By Fire or By Fraud

Ask most scholars of modern Syrian Jewish history and they’ll tell you the interesting if painful “official” history of the Aleppo Codex the oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and perhaps the most valuable treasure in the Jewish world.

Here’s what you’ll hear: In November 1947 as the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states an Arab mob set upon the ancient Jewish community of Aleppo in northern Syria. Over a day of rioting approximately 150 Jewish-owned buildings were ransacked and burned including 10 synagogues and five schools. One of those synagogues Aleppo’s Great Synagogue was the home of the Codex. During the rampages nearly half of the Codex’s priceless pages were lost in a fire set by the mob. When the rioting subsided community elders entered the synagogue packed the manuscript away in a secret location and circulated rumors that the Codex also known as the “Crown of Aleppo ” had been completely destroyed in order to discourage Syrian authorities from trying to seize the priceless manuscript.

Ten years later in 1957 an Aleppo cheese merchant named Mourad Faham received an exit visa from the Syrian government (a rarity for Jews). Two leading Aleppo rabbis Rabbi Moshe Tawil and Rabbi Shlomo Salim Zafrani persuaded Faham to hide the Codex in his washing machine and after he reached Israel to deliver it to “a religious man” of his choosing. Faham agreed and dutifully handed the remains of the manuscript to one Shlomo Zalman Shragai the head of the Jewish Agency’s Aliyah Department.

Shragai was also a close associate of Yitzhak Ben Zvi Israel’s second president and a recognized scholar of “oriental” Jewish communities. Shragai decided to give the Crown to Ben Zvi and it immediately became a prized possession for the president’s new research institute Yad Ben Zvi as well as a feather in the cap of the young country that claimed to represent the Jewish People in its entirety.