possession of the manuscript. According to Faham’s testimony in court the following year, he spent two or three hours with Pessel. The topic of discussion was the Crown.

  A few weeks after Faham’s arrival in Alexandretta, Pessel sent his superiors a typed list of the passengers slated to sail to Israel aboard the Marmara, including Faham, his wife, Sarina, and four of their children.