The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible by Matti Friedman, Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, NC; ISBN 978-1-61620-040-4 ©2012, $24.95, p. 277, plus notes
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Unlike the Cairo Geniza, whose vast treasure of medieval correspondence came to light accidentally late in the nineteenth century, the Aleppo Codex, a bound volume of the Bible written in vocalized Hebrew, has been known to scholars and perhaps even a much broader audience, for centuries. The word “vocalized” is the distinguishing characteristic of the codex. After all, earlier copies of the books of the Bible exist from at least the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which scholars believe to have been written between the first century BCE and first century CE, but they are written without vowels.
Biblical Hebrew was, of course, spoken with vowels, but written without them until the Masoretes (from the Hebrew word meaning instruction), a group of Karaite scribes, working between the seventh and eleventh centuries in the city of Tiberius, in what is today northern Israel, in Jerusalem, and in Babylonia (modern-day Iraq), created a system of diacritical marks representing the sounds of the Hebrew vowels. In addition to fixing the pronunciation, the Masoretes established the Bible’s sentences and paragraphs, and developed its cantillation marks and musical trope.
Knowing the vowels in each Hebrew word is critical because Hebrew is primarily based on a three-letter-word root system, so different words can be spelled the same, but pronounced differently, thereby conveying different meanings. Without knowledge of the intended vowels of each word, misreading and mistranslations are possible. None other than the great Middle Ages’ polymath, Moses Maimonides, endorsed the final product of the Masoretes working in Tiberius, and all modern Hebrew Bibles are based on this creation.
Matti Friedman, now a journalist for the Times of Israel, a Jerusalem-based online newspaper, and author of The Aleppo Codex, tells an absorbing tale of intrigue, passion, lies, and duplicity whose full accounting was stifled by walls of silence from the Aleppo community and the Israeli government: The fabricated tales repeated by them often enough became the truth. Through interviews of the players in the codex conspiracy, their children, and original court transcripts, Friedman follows the trail of the codex, known as the Crown, from the completion of its final version in tenth century Tiberius, to Jerusalem, to Fustat (Cairo), and then in the fourteenth century to Aleppo, Syria, where it remained hidden away and continuously under the guardianship of small groups of men for nearly six hundred years.
When the United Nations voted to create the State of Israel in November 1948, it unwittingly sealed the fate of numerous ancient Jewish communities existing in Arab countries; Aleppo being among them. We learn of the stealth employed by the Aleppo community to spirit the codex out of Syria in the middle of the night and circuitously into the new Jewish state, where it fell into the hands of high-level Israeli government officials who desperately wanted the codex, rather than into the awaiting arms of Aleppo’s Jews now living in Israel, and the ensuing legal battles between the Aleppo community and the government. For Friedman, the trial underscores the lies told by both sides about the codex and its missing two hundred pages, pages that disappeared without a trace. Like a modern day Sherlock Holmes, he vigorously and relentlessly investigates the period of time that can rightly be called the lost history of the codex, during the 1950s, and finally brings the surprising truth to light.
The codex, an unremarkable set of folios to look at, has writing is three columns wide and twenty-eight lines per unadorned page, the lines are not justified, but end wherever the scribe placed the last word, and notes, in tiny letters, are scribbled everywhere, as though it were a college textbook. Within the codex there are no decorations, borders, or illustrations, as were many of the Bibles produced by church scribes. The Hebrew letters are written in simple calligraphy with black ink crafted using the formula developed in Rome, powdered tree galls mixed with iron sulfate and black soot, rather than the erasable-type of ink used to write the Dead Sea Scrolls, on parchment made from animal skins. Yet, at the same time the codex is extraordinary, completed by scribes over several centuries of careful study, it represents the closest thing we have to a perfect written copy of the words of God. Part history, part detective mystery, The Aleppo Codex is an absorbing story about a unique and historically important Bible.
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Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached a fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.