Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex () is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. Together with the Leningrad Codex, it contains the Aaron ben Moses ben Asher Masoretic Text tradition.

The codex was kept for five centuries in the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, until the synagogue was torched during anti-Jewish riots in 1947. The fate of the codex during the subsequent decade is unclear: when it resurfaced in Israel in 1958, roughly 40% of the manuscript—including the majority of the Torah section—was missing, and only two additional leaves have been recovered since then. The original supposition that the missing pages were destroyed in the synagogue fire has increasingly been challenged, fueling speculation that they survive in private hands.

The portion of the codex that is accounted for is housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

Name

The codex's Hebrew name is , translated as "Crown of Aleppo". ''Kether'' means "crown", and Aram-Ṣovaʾ (literally "outside Aram") was a not-yet-identified biblical city in what is now Syria whose name was applied from the 11th century onward by some Rabbinic sources and Syrian Jews to the area of Aleppo in Syria. ''Kether'' is a translation of Arabic ''tāj'', originally Persian '' tāj''; the codex was called ''al-Tāj'' by locals until the modern period. In Arabic, the term ''tāj'' was used mostly as a stock superlative title (Muslim caliphs did not wear crowns) and applied liberally to model codices. It lost this sense when translated into Hebrew as ''kether'', which has only the literal sense of crown.

History

Overview

The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased the codex about a hundred years after it was made. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, the synagogue was plundered. The codex was held for a high ransom, which was paid with money from Egypt, leading to the codex being transferred there. It was preserved by the Karaites, then at the Rabbanite synagogue in Old Cairo, where it was consulted by Maimonides, who described it as a text trusted by all Jewish scholars. It is rumoured that in 1375 one of Maimonides' descendants brought it to Mamluk-ruled Aleppo, leading to its present name.

The Codex remained in Syria for nearly six hundred years. In 1947, rioters enraged by the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine burned down the synagogue where it was kept. The Codex disappeared, then reemerged in 1958, when it was smuggled into Israel by Syrian Jew Murad Faham and presented to the president of the state, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Sometime after arrival, it was found that parts of the codex had been lost. The Aleppo Codex was entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is currently (2019) on display in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

Israel submitted the Aleppo Codex for inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World international register and was included in 2015.

Ransom from Crusaders (1100)

The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem received the book from Israel ben Simha of Basra sometime between 1040 and 1050. It was cared for by the brothers Hizkiyahu and Joshya, Karaite religious leaders who eventually moved to Fustat (today part of Old Cairo) in 1050. The codex, however, stayed in Jerusalem until the latter part of that century. After the Siege of Jerusalem (1099) during the First Crusade, the Crusaders held the codex for ransom.Olszowy: pp. 54-55 and footnote #86The Vicissitudes of the Aleppo Codex
 – See ''4.4 The Crusades and the Ransoming of Books''. Retrieved on 2008–03–04. Letters in the Cairo Geniza describe the inhabitants of Ashkelon borrowing money from Egypt to "buy back two hundred and thirty Bible codices, a hundred other volumes, and eight Torah Scrolls" from the Crusaders which may have included the codex. A Judeo-Arabic inscription on the lost first page of the Codex described that the book was

In Aleppo

The Aleppo community guarded the Codex zealously for some 600 years: it was kept, together with three other Biblical manuscripts, in a special cupboard (later, an iron safe) in a basement chapel of the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, supposed to have been the Cave of Elijah. It was regarded as the community's most sacred possession: Those in trouble would pray before it, and oaths were taken by it. The community received queries from Jews worldwide, who asked that various textual details be checked, preserved in the responsa literature. It allowed for the reconstruction of information in the missing parts today. Most importantly, in the 1850s, Shalom Shachne Yellin sent his son-in-law, Moses Joshua Kimḥi, to Aleppo to copy information about the Codex; Kimḥi sat for weeks and copied thousands of details about the codex into the margins of a small handwritten Bible. The existence of this Bible was known to 20th-century scholars from the book ''‘Ammudé Shesh'' by Shemuel Shelomo Boyarski, and then the actual Bible itself was discovered by Yosef Ofer in 1989.

However, the community limited outsiders' direct observation of the manuscript, especially by scholars in modern times. Paul E. Kahle, when revising the text of the '' Biblia Hebraica'' in the 1920s, tried and failed to obtain a photographic copy. This forced him to use the ''Leningrad Codex'' instead for the third edition, which appeared in 1937.

The only modern scholar allowed to compare it with a standard printed Hebrew Bible