MORE ON THE ALEPPO CODEX and the new effort to recover all surviving bits of it:

From Maimonides to Brooklyn:
The mystery of the Aleppo Codex

By Dina Kraft Published: 12/09/2007

TEL AVIV (JTA) -- It's been a long journey for the brittle pieces of parchment inked more than 1,000 years ago along the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

The manuscript considered the most authoritative text of the Bible, the Aleppo Codex, was studied by Maimonides, ransomed by Crusaders and dismembered during rioting in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

A tiny patch of the codex even spent several decades in the wallet of a businessman from Brooklyn, N.Y. -- Sam Sabbagh revered it as an amulet with sacred powers.

Several weeks ago that fragment was brought to Israel, prompting a new drive for the return of the text's other long missing pieces.

"Our feeling is that if there is one piece of it, there must be others," said Michael Glatzer, academic secretary of the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, which has worked to track and study the codex.

Last week, the institute launched a new campaign to bring other missing pieces of the famous codex home to the Holy Land.

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Covers much the same ground as this article, but I think it has a few new details.