{"id":359,"date":"2012-09-12T07:54:24","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T07:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=359"},"modified":"2012-09-12T07:54:24","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T07:54:24","slug":"jewish-ideas-daily-review-alex-joffe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2012\/09\/12\/jewish-ideas-daily-review-alex-joffe\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewish Ideas Daily review: Alex Joffe"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Aleppo Codex and the Ownership of Tradition\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sept. 12, 2012<\/p>\n

The Torah belongs to all Jews and, indeed, to anyone who cares to learn and live its ways. But it is not transparent. \u00a0Copyists make errors.\u00a0 Torah scrolls lack vowels, making pronunciation and meaning uncertain.<\/p>\n

Matti Friedman\u2019s new book\u00a0The Aleppo Codex<\/em>\u00a0tells the story of the oldest and most authoritative text of the Bible from its origins in Tiberias around 930 to its present home in the Shrine in the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. \u00a0Its travails are those of the Jewish people\u2014the striving for unity, uncertain life in exile, and the return to Zion that left unhealed wounds.<\/p>\n

A thousand years ago, a newly invented system fixed vocalization and meaning for the Jewish people. \u00a0The scholars and grammarians of Tiberias, above all the Ben-Asher family, built on hundreds of years of scholarship to create a singular edition of all the books of the Bible. \u00a0One bound book of some 500 leaves stood above all the others, as if a crown. \u00a0Its value is beyond money.<\/p>\n

The book was written in Tiberias, sojourned in Jerusalem until its capture by Crusaders, was ransomed, and went down to Egypt, where Maimonides consulted it when writing his\u00a0Mishneh Torah<\/em>. \u00a0From there it went to Aleppo, Syria, where it stayed for 600 years. There, Jews called it the\u00a0Keter Aram Zova<\/em>, the Crown of Aleppo.\u00a0 The book reposed in the Great Synagogue in a safe under lock and key, becoming an object of veneration, invested with magical properties. \u00a0Outsiders were forbidden to gaze upon it.<\/p>\n

That repose effectively ended on the night of November 30, 1947, when word of the United Nations\u2019 vote on the partition of Palestine sparked pogroms.\u00a0 The Great Synagogue of Aleppo was burned.\u00a0 The Crown was feared destroyed; but it had survived, almost intact, and was swiftly hidden by the community\u2019s rabbis.<\/p>\n

For the first time, Friedman tells how the Crown came to Israel and what happened to it there. \u00a0With a sad and poetic touch, he meticulously reconstructs\u2014from interviews with members of the Aleppo community and their descendants worldwide, former spies, amateur sleuths, and wealthy art collectors, as well as long suppressed government files\u2014a shocking and degraded tale.<\/p>\n

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi\u2014politician, scholar, and future president of Israel\u2014had attempted through emissaries to persuade the Aleppo guardians to transfer the Crown to Jerusalem during World War II, only to be rebuffed. \u00a0But the 1947 pogroms and the darkness falling on Aleppo and across the Arab and Muslim world made the matter pressing.<\/p>\n

After the attack on the Great Synagogue, the Crown was entrusted to a Christian merchant who hid it until late 1957. Then, a cheese merchant named Faham was given the task of transporting it to safety in Israel. \u00a0Was he to take it to Rabbi Dayan of Israel\u2019s Aleppo community or the Israeli government? \u00a0In fact, in early 1958 it was turned over to an Israeli immigration official who then gave it to Ben-Zvi.<\/p>\n

Friedman unearthed the proceedings of a four-year-long rabbinical court case brought by the Aleppo community in 1958 to recover the book. \u00a0They show that Faham was in fact instructed to take the Crown to Rabbi Dayan, but the state began working to obtain custody even before Faham arrived in Israel. \u00a0The case was settled out of court.\u00a0 Ben-Zvi\u2019s Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the Middle East was given custody, and the official history covered up an effective theft by the government from the then-dispersed Aleppo community.<\/p>\n

But in what sense can something so important to the Jewish people be considered the property of a separate community, and who becomes its steward when a community is lost? \u00a0Ben-Zvi and his institute were indefatigable collectors of manuscripts and other materials belonging to \u201cOriental\u201d Jews arriving in Israel.\u00a0 Those Jews were considered too primitive to look after property they had preserved for centuries. \u00a0Theft of books, scrolls, and ritual objects, by Ben-Zvi and the state, was common.<\/p>\n

As in Aleppo, the Crown, for its first decade under Israel\u2019s stewardship, was locked in a filing cabinet with all but a select few forbidden to see it. \u00a0Though it appears to have left Aleppo virtually intact, scholars who later examined it found some 200 pages missing, a full 40 percent of the book. \u00a0What became of the rest?<\/p>\n

Two leaves have recently emerged from the Aleppo community itself.\u00a0 But Friedman indicates that the vast majority were stolen while the book was in the custody of Ben-Zvi\u2019s institute\u2014that is, of the state. \u00a0Friedman tries to trace their fate on the shadowy international manuscript market but has no answers. \u00a0Their monetary value is such that least one ultra-Orthodox dealer connected to the missing leaves appears to have been murdered.<\/p>\n

The Aleppo Codex<\/em>\u00a0is a marvelously written international thriller, but the issues it raises are profound and current. Who is the legitimate heir to the property of dispersed or extinguished Jewish communities? \u00a0Israel\u2019s assuming this role even before a community is gone was initially characterized by obsessive self-interestedness, dismissiveness towards fellow Jews, and outright theft; its treatment of Holocaust survivors and their property was not dissimilar. \u00a0Can Israel, or any state, be fully trusted with cultural property?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For the full review click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Aleppo Codex and the Ownership of Tradition\u00a0 Sept. 12, 2012 The Torah belongs to all Jews and, indeed, to anyone who cares to learn and live its ways. But it is not transparent. \u00a0Copyists make errors.\u00a0 Torah scrolls lack vowels, making pronunciation and meaning uncertain. Matti Friedman\u2019s new book\u00a0The Aleppo Codex\u00a0tells the story of the oldest and most authoritative …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}