"The Aleppo Codex - A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible"What a fascinating book! Matti Friedman's book follows an ancient text of the Hebrew Bible through the centuries.
From the Aleppo Codex website: "The Aleppo Codex, the most splendid, old, and accurate manuscript of the Bible, ... The Aleppo Codex is a full manuscript of the entire Bible, which was written in about 930. For more than a thousand years, the manuscript was preserved in its entirety in important Jewish communities in the Near East: Tiberias, Jerusalem, Egypt, and in the city of Aleppo in Syria. However, in 1947, after the United Nations Resolution establishing the State of Israel, it was damaged in riots that broke out in Syria. At first people thought that it had been completely destroyed. Later, however, it turned out that most of the manuscript had been saved and kept in a secret hiding place. In 1958, the Aleppo Codex was smuggled out of Syria to Jerusalem and delivered to the President of the State of Israel, Izhak Ben-Zvi."
After reading the book, I went to the Internet to see what's there about the Aleppo Codex. It was interesting to read "official" histories and compare them with Friedman's account. Under whose watch did all those priceless pages disappear? Read more here and here.
For centuries Jews were persecuted, were driven, fled, and settled all over the world. It was fascinating to read about the Jewish scattered communities and the text, THE BOOK (the Hebrew Bible), that connected them. These wide spread, global communities often provided linkages for businesses.
When the United Nations voted to create the state of Israel in 1947, relationships between Jews and their neighbors disintegrated in some countries. This was especially true in many Muslim countries. The Aleppo Codex was once again on the move.
The politics and religion of Israel played a major role in the later part of this story. I was interested in the process of Jews from all over the world coming into Israel. The assimilation was not smooth. For example the Jews from Aleppo had been Syrian for centuries. Their culture and religious traditions were very different from Jews with a history in New York City, or Eastern Europe, or Africa, and so forth. Not all Jews were Zionists and not all Zionists were religious Jews.
Friedman writes at the end of the book: "The Hebrew Bible, of which our codex was the most perfect copy, ... was meant to serve humans as a moral compass. Its story is a tragedy of human weakness. The book was the result of generations of scholarship in Tiberias, of the attempt to arrive at a perfect edition of the divine word. It was a singular accomplishment and a testimony to the faith of the men who created it. It was desecrated. ... The story of this book ... should come as no surprise to any who have read it.
"Those who understand the book's meaning and those who do not; those who would protect it and those who would destroy it; and those who seek it for the right reasons and those whose desire for it is base and dark - the book contained all these people and their conflicting motivations before it succumbed to them. We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail: A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it. It fell victim to the instincts it was created to temper and was devoured by the creatures it was meant to save." (The Aleppo Codex, p. 276-77)
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