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

by Matti Friedman

  THE COMPLICATED DRAMA that unfolded in the courtroom beginning on March 18, 1958, was, on the surface, a legal dispute between two sides over an object of great worth. But it was more than that. The Jerusalem trial was an argument over who owned the patrimony of the Diaspora, and thus about the nature of Judaism, exile, and the state of Israel.

  On one side were the Aleppo Jews, and on the other was the state: President Ben-Zvi, whose institute was now in possession of the book; the immigration chief Shragai; and the cheese merchant Faham, whom the Aleppo Jews saw as a traitor and for whom they reserved much of their fury. For Ben-Zvi and the Israelis, the Jewish state was the rightful heir to the communities of the Diaspora, which were now extinct or would be soon, and was thus the natural owner of Judaism’s greatest book. The Aleppo Jews had indeed guarded the book for years in exile and were to be commended, but now the exile was over and the manuscript was home. The codex would be properly cared for and would belong not to a group of rabbis or to one small community but to the entire Jewish people, as embodied by the leaders and scholars of the new state.

  The Aleppo Jews, on the other hand, had not subsumed themselves into the Zionist project and its version of history. They were one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, though they might have been humbled, and saw the Crown as the symbol of a place almost none of them had ever considered to be exile. They had not kept it for centuries to turn it over to outsiders. The Crown, the Aleppo rabbis wrote in an angry letter to the court, is “not abandoned property to be won by anyone who so desires.” It was theirs, and they wanted it back.

  The argument centered on what, exactly, had transpired in the conversation between Faham and the two chief rabbis on the night in Aleppo six months earlier when they had entrusted him with the Crown. The state’s claim was based on Faham’s account of his instructions: he was told to take the manuscript to Israel and give it to a religious man, and he did precisely that, choosing Shragai, the immigration chief, who passed it on to the president. The state had thus acquired the book legally and could keep it.

  The Aleppo Jews, on the other hand, were certain the rabbis would never have willingly let the book out of their hands. They claimed Faham had been instructed to pass it on to the Aleppo community in Israel, in the person of Rabbi Dayan. Ben-Zvi was too respected a personality to attack directly, so most of their antagonism during the trial was directed at Faham and Shragai.

  The attorney for the Aleppo Jews, the keen-minded Shlomo Mizrahi, spoke first, beginning his opening remarks with a description of the great synagogue; he recognized that any telling of the story must begin there, with the hidden book and the riot. “During the war of independence, riots erupted in Aleppo and rioters breached the safe, and when they didn’t find money, they tore a few pages from the great Crown and threw it to the ground,” he told the court. Ten years later, he said, the chief rabbis decided they must send the Crown to the Aleppo community in Israel. The courier whom they trusted had betrayed them. “Faham is only a messenger, and his mission did not render the crowns his property,” he charged.

  “The crowns were never private property,” responded the government lawyer, Shlomo Toussia-Cohen. The merchant, he said, was given “power of attorney” by the Aleppo rabbis to give the Crown to “a religious man of his choosing.”

  “The power of attorney was oral,” he added quickly, heading off what was certain to be the first question from his opponent, “because of the deadly danger involved.”

  “The value of the crowns,” the government lawyer added, “is vast.”*

  The Aleppo lawyer announced that he would be calling both Faham and the immigration chief to the stand. The government lawyer had no objections, and the court adjourned, to reconvene at noon a week later, on March 25.

  When Faham appeared in court, both lawyers insisted on being the first to question him.

  “It is my right to question the witness,” the Aleppo lawyer told the judges, “as he was called according to my request.”

  The government attorney objected. “I want to question him first. I represent him,” the attorney said. “I want him to recount the events as they took place.”

  The Aleppo lawyer did not back down. He pulled out the transcript from the first session and read from page 2. “I asked to call him and hear him,” he said. The lawyers finally agreed that Faham would first tell his story by himself, without questioning. The merchant began with a plea for sympathy.

  “I am a resident of Syria,” he began. “I took care of the members of the community coming to Israel and of matters important to the community. The [Syrian] government heard about me through the spy service, and they beat me to make me tell them about my work and about the money from America. I denied everything.” He was expelled from Syria but was then allowed back to put his affairs in order before leaving for good, he said. Before the government’s deadline was up, he met the community’s two chief rabbis, Tawil and Zaafrani.

  “Rabbi Tawil said he had secrets to tell me, but was afraid of the authorities,” Faham told the court. “I said, ‘Do not be afraid. Let us trust in God.’ He said, ‘The Crown that survived the fire must be taken to Israel, but there is danger in this.’ And he told me that if I did not take it, no other man would be able to take it. Our conversation was in the synagogue, and I promised him I would save the Crown.”

  As for his instructions, he said, “They told me to give it to a religious and God-fearing man,” repeating the central point of the government’s case. They did mention Rabbi Dayan but said only that he should consult with the rabbi, nothing more. Furthermore, upon arriving in Turkey with the Crown, he received instructions in writing from two of the community’s wealthy leaders who were already living abroad. They repeated the rabbis’ directive to give the Crown to a “religious man.” Faham did not produce the letter, though he said he might still have it; later in the trial, in response to a question from the Aleppo lawyer, he said he could not find it.

  In Israel, he went on, the Aleppo Jews heard the Crown had arrived. They “were surprised by this and alleged that I wanted to sell the crowns. I risked my life to save it, not to sell it, and I did as I was commanded—to give it to a religious man.

  “I consulted with Rabbi Dayan,” he testified, “and told him about the arrival of the crowns. He took me to the synagogue where he wanted me to put it. I didn’t like it, and I told him I was told to consult him, not to give it to him. I told him I had given them to Mr. Shragai.”

  To the Aleppo community, Faham’s act was treason. One of the community’s leaders, Meir Laniado, referred to him in a letter as “that crooked messenger, Mr. Faham,” who, instructed to give the book to Rabbi Dayan, “betrayed his mission and gave it to other hands.” The oral recollections Faham taped twenty years later, which, when compared with his earlier testimony around the time of his arrival in Israel, are exaggerated and unreliable, reflect nonetheless what must have been genuine distress. The Aleppo Jews, he remembered, “would bring six or seven thugs to every hearing of the rabbinic court to scare me.” At one hearing, he recalled, “The room was full of thugs, thirty in number. The lawyer for the Aleppo Jews asked me to repeat my testimony from beginning to end. I replied that I am a sick man from all of the blows I was given, my eyesight is bad, and my health is poor, and each time you ask me to repeat things I have already said several times. What do you want from my life?”

  * There are two notable peculiarities in the transcripts. The trial was also concerned with the ownership of the lesser manuscript that arrived with Faham, the Little Crown, and the protagonists thus sometimes refer to the “crowns.” The second book, however, was of far less interest, and references to “crowns” nearly always mean the Crown of Aleppo. Secondly, the transcripts often leave out the attorneys’ questions, telling us only what the witness replied. In most places, however, the text allows us to deduce what the questions were, and when possible, I have reconstructed them here. These reconstructed phrases appear without quotati
on marks.

  15

  A Religious Man

  WHEN FAHAM FINISHED his account of the codex’s journey, the Aleppo attorney pounced. His first line of questioning was an attempt to discover why the witness had chosen Shragai, the immigration chief, as the recipient of the treasure.

  Where did you first hear about Shragai? the lawyer wanted to know.

  “I heard about him in Turkey, from a man in Istanbul named Mr. Pessel,” the witness replied. Pessel was the Israeli immigration agent who met Faham and notified his superiors of the courier’s departure for Israel. Faham said he spent two or three hours at Pessel’s home in Istanbul discussing the Crown.

  Did the rabbis instruct you to do whatever you wanted with the book?

  “They told me to give it to a religious man, not to do with it what I please. Only that I should consult with Rabbi Dayan and do as I see fit,” said Faham. He had, in fact, asked Rabbi Dayan what he thought about the immigration chief, he said, and the rabbi agreed that Shragai was indeed a religious man.

  What if the rabbi had thought otherwise?

  “If Rabbi Dayan had not agreed about Shragai, I would have done what I thought right. I consulted with him out of respect,” Faham said.

  How much time elapsed between his meeting with the rabbi and the transfer of the manuscript to Shragai?

  Faham replied, “Two days passed between the time the books were sent to Shragai and the meeting with Rabbi Dayan.” In other words, the merchant had been told to consult with the rabbi but had done so only two days after he had already given the Crown to the government. Later in the questioning, he would also admit that he did not go looking for the rabbi, but rather that the rabbi had come looking for him. The Aleppo lawyer was making progress. He continued to grill Faham over the weeks that followed.

  When he refused to turn over the Crown to Rabbi Dayan, the merchant said the next time the court convened, the Aleppo community began attacking him, suggesting he had somehow made money from the transaction. He denied this.

  “I have not settled in Israel,” he testified, “not in housing and not in a job and not in anything else. I borrow money to eat.” He suggested he could receive benefits from the government but was purposely not doing so. “I am not demanding an arrangement now so that they won’t say I am benefiting from the Crown,” he said.

  Faham volunteered an interesting piece of information. “Not only did I not make money from the crowns,” he told the court, “but because of the crowns I was charged more than five thousand pounds because my possessions were searched.” He was referring to a customs bill he received after arriving in Haifa. This clearly drew the Aleppo lawyer’s interest, and the attorney repeatedly came back to the customs bill, which, it turned out, had been waived thanks to the intervention of an influential friend.

  “Mr. Faham was told to pay customs for the books and with Mr. Shragai’s intervention was released from the customs payment,” the lawyer told the court at one point. Then he insinuated the quid pro quo: “Mr. Faham gave the books to Mr. Shragai for safekeeping.” He wasn’t quite there, but he was getting close.

  The lawyer now lunged at a weak link in the merchant’s story. You were told to give the Crown to a religious and God-fearing man, he said. Why not Rabbi Dayan himself? Was he not a religious man?

  “I had no doubt that Rabbi Dayan was a rabbi, and religious,” Faham was forced to admit. Still, he said, “the matter was up to me.”

  Were there no religious people among the Aleppo Jews in Israel? asked the lawyer.

  “I know the people of Aleppo well, and I know that the ones in Israel include people who fear heaven and rabbis and wise men. And I knew that most of the Aleppo Jews in Israel are religious,” Faham conceded. But his decision, he suggested, enjoyed the backing of others in the community. After arriving at his son’s house in Israel, many visitors came, Aleppo Jews, “and they said Shragai was religious and feared God.”

  How many of them told you he was religious? asked the lawyer.

  “I don’t know how many,” Faham replied.

  And what were their names? the lawyer asked.

  “Many people came, and I don’t remember the name of any one of them,” the witness said.

  How many of them did you ask?

  “I don’t remember how many I asked about Shragai,” the witness said.

  Are there no religious people in Israel other than Shragai?

  “I know that there are many other religious people in Israel, but I don’t know them,” Faham replied.

  The lawyer changed tack. Describe to us again your arrival at Haifa, he said.

  “I arrived in Israel on a Monday,” Faham said. “I gave the crowns to the Jewish Agency in Haifa, and I told them to send them to Shragai.”

  What was the name of the clerk at the port?

  Faham did not know.

  Did you get a receipt?

  No, Faham said.

  Perhaps the lawyer allowed a moment of silence in the courtroom to let this answer sink in. Handing the Crown over to Israel’s president was one thing, but Faham had turned the Crown of Aleppo over to a man whose name he did not know and who gave him nothing in return.

  Did you tell the clerk that you were supposed to consult with Rabbi Dayan before ceding the books?

  No, Faham said. “I told him to give them to Shragai.”

  But what was wrong with Rabbi Dayan? the lawyer asked, resuming his previous course of attack. What do you have against him?

  “I won’t answer what I have against Rabbi Dayan. There are things I won’t say to avoid denigrating Rabbi Dayan’s honor,” the merchant said.

  “I ask the court to force the witness to answer what he has against Rabbi Dayan,” the Aleppo lawyer demanded, turning to the three judges.

  They overruled him, but the lawyer had already done his job. He had raised doubts about Faham’s story and had introduced the court to hints of collusion, forced or voluntary, between the witness and his new allies from the Israeli government.

  President Ben-Zvi was not in the courtroom but was following the case closely. Faham’s testimony was clearly a matter of some concern. On March 27, the government’s lawyer told Ben-Zvi that the merchant had been cross-examined by the Aleppo lawyer two days before. The questioning, he wrote, “reached great levels of tension, but Mr. Faham stood by his story as it was given in writing to Your Honor.” A month later, however, after another court session, the lawyer was forced to report that there had been “contradictions in his testimony.” Faham, he said, had become “confused” on the stand.

  16

  Our Last Drop of Blood

  WITH THE ARRIVAL of Shragai, the immigration chief, the atmosphere in the courtroom must have changed. The witness was now an important state official and, unlike Faham, an experienced polemicist fluent in Hebrew. He and Faham were on the same side, but after Shragai had been on the stand for a few minutes and had presented two slips of paper to the court, those present must have realized he was telling a story that contradicted much of what they had heard from the previous witness.

  He first heard that the Crown had left Syria, Shragai said, in a letter from the agent Pessel in Turkey. He produced a copy of the letter, dated October 7, 1957, around the time of the Jewish new year.

  The Honorable Mr. Shragai,

  In the possession of the community in Aleppo (Syria), as is known, is the “Crown of the Torah.” All efforts to convince the heads of the community to transfer it to Israel have been met with resistance, and what is also unclear is whose possession it was in, as the fact of its existence was made to disappear after the Syrian authorities came looking for the book.

  Recently I succeeded in convincing them to bring the book, and now it has been brought here and is in the possession of the customs authorities, together with one item of cargo, and will be brought to Israel after the holidays by Mr. Faham, who brought it here.

  In order to prevent Mr. Faham from having to run around searching for someon
e to whom to give the book, I would be grateful to you if you would instruct me on the matter of to whom he should give the “Crown of the Torah” upon his arrival in Israel: to the chief rabbis, the president, the university. It is preferable that he should have this upon his arrival in order to prevent others from approaching him in order to take possession of it. I will inform you of the date of his journey.

  With holiday blessings,

  Y. Pessel

  Shragai then produced a copy of his response, dated October 13.

  Mr. Y. Pessel

  Istanbul

  The Honorable Mr. Pessel,

  I hereby confirm receipt of your letter of 12 Tishrei [October 7] regarding the “Crown of the Torah,” which was brought from Aleppo and will be sent to Israel after the holidays by Mr. Faham.

  Mr. Faham should kindly give the “Crown of the Torah” upon his arrival in Haifa to the Aliya Department. Afterward it will be decided where to send it.

  With great respect and best holiday wishes,

  S. Z. Shragai

  Head of the Aliya Dept.

  More than two months before the merchant even sailed to Israel, these curious letters suggested, the Israelis, and not Faham, were in charge of the Crown. Whom shall I tell him to give it to? asked the agent in Turkey. To the Aliya Department, replied the head of the Aliya Department. Shragai might have thought it crude to write what he meant, which was: To me. Despite Faham’s version of his instructions from the Aleppo rabbis, the letters made no mention of any “religious man.” There was no mention at all of Faham’s wishes or those of the rabbis.

  When Faham sailed into Haifa, the immigration chief testified, he received a call from a port clerk saying the Syrian had arrived with the books. “I instructed them to release them from customs and send them to us,” he told the court. In response to a question from the lawyer for the Aleppo Jews, Shragai said he did not believe the Crown had been given to him personally. “Because he is asking about this,” Shragai said, “it is clear that it was not given to me to do with as I please.” The Crown should be put in the state archive, he said; it was not private property.