Praise for Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex “The Aleppo Codex could be read as a thriller. It could also be read as a history of the Jewish people, or as a meditation on history and myth. This great book comes closer to containing everything than any book I’ve read in a long, long time.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “[Friedman] opened a treasure box of …

International war, the gradual yet violent retreat of colonialism, and the ongoing construction of a universal Jewish homeland were the brush strokes that colored the uncertain infancy of Israel’s statehood. The challenges posed by five simultaneously invading armies aside, Israel’s leaders undertook the difficult task of cultivating the cultural Jewish identity that would transform their nation into the proper historical home …

Praise for Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex “The Aleppo Codex could be read as a thriller. It could also be read as a history of the Jewish people, or as a meditation on history and myth. This great book comes closer to containing everything than any book I’ve read in a long, long time.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “[Friedman] opened a treasure …

Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex is a book lover’s dream: Not only is it a book about a book, it’s a page-turning thriller. History dishes up some pretty compelling tales, and Friedman uncovered a spellbinder. “I expected to write a heartening story about the rescue of this book,” Friedman writes, “but instead found myself like a person who innocently opens …

The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman First line: “In the summer of 2008, in a dark underground room at Israel’s national museum in Jerusalem, I encountered one of the most important books on earth.” This may look like a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, but in reality it’s something far more exciting. Both an ode to the power of …

‘The Aleppo Codex’ traces the history of perhaps most authoritative manuscript of Jewish Bible Matti Friedman, an Associated Press reporter, thought he’d found the perfect human interest story. Perhaps the most authoritative manuscript of the Jewish Bible, the Aleppo Codex, called the Crown, had been annotated by Maimonides himself and safeguarded by the Jewish diaspora for millennia. Nearly destroyed when …

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo …

Listen to Tablet Magazine’s May 7 podcast interview here.

Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex is not, by his own admission, the book he set out to write. What began as a glimmering of interest evolved quickly into a web of mystery, intrigue, and unanswered questions as Friedman mined the story behind the legendary “Crown of Aleppo”—the oldest authoritative manuscript of the canonized Hebrew Bible, written in the tenth century …

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 By Jessica Steinberg May 10, 2012 Times of Israel writer Matti Friedman publishes his first book next week: ”The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible” …