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

by Matti Friedman

  SUTTON. When they brought it to this man, was this a long time after the fires, or immediately afterward?

  COHEN. I don’t remember exactly.

  SUTTON. You don’t remember. What was the state of the Crown when you saw it?

  COHEN. It was a big, thick book.

  SUTTON. I’m asking about its condition, if it was whole . . . You said it was incomplete.

  COHEN. It was incomplete and taken apart a bit at the beginning. I don’t remember exactly after thirty years.

  SUTTON. Was it damaged? Was it burned?

  COHEN. I don’t remember exactly. I don’t remember.

  Cohen believed the book was missing pages when it reached his uncle, but he wasn’t sure how many. Sutton noted that in a few short minutes of filmed footage, the subject had said “I don’t remember” no fewer than eight times, which made him suspicious, though he granted that the man was worried about relatives in Syria and had only recently escaped the grip of the mukhabarat himself.

  Sutton also interviewed the sexton’s son, Shahoud Baghdadi, who was then in his late sixties and had long been a grave digger in a cemetery near Tel Aviv. People who knew him described him to me as charitable and scrupulously honest. Baghdadi, dressed in his best clothes and visibly nervous in front of the camera, sat opposite the old Mossad man.

  In the riot’s aftermath, the sexton’s son recounted, his father took him to the synagogue and they began searching amid the rubble and scattered pages of other books for pieces of the Crown.

  BAGHDADI. I saw my father crying like a baby. I said, Abba, what happened? Get up, why are you sitting there? In the place where he was sitting there was no fire, just damage . . . My father is sitting, I’m picking through the piles to try to find the pieces of the Crown, page by page.

  SUTTON. Maybe you remember how much you sorted through.

  BAGHDADI Believe me, I sorted through a lot. A big pile. More than I can count.

  SUTTON. But how much did you find after sorting through it all?

  BAGHDADI I found the whole Crown.

  SUTTON. All of the Crown? All of it, in its entirety?

  BAGHDADI All of the Crown, in its entirety, page after page.

  SUTTON. What did you do with what you found?

  BAGHDADI What I found I gave to my father.

  SUTTON. Immediately.

  BAGHDADI Immediately. My father was sitting there, looking.

  SUTTON. How do you know you found it all?

  BAGHDADI When it was done, my father put it in order: Genesis, Exodus. Deuteronomy was incomplete. I said, It’s all right—

  SUTTON. Wait, you’re saying Genesis, Exodus—

  BAGHDADI Numbers, Leviticus. Deuteronomy was incomplete, I remember well.

  SUTTON. The book of Deuteronomy was missing?

  BAGHDADI Not the whole book. Pieces. And there were parts missing from the book of Isaiah.

  Sutton stopped him to make sure he was hearing right. “One minute,” he said.

  SUTTON. You’re saying this: The books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers were there.

  BAGHDADI Were almost there.

  SUTTON. What do you mean by “almost”?

  BAGHDADI I remember that they were there. They were there.

  SUTTON. Whole.

  BAGHDADI Whole.

  SUTTON. And burned at the edge.

  Sutton asked this question to ensure the subject was talking about the Crown, with its trademark purple “burn” marks, and not one of the other manuscripts from the synagogue.

  BAGHDADI Everything was burned at the edge.

  SUTTON. And the book of Deuteronomy, you say, was not whole.

  BAGHDADI It was not whole, it was incomplete. And from Prophets, Isaiah was incomplete.

  The sexton’s son appeared to have said that all the missing books of the Crown, with the exception of part of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, were rescued after the fire. This contradicted what nearly everyone believed. But the testimony of one simple man, especially one who seemed confused about some details, was not enough to turn the accepted story on its head. That would require Sutton’s next target, the most respected Aleppo rabbi of that time and a man who had been involved in the Crown’s rescue and preservation in Aleppo years before. This was Itzjak Chehebar, who had left Aleppo in 1952 and now led the exile community in Buenos Aires. Sutton had no doubt that the rabbi could help if he so chose; he also knew that Chehebar was in his eighties and that no time could be wasted.

  The agent carefully considered his approach. He remembered the rabbi’s wedding in Aleppo, which he had attended as a child, and knew that his own uncles, the Beirut jewelers, had taken care of the rabbi when he arrived in Lebanon after fleeing Aleppo. He decided to mention both details in his request for an audience, which he sent through a relative in Buenos Aires. The rabbi agreed to see him.

  With an embroidered skullcap perched on his head, Sutton went to the Aleppo synagogue in the Argentinian capital. It was December 1989. He entered the rabbi’s office, which was lined with Hebrew books in glass-fronted cupboards, bent over, and kissed Chehebar’s hand, in keeping with a tradition he had not observed since leaving Aleppo. Chehebar was clean shaven, lucid, and personable. They reminisced about Aleppo in Arabic and Hebrew. The ice broken, Sutton came back the next day wearing a powder-blue suit and trailed by a TV crew. It was fortunate for those interested in the Crown’s history that the subsequent interview—the only time one of the Aleppo community leaders from the period in question has ever spoken candidly and publicly on the subject—was recorded. The rabbi died ten months later.

  Chehebar, who was among those responsible for the Crown in its hiding place, went to see the book in 1952, just before he left the city for good, he said. At the time, it was in Ibrahim Effendi Cohen’s storeroom in one of the Aleppo souks.

  “I opened it in the storeroom of Ibrahim Effendi Cohen, and I saw it,” the rabbi said. “It was missing a few pages that perhaps fell to the ground or were burned, but not to this extent. Not hundreds of pages.”

  SUTTON. Missing are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and half the book of Deuteronomy. And parts of other books are missing.

  CHEHEBAR. I saw that it was missing a few pages. Not that many pages.

  SUTTON. You mean individual pages?

  CHEHEBAR. Individual pages. Not even dozens were missing.

  This matched the testimony from the sexton’s son. We may also remember that it matched what the exile in Rio de Janeiro, the treasurer Yaakov Hazan, told Ben-Zvi’s envoy three decades before. “To demonstrate what he meant about the missing part, he pointed at a booklet that was at most five millimeters thick,” the diplomat wrote to the president in 1961. “He had difficulty estimating the number of pages, but in comparison with the thickness of the Crown, this would be only a few pages, perhaps no more than ten.” This was dismissed at the time as an “utter error.” Now came the third eyewitness testimony to this effect. In 1952, five years after the riot, the Crown was seen to be intact except for a small number of pages. By March 1958, as we know, with the book already in Israel, nearly two hundred pages, including the Torah, were gone.

  What of the missing pages? Sutton asked. Two hundred have vanished.

  “That was not the case,” the rabbi answered. “Perhaps a hand . . .” He tapped the table, looking for a word.

  “Played with it,” suggested Sutton.

  “Played with it,” agreed the rabbi, weighing his words, “and stole it.”

  FOUR EYEWITNESS TESTIMONIES had now been collected.

  The testimony of Edmond Cohen, who claimed not to remember, was inconclusive. The other three witnesses—the treasurer in Rio de Janeiro, the sexton’s son, and the rabbi in Buenos Aires—were in agreement that the Crown had in fact been complete after the riot, except for a small number of pages. The sexton’s son saw the codex on the day after the riot, the treasurer saw it several weeks later, and the rabbi saw it five years later.

  The accumulation of evid
ence amassed by Rafi Sutton pointed to a conclusion that was explosive. If the Crown was intact in Aleppo in 1952 but was no longer intact in Israel in 1958, it meant the missing pages had disappeared while the book was in the hands of supposedly trustworthy guardians. It meant the missing pages of the Crown were not “lost.” They were not burned, looted by rioters, or picked up as souvenirs and spirited to New York. The missing pages were missing because one or more of the keepers of the codex had stolen them.

  At this point the TV channel’s money ran out and Sutton’s assignment was terminated. The ex-agent, feeling he was on the cusp of breaking the case, wrote up a new report urging that the investigation be continued even after the show was aired. “The broadcast of the program, even though we did not succeed in discovering the missing pieces, is very important and will certainly lead to unexpected developments,” he wrote. But then the reels sat in the vaults at Channel 1 for three years because the producers had not used union TV crews when they filmed abroad and the union technicians refused to edit the footage. When the show finally aired in 1993, Sutton tried to drum up support for renewing the search. He wrote letters to foundations. He approached the famous Edmond Safra, a global financier originally from Aleppo. He met the mayor of Jerusalem. He sent more copies of his report to the Ben-Zvi Institute and to the Aleppo community’s heritage center in Tel Aviv, thinking they would certainly want the truth uncovered. “In order to strengthen our hypothesis and collect additional evidence,” he wrote, “we must continue the investigation and interview people who are the sons of those who were involved in saving the Crown in Aleppo.” In addition, he wrote, “We must find a fitting person abroad”—he had in mind a private investigator—“who can help in gathering and obtaining evidence and additional proof.” Rafi figured he needed about $50,000 but could make do with less. No one was interested.

  At one of our meetings in his living room, I asked him why.

  “I present a situation, and it must be interpreted,” he said. He looked at me. Many of our conversations went like this.

  Was it because no one was interested in seeing you get further? I asked.

  “Correct,” he said.

  Talking vaguely about “lost” pages was safe. Talking about “stolen” pages was not, because it meant that someone must have stolen them—that a crime had been committed. It meant that something might actually have to be done about it. After sparking a brief flurry of newspaper articles, the program was forgotten. The Mossad man put his unwanted report on his bookshelf and watched the trail go cold.

  25

  The Collector

  I ENTERED THE opulent and charmless lobby of the hotel, took the elevator to the top floor, the fourteenth, and pressed the buzzer next to one of the doors. I imagined that inside I would see a glamorous penthouse with a view of lights sparkling down the coast toward Tel Aviv, but when the door swung open I found myself in a room resembling a dark cave. The suite might have been tiny or huge; in the gloom, it was impossible to tell. A circle a few paces from the doorway was illuminated, and in the fading light on its edges I made out an Ali Baba’s trove of jugs, oil lamps, and candelabra. Sitting at a table in the circle of light was a frail man with watery and unsettling blue eyes.

  When I walked into the hotel, a decade and a half had passed since Sutton’s investigation. There had been no breakthroughs in the case since then. No pages of the codex had been found since the fragment from Samuel Sabbagh’s wallet surfaced in 1987. If the pages were indeed stolen, I reasoned, they might have appeared by now, and yet there was no proof that they had. The traffic in ancient manuscripts, and certainly in ancient manuscripts acquired in a questionable fashion, is almost completely opaque, and looking for the pages would be like looking for gold by staring intently at the ground. But there were, I found, indications that some of the pages had indeed turned up, only to disappear again. In this search there were no certain answers, only brief flashes of lightning that illuminated the story for a moment before I was left in the dark again.

  In my first months of sniffing around the story of the Crown, several people I spoke to mentioned someone who might be holding a large number of pages. They would not give me a name, but eventually I realized that they were all talking about the same person. It took a while longer before I discovered that the person was Shlomo Moussaieff: mysterious tycoon, jeweler to the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf, father-in-law of the president of Iceland, and owner of one of the world’s most extensive private collections of Jewish and biblical antiquities. Moussaieff was eighty-seven years old. I decided that I would try to induce him to tell me what he had and that I would get it on tape.

  Expecting someone aloof and refined, I found a figure far more interesting, even baffling: a merchant of the East, a master of the dance between seller and buyer, a dropper of hints, and a teller of stories. I felt that I had met him before in the carpet bazaars of Cairo or Istanbul. The perfect carpet, you believe, is kept hidden in the back, but the seller does not know you well enough, or respect you enough, to let you see it. If you play your cards right, you think, he might, and he might even sell it to you for a good price. But there is always the suspicion that the perfect carpet does not, in fact, exist. The dance is not just about profit; it is also about honor and social interaction, and it is not untouched by comedy. Moussaieff was a human hall of mirrors. I spent hours and hours with him and cannot say for sure if behind his stories lay something amazing or nothing at all.

  An inquiry into the fate of the pages must begin with a consideration of what we are looking for. A significant piece of the codex is missing from the beginning: this is the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. A piece of similar size, consisting mainly of books of the Prophets, is missing from the end, and there are individual pages and sections missing from the middle. The pages might be together, or they might be circulating separately. It is also possible that individual pages have been cut up and sold as charms. Most books lose value if they are not whole, but there are some manuscripts—chiefly those seen to have talismanic qualities—that are worth more in pieces. A book of mysticism written by the kabbalist rabbi Haim Vital four hundred years ago, for example, was dismembered by its owners and put on sale page by page in recent years, to the futile fury of scholars. The book business is a business, and the profit margin was simply better that way.

  Anyone looking into the fate of the Crown’s missing pieces will hear numerous stories about pages circulating among Aleppo Jews. These stories share a formula and are all impossible to confirm. I heard a typical example from a book dealer named Moshe Rosenfeld, who works out of a cluttered office in downtown Jerusalem. In 1990, Rosenfeld told me, he was in New York, walking down Broadway as the office buildings emptied their workers onto the street, when he heard someone shouting his name. He turned to see a man of about thirty-five who had been a student of his twenty years before, when he taught high school. The man, whose family was from Aleppo, said he had since moved from Israel to New York, where he had relatives who ran a business importing merchandise from China.

  What are you up to now? the man asked.

  I’m in old books, Rosenfeld answered, and he saw a light switch on in the man’s eyes.

  Have you heard of the Crown of Aleppo? asked the man.

  That’s the book that was burned, the dealer said. The man laughed. Nothing was burned, he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and showed the dealer a small piece of folded parchment in a protective plastic slip. This is from the Crown, he said. Rosenfeld was new in the book business at the time, he said, and only later understood the significance of what he had purportedly been shown. Later he heard another report: an Israeli who worked as a security guard for an Aleppo banking family in São Paulo told him the family had two pages of the Crown.

  Michael Maggen, the paper conservator at Israel’s national museum, and Adolfo Roitman, the curator in charge of the Crown and the Dead Sea Scrolls at the museum, both said they had received tips about people ho
lding pages, but the leads invariably ended with people who were not willing to talk. Beyond these fragmentary hints at the existence of small pieces, however, there are rumors of a large portion of the Crown that has been kept together. In the Aleppo Codex Underground, this is the grail.

  William Gross, a collector who lives in Tel Aviv, offered me a rapid beginner’s course on the world of rare Hebrew books, where he is well known but not representative: he is open, and happy to talk, and sees himself less as a collector than as a custodian. Gross was born in Minneapolis. The walls of his living room are lined with pieces of antique metalwork: menorahs, spice boxes, pomegranate-shaped decorations for Torah scrolls from Jewish communities in Europe and the Islamic world that are now, with few exceptions, gone. “I’m very aware of what’s behind my collection,” Gross told me. “The Holocaust, the movement of Jews from the East. A great sadness accompanies these things.” He collects many different kinds of artifacts but sees books as special: “When a man writes a manuscript, he invests part of his soul in it,” he said.

  Hebrew manuscripts move through the book market, from seller to buyer, through dealers or at auction, openly or secretly. It is often unclear who is buying what. For years, some of the most beautiful and expensive Hebrew manuscripts on the market simply disappeared without a trace, until René Braginsky, a little-known Zurich collector, went public with a collection now considered one of the world’s finest. As a rule, the oldest books are the most expensive, and books the Crown’s age almost never go on sale. Sometime before we met, Gross followed an auction where two spectacular pieces went on the block: a scroll of the book of Esther from the sixteenth century, written by a woman scribe, which sold for about $600,000, and a Torah scroll from before the Spanish expulsion in 1492, which sold for $350,000. On the black market, a part of the Crown would be worth far more, even taking into account the reduction in its value because it had been illicitly obtained and could not be exhibited or easily resold. One biblical codex not as old and far less important than the Crown, Gross said, sold in the 1990s for $3 million.