The
Aleppo Codex, a bound book of approximately 500 parchment pages, was compiled
in Tiberias around the year 930 C.E., making it the oldest known copy of the
complete Bible. It was moved to Jerusalem, stolen by crusaders in 1099,
ransomed by the Jews of Cairo, and studied by the philosopher Maimonides, who
declared it the most accurate version of the holy text. It was later taken to
Aleppo, Syria, and guarded for six centuries. There it became known as the
“Crown of Aleppo.”
In
1947, in a riot that followed the United Nations vote on the partition of
Palestine, the codex disappeared, surfacing 10 years later in mysterious
circumstances in the new state of Israel. The codex is currently held in the
Israel Museum, in the same building as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is controlled
not by the museum, however, but by a prestigious academic body, the Ben-Zvi
Institute, founded by Israel’s second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Somewhere
along the way in the mid-20th century, 200 priceless pages—around 40 percent of
the total—went missing. These include the most important pages: the Torah, or
Five Books of Moses.
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