Aleppo Codex

A Hebrew Bible manuscript carries two layers. There are the consonants, which are what a Torah scroll contains and which had been stable for centuries. Then there are the vowel points, the accents that govern chanting, and the masoretic notes in the margins that count words and flag oddities so that a copyist cannot drift. That second layer was the work of the masoretes of Tiberias, and its final and most authoritative form is associated with one family, the ben Ashers.

The Aleppo Codex is the only surviving manuscript in which that apparatus was supplied by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher himself. The consonants were written by another scribe, Shlomo ben Buya'a; ben Asher pointed, accented and annotated them. Nothing else in existence is that close to the source.

Its authority was settled in the twelfth century. Maimonides, working in Egypt, examined the codex and adopted it as the standard for his rules on how a Torah scroll is to be written, down to the layout of the poetic sections. Once he had done that, every later halakhic authority inherited the judgment. For roughly eight hundred years afterwards the manuscript was treated as the yardstick against which other Bibles were measured, which is a large part of why the Jewish community of Aleppo guarded it so closely and showed it to so few.

The codex was kept in Aleppo for about six centuries, in an iron chest in the Great Synagogue, under a community that regarded showing it to outsiders as a risk not worth taking. In 1947 a scholar in Jerusalem asked for photographs so the manuscript could be published; the request was refused. In December of that year, after the United Nations vote on partition, the synagogue was attacked and burned.

The codex survived. What did not survive is roughly two fifths of it: about 190 leaves, including almost the whole Torah, so that what remains now begins partway through the last chapters of Deuteronomy. It was hidden in Aleppo for a decade and brought to Israel in 1958.

The honest position on the missing leaves is that nobody knows. They were not seen to burn, and the pages that survive do not show the scorching that a fire heavy enough to consume two fifths of a book would leave. Two leaves have surfaced since, one in 1982 and one in 2007, both from private hands, which proves that some left Aleppo whole. Suspicion has fallen on the Aleppo community, on those who carried the manuscript out, and on the institution that received it, and none of it has been carried to a finding. This is not a debate with camps. It is a gap, and it is recorded here as one.