Revealed: The scandalous history of Judaism’s most precious bookBackground on the book, the author, and the Aleppo Codex is here with many links.
Theft, espionage, corruption and a cover-up lasting decades — a new book by a Times of Israel reporter exposes the extraordinary saga of the uniquely revered, 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex
By Times of Israel staff May 10, 2012, 3:52 pm 4
A new book by a Times of Israel reporter reveals dramatic new information about the fate of a manuscript many consider Judaism’s most important book — the 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex.
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“I did not imagine,” author Matti Friedman writes of his first encounter with the codex at the museum, “that there could be much new to say about something so old, and it certainly did not occur to me that the true story of the manuscript had never been told at all.”
Publication of the book in Hebrew on May 1, and an extensive article on the investigation in Israel’s biggest daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, several days later, have revived interest in the codex in Israel and have drawn angry responses from some involved or implicated in the story.
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According to the known story of the codex, the manuscript was damaged around the time of the fire, and it was then that the pages — including the most important part of the manuscript, the Five Books of Moses – went missing, never to be recovered. In 1957, the chief rabbis of Aleppo smuggled it to Israel and presented it to the president of the new state, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, who was also a scholar of Middle Eastern Jewish communities. The academic institution the president founded, the Ben-Zvi Institute, remains the official custodian of the codex today.
According to the new book’s findings, that version of the manuscript’s travels is mostly false, serving in large part to conceal the actions of government officials and academic scholars in Israel.
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UPDATE: The Times of Israel also has an interview with Matti Friedman, with video: Four years on the trail of the codex: Matti Friedman, author of ‘The Aleppo Codex,’ explains how he got drawn into a search for the truth about the most revered version of the Hebrew Bible.