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

by Matti Friedman

  Israeli intelligence officers take possession of the Temple Scroll in Bethlehem. From left to right: Rafi Sutton; Kando; Rafi’s commander, Shmuel Goren; and Rafi’s deputy, Samuel Nachmias.

  On the evening of Thursday, June 8, the ministers of Israel’s cabinet convened to decide whether to launch an assault against Syrian forces in the Golan Heights. The defense minister, Moshe Dayan, was opposed. The argument, Yadin wrote, “became heated.” Dayan eventually came around, and the next day Israeli troops would be sent into battle on the Heights. In the middle of the meeting, Yadin was called out. “I waited until I had heard the major arguments on both sides, offered my own judgment, and then left quietly,” he wrote. Outside he found a lieutenant colonel holding a Bata shoe box.

  “Well, I don’t know,” the officer said. “I hope this was the scroll you meant.”

  THE TEMPLE SCROLL eventually joined the other Dead Sea manuscripts in the Shrine of the Book at the national museum, where they enjoyed temperature and humidity controls and stringent security measures. The story of the scrolls was exciting, and they were remnants of a period of Jewish history that Israel was very much interested in remembering, because it served to emphasize the new state’s ties to the land and self-image in the present. The scrolls riveted the world’s attention and drew thousands of visitors.

  At the same time, the Crown of Aleppo was decaying in a filing cabinet.

  20

  Exodus

  OF ALL THE scenarios that might have befallen the codex after the failed attempts to obtain it, the operation to extract it from Syria, and the charged legal battle over its ownership, perhaps the most unlikely one had befallen the book: it had been quickly and almost completely forgotten.

  The Aleppo Jews, now spread across the world, were busy building new communities; Aleppo was history, and the book was no longer theirs to care for. President Ben-Zvi had died in 1963. The trustees would not allow the manuscript to be exhibited or copied, and the university scholars studying it continued to keep it to themselves. The unpleasant details of the story seem to have convinced those involved that it would be best simply not to tell it, and the lie that the Aleppo Jews had given their book to the state became accepted as truth outside the small circle of people who knew the real story, to the extent that anyone gave it any thought at all. The search for the missing pages, driven by Ben-Zvi, had been called off, with a few exceptions—one of them particularly unusual, I discovered—and the uncomplicated belief in their loss in the synagogue fire had come to be largely accepted as fact.

  Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Crown was an ancient manuscript of immense value, but it had no connection to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel two millennia ago—a period to which the new state explicitly linked itself, glossing over the intervening centuries—and so it was of less interest to the government and the general public. Feelings were far more ambivalent about the Crown’s world, that of the Jews of Islam, which was quickly vanishing, mourned by few besides the refugees themselves. The codex represented nothing that most people seemed inclined to remember, and though it, too, had an exciting story, it was not one that the people who knew it wanted to recount.

  One of the state’s justifications for holding the Crown was that only academic scholars could properly care for it. The manner in which the Ben-Zvi Institute tended to its hard-won manuscript is evident from letters I found in its own archive and that of Hebrew University, of which the institute is a part. After work hours ended at the university at two in the afternoon, “there is of course no one guarding the Crown, which is kept only behind locked doors,” scholars studying the Crown wrote to the university’s president in 1963. Not much had changed by 1971, when two of the scholars with access to the manuscript wrote another letter. “The Crown of Aleppo is kept today in a regular locked office cabinet in one of the rooms of the Ben-Zvi Institute at Hebrew University, wrapped in fabric,” they wrote. Years of this treatment had “damaged the remains of this precious manuscript, and today there are places in the manuscript that are not legible, though they were several years ago.” The same year, the head of the conservation labs at Israel’s national museum was given special permission to view the manuscript. “I found,” he informed a meeting of the Crown trustees, “that photographs taken ten years ago show more than the original does today.”

  The first evidence of a visit from outside conservators comes from 1970, twelve years after the Crown arrived in Israel. “It would seem,” the two experts informed the institute, “that there have been years of neglect.”

  Four years after that report, and three years after the scholars’ warning that the book was being ruined, the Ben-Zvi Institute, the manuscript’s trustees, and scholars at Hebrew University were still arguing about whether to transfer the book across town to the vaults of the national library, where it would enjoy adequate conditions for the first time. The proposal included a complicated legal agreement—one inspired by the extraterritorial arrangements governing foreign embassies—that would transform the corner of the national library that became home to the Crown to a zone that was technically under the jurisdiction of the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  At a meeting of the institute’s directorate, the late president’s elderly widow, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, rebuffed the implication that the institute had been neglectful in its handling of the manuscript and said they should not be “hasty” in moving it. She demanded that the president of Hebrew University “visit the Crown and see that we made sure there was maximum security.” Her comments are preserved in a typed transcript of the meeting kept in the archive at the Ben-Zvi Institute. Referring with sarcasm to a university professor who was urging that the book be moved to the national library, she suggested he was doing so because this would “be easier for his work.”

  “The institute has value with the Crown in its possession,” the president’s widow insisted, inadvertently channeling the Aleppo rabbis of long ago. “This is the essence of the institute and its prestige.”

  In Aleppo, the community that had once guarded the Crown had been reduced by those years to several hundred people. In 1972, Moshe Cohen’s turn came to leave. Cohen was from the family of the Crown’s last keepers in Aleppo: he was the great-nephew of the late Ibrahim Effendi Cohen and the son of Edmond Cohen, the man who had removed the treasure from its hiding place in the fall of 1957.

  Cohen’s parents were among the few well-off Jews still in the city. He had been raised by an Armenian nanny and educated at a Catholic private school, where he and his Jewish friends passed around a contraband French copy of Exodus, the best-selling Zionist fantasy from America, which a foreign acquaintance had smuggled into Syria. In 1972, Cohen was a student at the University of Aleppo, majoring in Arabic literature; Jews were largely barred from a list of other subjects he would have preferred, including medicine and pharmacology.

  At about this time, Cohen traveled to Damascus with his father for a memorial service for a recently deceased kabbalist rabbi. The young Cohen delivered a speech in literary Arabic to an audience in the synagogue that included, inevitably, several members of the mukhabarat, the secret police. Not long afterward, he was summoned to the top floor of the mukhabarat’s headquarters in Aleppo. He entered the well-appointed room of an officer whose epaulets indicated high rank.

  Thank you for accepting our invitation, the officer said, smiling.

  Cohen said he had been summoned, not invited.

  Who forced you to come? I’ll punish him. I asked them to invite you with respect, said the officer.

  These were the usual games of the mukhabarat.

  Listen, the officer said. I see that you are an educated person, that you are on the honor roll at university, and that you spoke in Damascus at the synagogue. We liked your speech very much.

  Then the officer dispensed with the pleasantries: The government wanted Cohen to begin doing radio broadcasts once a week. Both of them knew he meant that the regime wanted a Jew willing to serve as a propaganda mouthp
iece.

  General, Cohen said, I might be good at literature and eulogies for rabbis and academic studies, but this is politics. I don’t understand politics.

  That’s not a problem, the officer replied, still friendly. We’ll prepare material for you, and you’ll speak, because you have a good voice for radio.

  Cohen equivocated some more, and the officer’s temperament became progressively less sunny. You’re making a laughingstock of us, he growled. Cohen understood that he was now officially in trouble. His father pulled a few strings with the authorities, buying him a reprieve, but this was temporary. Cohen realized he had to get out.

  The route was as risky as it had always been. Escapees were entirely at the mercy of smugglers, and some had vanished on the way. Others had been turned over to the authorities. Two years later, in 1974, four Jewish girls, three of them sisters, would be raped and murdered as they tried to escape, their bodies thrown in a cave.

  One evening, Cohen went to a prearranged meeting point amid the bustle of the clubs on Baron Street, near the Cinéma Roxy. He was accompanied by a close friend, Reuven Dayo, and a girl whose name he would not reveal. When he recounted this story to me, he left other names and details of his story purposely vague; nearly thirty years later, he retained the instincts of someone raised with the mukhabarat listening. Parked amid the taxis along the curb was the smuggler’s black Mercedes. Pretend you’re asleep, the smuggler told them as they sped out of Aleppo. They did. This was so they would not have to speak if the car was stopped, since the Jews’ Arabic accents, like those of Christians and upper-class Muslims, replaced the throaty qah of most Syrians with a more refined glottal stop, ah, which would draw attention. The Mercedes took them south, finally stopping around midnight. Cohen saw barbed wire and what appeared to be an army camp and concluded they were at a border crossing. The smuggler opened the car door and disappeared. A few minutes later he returned with two armed and jumpy soldiers who gave the passengers back their identity cards. This was odd, as they had not given the cards in the first place. Cohen was so frightened that he stuffed the card into his pocket without looking to see whose name and photograph appeared on it. They drove for another hour, until he saw the outskirts of a city. This was Beirut. The smuggler stopped at a house, tapped out some kind of rhythm on the door, stepped back, watched it open, saw his three charges ushered inside, and disappeared.

  The three ate breakfast. Cohen took off his extra layers of clothes, which were the only things he had brought from Aleppo, other than $200 in cash and the honor roll certificate he had snatched from the wall at the university the night before. That day they were split among different families. Lebanon was still enjoying the heady years before its colorful jumble of ethnicities descended into the nightmare of civil war, and Cohen’s host family took him skiing in the hills, to the shops on Hamra Street, to the casino. After a few days of this, he received a phone call.

  Walk down Hamra Street, the voice said, then down to the seaside promenade. Carry today’s edition of L’Orient–Le Jour under your arm.

  On the promenade, Cohen met Reuven and the girl, and they walked down the beach until they reached a small, ramshackle building. Inside were three rooms furnished with old beds and dressers. They were greeted by a number of men who spoke with musical Lebanese accents and wore jackets that Cohen thought concealed weapons. Cohen did not know if he was a guest or a captive, and when he tried to inquire who the men were and what they planned to do with them, he was instructed to shut up. Night fell. A small fishing boat arrived on the beach, piloted by a man in an Australian bush hat. With the escapees and the Lebanese men onboard, the boat motored back out into the Mediterranean. Cohen, who had seen the sea for the first time in his life only days before, was terrified, and to keep his spirits up he pretended he was not a scared kid from an Arab city but the Zionist poster boy Ari Ben-Canaan, the Paul Newman character from the movie version of Exodus.

  This went on for more than an hour, the small boat cutting through the dark Mediterranean waves, the passengers’ backs to the lights of the Beirut shoreline and their faces to the open sea, the Lebanese men saying nothing. These men were smugglers like the ones who had taken the Jews who vanished, Cohen began to think. They had already been paid, and now they would dump their cargo in the sea. First they would rape the girl. Or perhaps this was a trap: Syrian boats would pick them up and take them to prison back home.

  One of the men produced a flashlight, pointed it out to sea, and began flicking it on and off. There was no response, just blackness and the weak glimmer of the beam reflecting off the water, vanishing and reappearing. Cohen lost hope. A light blinked back from some distance away. The man in the Australian hat cut the engine, and the boat bobbed in silence as a black silhouette hove into view. Cohen, who had never seen a warship except in photographs, first thought he might be looking at a submarine. The ship drew alongside the fishing boat, dwarfing it, and a rope ladder unfurled down the hull.

  Up, one of the Lebanese men ordered.

  Almost paralyzed with apprehension, Cohen watched Reuven grip the ladder and begin to climb out of the boat. When his friend was halfway up, he began climbing himself.

  The first thing Reuven saw when his head peeked over the hull was a metal box mounted on a wall; later he would understand that it was a first-aid kit. A tiny lightbulb illuminated a red star with six points. He turned back down the ladder to Cohen and said, They’re Jews.

  PART FIVE

  21

  Aspergillus

  WITH COW INTESTINES, tweezers, microscopes, air guns, and gelatin, Michael Maggen wages war against rot and age, an endless defensive action meant to save the paper and parchment of old books. I found Maggen standing by a few humidifiers that emitted a cold mist into air tinged with the scent of chemicals, peering through a microscope, and using goldbeater’s skin—a transparent tissue from a cow’s digestive tract, so named because it has long been used as a film in the production of gold leaf—to repair minute tears in a page with a square of brilliant blue and four golden Hebrew letters taken from an exquisite fifteenth-century copy of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. It was in this laboratory at Israel’s national museum in Jerusalem that a layer of myth obscuring the truth about the codex was removed.

  The unadorned pages of the Crown were enough to intimidate the young Maggen when the manuscript arrived in a Brink’s truck one day in 1986, when restoration work finally began. A museum official scrawled a makeshift receipt on a piece of paper and handed it to the man who brought the book from the Ben-Zvi Institute: “I have received the Crown of Aleppo.” Maggen was thirty-six, with a red beard and a new degree from Italy. He had treated manuscripts from the eighteenth century, and even from the seventeenth, but never anything like this. He felt, he recalled, “like a pilot who is told, ‘Next week you’re flying to the moon.’ ”

  The ancient knowledge contained in a book is of little consequence to Maggen when he works. He sees parts of animals and plants, fibers, fats, and sugars, in various arrangements and states of decay, and deploys different parts of animals and plants to repair the damage. Looking at the Crown, he saw parchment folios made from the skin of cows or goats—the expert work of the Tiberias leatherworkers a millennium before had made it impossible to tell which—covered in ink markings.

  First he surveyed the manuscript page by page, marking each rip, smudge, and fold on a facsimile. This took six months. Rips were represented by green lines. Black lines indicated smudges from ash. In some places there were black stains, and in others, entire chunks of pages were missing. This was to be expected. More surprising, perhaps, were the rectangular glue marks that could only have been left by an adhesive from the 1950s or later and that informed Maggen’s expert eye that someone under the auspices of the Ben-Zvi Institute had tried to mend one of the world’s most precious manuscripts with Scotch tape.

  The difference between the sides of the parchment was clear: the hair side, which had been covered with the fur of te
nth-century livestock, was hardier, while the flesh side was more susceptible to damage. The Tiberias scribe had used iron gall ink of the type developed in Rome, not the kind used in earlier books like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was made by mixing ash with something sticky, like honey or sap, and could easily be erased. Iron gall ink could not, at least not without leaving telltale scrape marks, a key advantage for contracts or holy texts, which were meant to be unalterable. But the ink was also acidic, and in some places it had eaten through the parchment and caused letters to disappear.

  Maggen and his team removed a clumsy binding that had been attached to the book after its arrival in Israel, cleaned the glue off the spine, and undid the threads holding the thirty-two folios together. To remove centuries of accumulated grease that had become attached to the pages, Maggen used the substance he found to be most effective: his own saliva. He wet cotton swabs in his mouth, then rolled them gently on the pages until the parchment was clean. One day, in the midst of the restoration, one of Israel’s chief rabbis paid a visit to see how work was coming along. With some trepidation, Maggen told him how he was cleaning the pages. “Imagine me going up to the chief rabbi and saying, ‘Listen, I’m spitting on your manuscript, the one Maimonides used to study,’ ” Maggen told me. The rabbi praised his work and wished him a long life. When the pages were clean, the museum’s restoration team sprayed them with a gelatin mist to stabilize the brittle ink, then moistened each one to relax the fibers of the parchment. After that, the pages were stretched, dried, and flattened. The restoration project went on for six years.