History and Provenance

Ben Asher's pointing made the codex the model Tiberian Bible. In the 12th century Maimonides examined it in Egypt and adopted it as his standard for the layout and spelling of a Torah scroll in the Mishneh Torah, describing it as the manuscript on which everyone relied, an endorsement that fixed its later authority. Its earlier travels took it from Tiberias to Jerusalem, into Crusader hands and ransom, and on to Fustat (Old Cairo), before it reached Aleppo by the end of the 14th century, where the community kept it in the grotto of the Central Synagogue and guarded it jealously, rarely allowing it to be copied or photographed.

That secrecy meant the codex was poorly recorded when catastrophe struck. On 1 December 1947, days after the United Nations vote to partition Palestine, the synagogue was set ablaze in anti-Jewish riots. The codex vanished, and for a decade its survival was unknown. In 1958 it was carried secretly to Israel and handed to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; the Ben-Zvi Institute became its guardian, and it is now displayed at the Shrine of the Book. But by the time it re-emerged, roughly 200 leaves were missing, chief among them nearly the entire Torah, the very portion for which Maimonides had prized it.