Aleppo Codex

Two Men, and Only One of Them Is Usually Named

Popular accounts say the Aleppo Codex was written by Aaron ben Asher. Two people made it, and the division of labour is the thing worth knowing about medieval Hebrew Bibles generally. The Ben-Zvi Institute's own nomination of the codex to UNESCO's Memory of the World register puts it plainly: "The Codex was hand written in the 10th century around the year 929 in Tiberias, today in Israel, by a Jewish scribe Shlomo Ben Boya'a. The well-known Masorete... Aharon Ben Asher added the vowels, the cantillation marks and other important notations." One man wrote the consonants; the other added the vowel points, the chanting accents and the masorah, the marginal counting-notes that let a copyist check himself. P. Sanders describes the result in a review for the Society of Biblical Literature: it "was Judaism's most authoritative version of the Bible right from the moment it was produced, around 930 CE," and "probably the first single volume comprising all the books of the Hebrew Bible."

Even that attribution is on a footing the holding institution itself qualifies in the same sentence: the information "emerges from the dedicatory colophon in the Aleppo Codex, written about a hundred years after its completion." The codex went from Tiberias to the Karaite community in Jerusalem, was carried off in the Crusader conquest of 1099 and, in the institute's words, "literally ransomed by the Jewish Jerusalem community living in Egypt at that time." In Egypt Maimonides consulted a manuscript he describes without naming — "a scroll renowned in Egypt, which includes all the 24 books," corrected by ben Asher, on which he relied for the open and closed paragraph divisions and "the form of the songs." That the manuscript he means is this one is the traditional identification, and a careful account of it says so: there is a tradition that Maimonides saw the Aleppo Codex. It reached Aleppo in the fourteenth century and stayed for close to six hundred years — not as a library book but as the community's own trust, kept under a written curse on anyone who moved it and, in the Ben-Zvi Institute's own words, "revered especially by the Jews of Syrian origin as a source of protection for their community" and "connected with numerous cultural taboos". That is the frame every later custody question has to be read inside.

What Survives, and What It Is Worth

Two hundred leaves of it are gone — "nearly two hundred folios (around 40 percent), including extensive parts of the beginning and end," as P. Sanders puts it. The 294 surviving leaves are the only figure nobody disputes; how many there were to begin with is not settled, and the sources do not agree. J. A. Sanders and A. B. Beck write that "294 of the Aleppo Codex's 380 leaves were recovered," which would make the loss under a quarter; P. Sanders's "nearly two hundred" missing implies an original nearer five hundred. The holding institution gives a third answer and says only that "one third of its pages are missing." The loss is not evenly spread. Almost the whole Torah is missing: the surviving text begins at the last word of Deuteronomy 28:17 and runs, with gaps, to Song of Songs 3:11. So the manuscript Maimonides used to settle the layout of the Song of the Sea no longer contains the Song of the Sea. What is left is in Jerusalem, in the custody of a trustee committee at the Ben-Zvi Institute and on permanent loan to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, under the identification MSBZ 1. Who owns it is the last thing the third section takes up.

The gap has been partly repaired by scholarship rather than by discovery, and P. Sanders states what is recoverable and what is not: "Thanks to the Masorah, faithful Yemenite copies, and the notes of medieval and later scholars who consulted the authoritative codex, it is possible to reconstruct most of the text and part of the sectional division of the Torah," while "much less is known of the rest of the missing sections." And two leaves have come back. The first is known from two accounts that do not obviously join up. R. Bergman describes a man who went into the smouldering ruins of the synagogue a few days after the 1947 attack, found "a page with scripture on it", pocketed it, and passed it through his family to a relative in Jerusalem; the Jewish Telegraphic Agency records only "an additional page presented by a Syrian Jewish family in the 1980s". Neither says what is written on it, and the identification of it as a page of Chronicles that circulates elsewhere is not printed here. A fragment of Exodus — the passage about the plague of frogs — had been picked up off the synagogue floor after the riots by a man who took it to Brooklyn and would not give it up; it took years of negotiation with his family after his death to bring it to Jerusalem, and it arrived in 2007. The Ben-Zvi Institute's UNESCO nomination says openly why recognition mattered to it: "there are missing pages whose whereabouts are unknown. Some of which may be held by collectors or by individuals as an amulet."

Where Did the Missing Leaves Go?

The story told for fifty years was that they burned. On 30 November 1947, the day after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, a mob attacked the Jewish quarter of Aleppo and set the Great Synagogue on fire. That account is now dead, and Sanders explains why in the review already quoted: "the surviving parts of the volume do not show any burn marks. The origin of the rumor that the codex had been burned lay with Aleppo's Jewish elders, who tried to conceal that it had been rescued, fearing that Arabs might want to destroy or sell the sacred book. In reality, the codex was kept in the storeroom of the Aleppo Jew Ibrahim Effendi Cohen. Despite the evidence, the assumption that the codex was damaged by fire can still be found in recent scholarly literature." It was smuggled to Israel in 1957-58 and handed to the Ben-Zvi Institute in January 1958, whose founder listed the missing sections and attributed the loss to the 1947 pogrom.

M. Friedman's 2012 book challenged that, and the challenge is serious enough to state in his own words: "we know now that the manuscript was seen whole as late as 1952, five years later. The first description of any significant damage to the codex dates, strikingly, only to 1958—after the manuscript reached the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem." He names the test himself rather than naming a culprit: "If they were already gone, the Ben-Zvi Institute is innocent. If, on the other hand, they were there when Shragai had the codex, the Ben-Zvi Institute is responsible for their disappearance." And he flags his own weakest evidence unprompted, explaining that he left one witness's testimony out of the book "because I did not have a recording of this conversation or written notes made at the time." The institute's side has been put too. Its then director, an Aleppo native himself, told a reporter: "I know of no community and no synagogue that could have looked after the codex better than we do at the Ben-Zvi Institute... After all, if the book had not reached Israel, it would probably be sitting right now in some museum being shelled by the guns of Bashar al-Assad." And Sanders, reviewing the book in a scholarly journal, endorses the method and faults one of its witnesses — in that order, and in his own words rather than in a summary of them: "It is clear that Friedman was right in taking the voices that deviate from the predominant narrative so seriously. He regards also his own sources with suspicion... In some cases, however, Friedman could have been more critical of the witnesses who support his own reconstruction. For instance, Shahoud Baghdadi's statement that he and his father recovered virtually the complete codex except for some sheets of Deuteronomy and Isaiah is problematic, since in the surviving volume all sheets with the text of Isaiah are still present." Where it ends, Sanders summarises it: "In the end, Friedman can only speculate about who the culprit was, but he concludes with confidence that Jews bore more responsibility for the partial loss of the codex than the Arab rioters who damaged it in 1947." And underneath the question of where the leaves went is a question about the book itself that nobody has settled. The Aleppo rabbis told an Israeli court in 1960 that the codex had been entrusted to a courier for one purpose and handed to another: "We gave an object to a man who betrayed his mission," one of them said, and the other, "It is the property of the Aleppo community, and not of the state of Israel." The court decided in 1962 that the codex would stay at the Ben-Zvi Institute — and, Sanders records, "it declared also that the account of the Aleppo rabbis was trustworthy."

Scripture references

• Deuteronomy 28:15-17 — The surviving text of the codex begins at the last word of verse 17; everything before it is lost
• Exodus 15:1-2 — The Song of the Sea, whose layout Maimonides took from the codex — and which is now in the missing part
• Exodus 8:1-6 — The plague of frogs: the passage on the fragment recovered from Brooklyn in 2007

Sources

• Holding institutionBen-Zvi Institute, nomination of the Aleppo Codex to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register — Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, submitted 28 November 2013 · Read in full. The holding body's own account, and the source of the scribe-and-Masorete sentence quoted in section one, of its own caveat that this "emerges from the dedicatory colophon... written about a hundred years after its completion", of the Karaite dedication, the 1099 ransom and the six centuries at Aleppo, of the identification "(MSBZ 1 Ben-Zvi Manuscript Collection)", of the ownership and custody arrangements, of "Unfortunately one third of its pages are missing", and of the hope that missing leaves are still in private hands. Note that the facsimile URL this document gives, aleppocodex.org, now serves only an under-construction pageSupports: The scribe and the Masorete, the codex's journey, the shelfmark, the custody arrangements, and the missing leaves
• ScholarshipP. Sanders, review of M. Friedman, The Aleppo Codex — Paul Sanders, Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam · Review of Biblical Literature 04/2015, published by the Society of Biblical Literature; read in full. Source for the codex's status "right from the moment it was produced", for the division of labour between ben Buya'a and ben Asher, for the loss of "nearly two hundred folios (around 40 percent)" and the surviving span from Deuteronomy 28:17 to Song of Songs 3:11, for the demolition of the fire story, for the 1957-58 smuggling and the January 1958 handover, for the named witnesses on whom Friedman relies, for the criticism of Baghdadi's testimony, and for the summary of Friedman's own conclusionSupports: The making of the codex, the extent of the loss, the end of the fire theory, and a scholarly assessment of Friedman's case
• ReferenceJ. A. Sanders and A. B. Beck, "The Leningrad Codex" — James A. Sanders and Astrid B. Beck, Bible Review (Biblical Archaeology Society), 1997 · Read in full through a mirrored copy; popular-scholarly rather than peer-reviewed. Cited on this record for one sentence only — "294 of the Aleppo Codex's 380 leaves were recovered" — which is the lower of the two estimates section two sets side by side. Note that these are a different J. A. Sanders and the P. Sanders whose review is cited above: two scholars of the same surname, and the article distinguishes them by initial for that reasonSupports: The lower estimate of how many leaves the codex originally had
• ReferenceM. Friedman, "The Continuing Mysteries of the Aleppo Codex" — Matti Friedman, Tablet, 30 June 2014 · The author's own restatement of the case made in his book The Aleppo Codex (Algonquin, 2012), which was NOT opened here; everything attributed to him is quoted from this essay, which he wrote. It carries the 1952 and 1958 dates, the falsifiable test he sets himself, his own caveat about the testimony he left out of the book, and the 1960 court transcript he published for the first time. Tablet refuses automated requests to any script, so the essay was read in a browser and every sentence quoted here was then confirmed a second time against the Internet Archive's capture of the same pageSupports: The case that the leaves were lost after the codex reached Israel, in Friedman's own words
• ReferenceR. Bergman, "The Aleppo Codex: A High Holy Whodunit" — Ronen Bergman, The New York Times Magazine, 29 July 2012 · Long-form investigative journalism rather than scholarship, and read in full through a copy hosted by Palmer Seminary. It is cited for one thing this article could not get anywhere else: the Ben-Zvi Institute's own side, on the record, in the words of its then director — including the sentence quoted in section three. It also carries the first-hand accounts of the two recovered leaves: L. Tawil finding "a page with scripture on it" in the ruins and the leaf passing through his family, and M. Ben-Sasson locating the Exodus fragment with S. Sebbagh in Brooklyn in 1988 and the family releasing it only after his death. Bergman nowhere says what book the first leaf is from — the word "Chronicles" does not appear in his article — and section two therefore does not name itSupports: The institute's own response, and the first-hand account of the leaf recovered from the synagogue ruins
• Primary textMaimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Sefer Torah 8:4 — Moses Maimonides, twelfth century; translation by Eliyahu Touger, Jerusalem: Moznaim · Read in full through Sefaria's text API. Maimonides writes that he relied on "a scroll renowned in Egypt, which includes all the 24 books", "corrected by ben Asher", for the open and closed sections and "the form of the songs". He does NOT name the Aleppo Codex, and this article does not put the identification in his mouth. The translator's own footnote on the songs identifies them as the Song of the Sea and Ha'azinuSupports: What Maimonides actually says about the manuscript he used, and what he does not say
• ReferenceJewish Telegraphic Agency, "From Maimonides to Brooklyn: the Mystery of the Aleppo Codex" — Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 10 December 2007 · Read in full. Reports the return of the Exodus fragment: found on the synagogue floor after the 1947 riots, kept in Brooklyn, and released by the owner's family after his death. It identifies the text as "a few lines of verse from the Book of Exodus" and names one of them — "Let my people go, that they may serve me" — which fixes it at Exodus 8, the passage Bergman describes as the plague of frogs. It also reports that the finder kept it in his wallet and that it took "several years of negotiation after his death in 2000" before his family released itSupports: The recovery of the Brooklyn fragment and what is written on it
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Aleppo Codex

Further reading

• Ben-Zvi Institute, UNESCO Memory of the World nomination: the Aleppo Codex
• P. Sanders, review of M. Friedman, The Aleppo Codex (Review of Biblical Literature)
• Wikipedia: Aleppo Codex

Reflect

Two hundred leaves of this book are missing and nobody has been able to establish where they went. What would it take for you to keep asking a question nobody can answer?