The Aleppo Codex

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The date was December 2, 1947, four days after the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state. Arab mobs in Syria were once again looting, burning, murdering and raping local Jews under the aegis of their, government’s anti-Zionism campaign. Similar pogroms had been staged throughout the country in 1945 to celebrate Syria’s newly gained independence from France, and they would occur again in 1949 in frustration over the Syrian army’s. defeat by the fledgling state of Israel.

The 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Syria, was nearing extinction. All the synagogues of Aleppo were systematically destroyed, every Jewish-owned store was looted and 6,000 of its 10,000 Jewish inhabitants fled to refuge in foreign lands.

Rabbi Moshe Tawwil and Asher Baghdadi, the caretaker, watched in horror as the flames raging through the Jewish quarter of Aleppo consumed the ancient Mustaribah Synagogue, an architectural landmark since the fourth century. The building— which had survived the changes of 1,500 years— shuddered when the intense heat twisted its iron beams and cracked the giant foundation stones. Then the fire engulfed the Cave of Elijah chapel and the shrine where the community stored its religious relics. Encouraged by the soldiers supposedly sent to protect the synagogue, rioters stormed the building, hurling 40 Torah scrolls into the courtyard where they were drenched in kerosene and set afire, along with thousands of other books and sacred items.¹

When the still-smoldering rubble of Aleppo’s main synagogue was searched four days later, the world of biblical scholarship was stunned to hear that it had lost a priceless treasure—the Aleppo 024Codex. This 760-page parchment manuscript, written in the early tenth century, was the oldest copy of the complete Hebrew Bible containing vowel signs, punctuation, notations for liturgical chanting and textual notes.

To understand the importance of the codex— known in Hebrew simply as Keter Torah (the Crown of the Torah) or Keter Aram Zova (the Crown of Aleppo)—we must go back a few thousand years, to the earliest manuscripts of the Bible.

Ancient manuscripts generally did not leave space between words. The reader’s knowledge of prefixes, suffixes and impossible letter combinations provided the clues to word division. Usually this was adequate. But in many cases alternative word divisions were possible. For example, in Genesis 49:10 the Hebrew (hlyv can be read as sûlyloh (Shiloh) or sûay loh (tribute to him). The translation in the King James Version is based on the first reading:

“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah

nor a lawgiver from between his feet

until Shiloh comes”.

The New English Bible follows the second: “

The sceptre shall not pass from Judah,

nor the staff from his descendants,

so long as tribute is brought to him….”

As you may have deduced from the contrasting vowels in sûiyloh and sûay loh, the ancient Hebrew alphabet showed only consonants, but not vowels. Given the nature of Hebrew grammar, anyone fluent in the language can read almost every word. in a running text without ambiguity,² just as we know from context which syllable of project to stress in “Singers must project their voices” and “The project required funding” even though English spelling does not use accent marks. But a small number of homographs exists (like the two different words spelled bow in English); names and foreign words (such as for newly encountered flora and fauna or alien religious practices) stand outside the grammatical system; and, of course, when Aramaic became the everyday language of the Jews, fluency in Hebrew required conscious study. Methods had to be found, therefore, to preserve the correct pronunciation of the sacred texts.

Among the earliest reading aids was the introduction of matres lectionis, literally “mothers of reading.” These are consonants that are used to indicate vowel sounds, for example h for a, y for i, w for o. Thus, bn would be pronounced ben “son”, bnh would be bená “her son”, and bny would be bení “my son” and bnw 025would be benó “his son”. The practice was not universally applied even to the same word; a spelling with such a consonant was said to be “full” (plene in Latin, male’ in Hebrew) and one without the consonant was called “lacking” (Latin, defectivus; Hebrew haser).

Lists of problematic words were also compiled. A few such words are recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, the 63-volume compilation of discussions from the Palestinian and the Babylonian rabbinical seminaries of the first to sixth centuries C.E. There are, for instance, comments about spellings that require special attention because they have two pronunciations (Nedarim 37b—38a) and about compound words are spelled separated and which connected, for example the names Ben Oni (son of my pain) versus Benjamin (son of strength) Beth El (house of God) versus Yisrael (he wrestles with God) (Soferim 5:10–11).

Even though punctuation is a much later invention, the Talmud shows awareness of the concepts of sentence and intonation. One statement suggests that when the Torah is read aloud to an audience that does not know Hebrew, the reader should present the Hebrew one sentence at a time and then wait for the translator to explain it (Megillah 4:4). Another refers to the practice of indicating hand motions the rise and fall of the voice when reading the Torah (Berakhot 62a),³ a practice followed by some Yemenite and Italian Jews.

We can see, then, that from earliest times, transmitting the biblical text from one generation to the next included teaching the correct pronunciation of the words, phrasing and intonation. This had to be done orally, of course, since there was no technique for writing vowels and punctuation.

The entire undertaking of textual transmission—both the what and the how—is known as Masorah, from the Hebrew verb meaning “hand over.” The verb appears in the opening sentence of Mishnah Avot: “Moses received the Torah on Sinai handed it over (masar) to Joshua, and Joshua Elders….” In time a class of teachers arose particular skill was Masorah.⁴ Devoting their to the book (sefer) par excellence, they were soferim in Hebrew,⁵ though the name is now too narrowly translated “scribes”—a term which has acquired unjustly pejorative connotations from Gospels.

In addition to correct pronunciation, the “what” of the Masorah included the integrity of the sacred text. The soferim determined the correct division letters into words; they systematized the breaking the biblical text into units approximating paragraphs; they distinguished different poetic layouts, for example the two parallel columns of half-lines for the Song of Moses(Deuteronomy 32:1–43) and the “half brick over whole brick, whole brick over half brick” of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:2–31);⁶ and they Hebrew set standards for the size and shape of letters, length and width of columns and the type of writing materials to be used. All of these decisions are such antiquity that they are taken for granted discussions part of the halakhah (Jewish law) for writing Torah scrolls, just as we do not question why lower case p, q, b, d are distinguished from each other by the relative position of the circle and stem, while upper case P, Q, B, D are distinguished in an entirely different which way.

Standards not withstanding, individual manuscripts were only as good as the copyist who made and them. Then as now, clerical workers could be overworked and careless. But while today proofing one copy of a book to be printed almost guarantees that all others from the same press run will be identical concepts (though errors at the binding stage might omit suggests duplicate pages), every handwritten text is unique audience and must be checked separately for accuracy. The scribes therefore devised techniques for checking then manuscripts—the “how” of the Masorah.

Some techniques are still familiar to us. Most with modern authors have proofread printer’s galleys by reading them aloud to a friend, spelling out words, still announcing new paragraphs, calling attention special features like italics and bold type—all of which must be checked against the original. This the scribes also did. But for spot-checking or working alone, they used a mathematical form of proofing: they counted the letters, words and sentences in each book of the Bible, and listed the middle letter, word and sentence; a manuscript that had an incorrect total or that had the wrong letter or word or sentence in the middle position was obviously in error. In fact, the Talmud (Kiddushin 30a) explains: “This is why they were called soferim, because they and counted [in Hebrew, hayu soferim] all the letters the Torah. They said the waw of ghwn [Leviticus 11:42] is the middle letter of the Torah, drsû [Leviticus lives 10:16] is the middle word, and whtglh [Leviticus 13:33] begins the middle sentence.”

Of course, an addition and omission on both sides of the divide would cancel each other. So lists were also made of how frequently individual words appear in the text; spot-checks of the vocabulary could determine if a manuscript contained errors.

Though sometimes denigrated as mechanistic, of the Masorah actually contributed significantly to biblical exegesis and Hebrew language. For example, the question of what constitutes the “same” layouts, word is not always easy to answer. Is the plene spelling the same word as the defective spelling? (For an 026analogous situation in English consider whether draft is the same word as draught.) Is devoted the same word in “The money was devoted to charity” and “The children were devoted to their parents”? Is the noun revolution that corresponds to revolt the same word as the revolution that corresponds to revolve? In trying to answer questions like these, some Masoretes—specialists in Masorah—became quite adept at grammatical analysis and etymology. Their notes often list how many times a word is spelled plene or defective (draught/draft), whether a particular word has two different meanings (devoted) and whether a particular form is really two different words (revolution).

Unlike the details of paragraphing and lettering, which are part of the text itself, the proofreading techniques and grammatical comments of the Masorah were written separately. Out of fear that their comments might be mistaken for sacred text, the Masoretes did not annotate scrolls used in the liturgy.

The appearance of the codex—or bound book—in the early years of the Christian era presented the Masoretes with a convenient way of distinguishing liturgical texts from other copies of sacred Scripture. The scroll remained the only acceptable format for public reading of the Bible; books, however, were acceptable in nonliturgical contexts. Now, using the codex format, it was possible to write the Masorah notes and explanations next to the text of the Bible.

Typically the written Masorah takes two forms: short notes (called in Hebrew-Latin masorah parva, “small masorah”) and extended comments (masorah magna, “large masorah”). The masorah parva appear as abbreviations in the margin next to and between the columns and refer to a word in that column marked with a symbol; for example, using analogous English forms, “draft L B” would mean “this spelling of draft is Lacking elsewhere in the Bible” “devoted M 3 P” would mean “devoted occurs with the Meaning it has here 3 times in the Prophets”

The masorah magna appear on the top and bottom of pages and in appendixes after the text. They contain fuller explanations of the masorah parva, such as complete cross references of additional occurrences of words, as well as other comments that the Masorete thought might help the scribe or reader. Thus, the answer to our third question above might be: “revolution from revolt here, but from revolve in next chapter.”

Because many scrolls and books are easily destroyed by climate and man-made disasters, many details in the subsequent development of the Masorah are unclear. However, by the ninth and tenth centuries, codices of the Hebrew Bible contain a highly developed system of reading aids.

First of all, there are the nequdot, or “points.” These are dots and dashes placed above, below and sometimes inside consonants letter to indicate the vowel sounds that follow; for example, a dash below bet (b) would signify ba; a dot above bet would stand for bo. Manuscripts show evidence of three competing systems, called by scholars Palestinian, Babylonian and Tiberian. The Tiberian notation is the most fully developed and is the one in use today.

In addition, there is an elaborate system of te ‘amim “accents,” some two dozen symbols (depending on how one chooses to count certain variations) written above and below the words. These indicate the syllable stress and, through different combinations, the most subtle distinctions of phrasing and intonation. As such, they are indispensable for the analysis of Hebrew grammar. Their original purpose, however, may have been to convey the traditional melody used during the reading of the Bible in religious services, and in this context they are known to most American Jews as the “trope” that they had to learn when preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah recitals.

Finally, the ninth and tenth century codices of the Hebrew Bible contain very extensive masorah parva and masorah magna.

Though emanating from at least two different schools, the best of these manuscripts are strikingly similar in most matters relating to vowels, accentuation and punctuation. The explanatory comments, however, vary, and it is possible to cite “the Masorah of” particular scholars. In fact, the sevirin (“some believe”) notation, which some writers used frequently and others rarely, cites opposing views in order to reject them.

Aaron Ben Asher was the outstanding Masorete in Tiberias during the tenth century, the scion of a family respected for two centuries as Bible scholars. His Dikdukei ha-Te ‘amim (Details of Accentuation),⁷ while mainly concerned with correct pronunciation, was among the earliest analyses of the grammatical behavior of prefixes and suffixes in Hebrew—and, of course, their influence on syllable stress. His Keter Torah, the biblical codex that he wrote in the early decades of that century, is considered the finest Masoretic Bible ever produced. In addition, it is most likely the first manuscript of the complete Hebrew Bible to contain all the notations for vowels, accents, intonation and melody which we have been describing. He also included a fully developed Masorah.

With its hundreds of thousands of graphic details, the Ben Asher Codex—380 leaves (760 pages), each measuring 10 by 13 inches, with three columns 027to a page in most places—is the culmination of 1,000 years of Masoretic effort. And it is accurate. Because of scribal errors or inherent flaws, all other extant medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible exhibit numerous discrepancies between the text and the Masorah. Only the Ben Asher Codex is almost perfect in all the details of word counts cross references and grammatical notes. It is, as Moshe Goshen-Gottstein says, “the authoritative manuscript within the boundaries of its subtype which, to all intents and purposes, became almost identical with the Tiberian Massoretic Text a thousand years ago.”⁸

The fame of the Ben Asher Codex was legion. Moses Maimonides, the great 12th-century philosopher and Bible scholar, held it up as a model. “Everyone relied on it,” he wrote, “because Ben Asher worked on it for many years and proofread it many times, and I based myself on this for the Torah scroll that I wrote.”⁹ And other codices, such as the Leningrad Codex of 1008, were long ago corrected to bring them into line with the Ben Asher manuscript.

How the Ben Asher Codex found its way to Aleppo and among the flames of a pogrom is also instructive.

The veneration of the Jews for the Ben Asher Codex made it a valuable commodity for others as well: Several times it was stolen by kings and conquerors and held for ransom. Maimonides saw it in Cairo after the Jews there ransomed it from the Seljuk Turks, who had looted it from Jerusalem. It arrived in the thriving metropolis of Aleppo—where it became known as the Aleppo Codex or Keter Aram Zova—sometime around 1478, after Jewish Aleppines paid off the Ottoman sultan.

Situated in the rocky Syrian mountains 300 miles north of Jerusalem and 70 miles east of the Mediterranean Sea, Aleppo has been ruled by Hittites, Arameans, Israelites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, French and Arabs. It is mentioned in Psalm 60:1 and 2 Samuel 10:6, under the Hebrew name Aram Zova (literally “the Zova district of Syria”), as one of the areas conquered by King David. As Halab, its history goes back a millennium further. Local legend derives the name from the belief that the patriarch Abraham milked (Arabic halab) his flocks here and distributed the food to the poor¹⁰

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The Jewish community of Aleppo dates from at least the fifth century B.C.E., when, according to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the Persian king Xerxes instructed Ezra to organize Jewish courts for the area. The close ties between this community and the Jewish centers in Palestine during the Hellenistic period can be seen the interesting law of provisional divorce: Since Judaism does not presume the death of a missing spouse, travelers to foreign lands provided their wives with divorce papers that went into effect if they did not return by a certain date; for Palestinian Jews, “foreign” was defined as north of Aleppo.

“The road from every village leads Aleppo,” according to a local saying. And, indeed, situated as it is on the major ancient caravan route between India and Persia to the east, Turkey and Greece to the north and Egypt to the south, Aleppo has long been a center of commerce. Aleppine merchants figured prominently in the economies of Egypt, Iraq and Anatolia; the first Jew to settle in Calcutta, Shalom ha-Kohen by name, was from Aleppo. And its turn, Aleppo attracted notables government, commerce and scholarship. Halabi chalabi—“a man from a Halabi gentleman”—they used to say in Ottoman Turkish¹¹

After the Arab conquest of the seventh century C.E., the Jews of Aleppo prospered in occupations that Muslims did not want or that their religion banned—banking, dyeing, tanning—as well as in medicine and public service. Travelers to Aleppo during the 13th century reported a thriving Jewish community with three synagogues and many scholars. In 1225, for example, the head of the community was Joseph ibn Shimon (sometimes called ibn Aknin), the “beloved disciple” for whom Maimonides wrote his famous Guide for the Perplexed.

Devastated along with the rest of the city by Tamerlane in 1400, the Jewish community was rebuilt toward the end of the century. It was then greatly strengthened with the arrival of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, once again becoming a center for Jewish scholarship. The Aleppo Mahzor (that is, Holy Day prayer book) was published at the Hebrew press in Venice in 1527 and is the source of many otherwise unknown religious poems of the Spanish- Jewish liturgy. The main synagogue of Aleppo housed a rabbinical college with an extensive library and many rare manuscripts, including a Maimonides manuscript written 039in 1236, a Pentateuch dated 1341—and the Aleppo Codex.

Though Aleppo was an important administrative center of the Ottoman empire, its economic and cultural position declined during the 19th century, along with the empire in general. European powers wrested concessions from the Ottomans. In particular, the right to grant consular protection to hundreds of local Arab Christians created a class of Ottoman subjects with loyalties to England, France, Holland and a variety of other European patrons. Coupled with the fact that non-Muslim communities—including at least four Christian denominations—had for centuries been allowed autonomous courts, schools, charities and police functions, the result was a rupture in the social fabric of Aleppo. Previously, for example, ethnic and religious groups concentrated in certain neighborhoods, but there were no wholly homogeneous areas: the so-called Kurdish Quarter was predominantly Christian; Muslims lived in the al-Saliba district, home of the Christian elite and their churches; and Muslims lived next door to the synagogue and Jews next to the mosque in Bahsita, the Jewish neighborhood. By the end of the century, however, Jews were living in a ghetto separated from the rest of the city by a gate.¹²

In addition, the opening of the Suez Canal broke the monopoly of the overland trade route to the East. As Aleppo was no longer at the crossroads of the world, rich merchants emigrated, taking with them the city’s high culture along with its wealth. By 1942, almost 65 percent of the Jewish residents required assistance from communal charities, funded from foreign sources. Even the library of the main synagogue was sold off to raise money—except for the Aleppo Codex.

According to Meir Turner of Hebraica/Judaica, a New York City rare-book dealer, representatives of the Zionist shadow government in British Mandate Palestine tried to acquire the Codex. But the Aleppine Jewish community maintained a mistakenly optimistic belief that it could protect its ultimate treasure. Then came the pogroms, and the news that the Aleppo Codex had been lost to the flames.

The horror of the loss was twofold. Not only was the Aleppo Codex a priceless artifact, but the promise of its contribution to scholarship had never been fulfilled.

In Aleppo it was stored in the venerable Mustaribah Synagogue and carefully guarded. For fear that it might be damaged or stolen yet again, visitors were kept away. Thus, instead of this manuscript, Jacob ben Hayyim used an eclectic version based on what was available to him when he edited Bomberg’s 1525 rabbinic Bible, which became the basic text of Christian Hebraists until this century. Because Paul Kahle, one of the most influential Masoretic scholars of this century (who, by the way, was driven from his native Germany by the Nazis in 1938 because his writings were too favorable to the Jews), could not get permission to remove this codex, he used the corrected but less desirable Leningrad Codex in his 1937 revision of Rudolf Kittel’s monumental Biblia Hebraica. And when Umberto Cassuto—the preeminent historian of Italian Jewry and chief editor of the Hebrew Biblical Encyclopedia—examined the manuscript in 1944, he was not even allowed to take notes.

Needless to say, however, Bible scholars longed to see it. As Marc Brettler explained in a recent issue of BR,^a while the Qumran documents are 1,000 years older, they are fragmentary and limited to the consonantal skeleton. Ben Asher’s Aleppo Codex is the oldest text of the entire Hebrew Bible containing vowels, punctuation and textual notes. Thus, the efforts to remove it to Palestine, and the horror at the news that it had been destroyed in the 1947 pogrom.

But the story did not end there. In the 1958 volume of Sinai, in a Hebrew article entitled “Ben Asher’s ‘Keter Torah’—A Brand, Plucked from the Fire,” Israel’s president Yitzchak Ben-Zvi was able to announce that the Aleppo Codex, seriously damaged but still priceless, had found its way to Israel.

Ben-Zvi did not disclose how the codex was smuggled out of Syria and into Israel. The danger was too great. The 5,000 Jews in Syria—1,500 in Aleppo—are virtual hostages. Their religious schools have been closed by the government. They have no civil protection against intimidation and violence. They may not hold public jobs, may not meet privately with foreigners, may not travel—and may not emigrate from the country where they are treated this way.

As years passed, however, refugees from Aleppo reached safety and the story was pieced together from many sources over two decades. There are contradictions and unanswered questions, of course—because of the confusion inherent in the riots, the passage of time, the desire of some to exaggerate their part and of others to protect family and friends still at risk in Syria.

In general, though, it seems that Rabbi Moshe Tawwil and Asher Baghdadi found the burned codex in the ashes of the destroyed synagogue and gave it to a Christian friend to hide. After being moved among hiding places for almost ten years, the codex was given to Mordecai Fahham, unannounced, the day he was allowed to leave for Turkey, and he smuggled it into Israel at great personal risk. It is now in the custody of the Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University.

A quarter of the original manuscript was destroyed: all of the Pentateuch up to Deuteronomy 28:17, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Lamentations, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and a few chapters from other books. But the remainder—294 leaves or 588 pages—promises to change our understanding of the Masoretic text.

We have already noted both the view of Maimonides that the Aleppo Codex should serve as a model for Torah scrolls and the belief of Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein that the Tiberian Masoretic text is identical to that in the Codex. Absent the Aleppo Codex, however, the text for Hebrew Bibles has come from the Leningrad Codex of 1008, which is a century later and considerably less perfect. It is not surprising, therefore, that immediately after its reappearance, the Aleppo Codex became the centerpiece of the Hebrew University Bible Project, whose goal is publication of a critical edition of the entire Hebrew Bible.

A burst of scholarship followed the reappearance of the Codex. A facsimile of the surviving portion was published by the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University in 1976, edited by Goshen-Gottstein. There have been studies, as well, of its accentuation, grammatical notes, relation to other manuscripts and place in biblical history.¹³

As mentioned earlier, by the tenth century, Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible exhibit only few and minor differences. Thus, we should not expect that examination of the Aleppo Codex will yield headline-grabbing new readings. Goshen-Gottstein puts it well: “I do not foresee that any future evidence could possibly dislodge the Aleppo Codex. Whereas I have no doubt as regards the suitability of this codex as a base text for our text critical edition, one may have practical hesitations as regards an edition for general and liturgical use.”¹⁴

But the value of the Aleppo Codex to scholarship cannot even be predicted yet: Whole generations of Bible scholars have never even seen a fully annotated masoretic text and have no idea what knowledge it may hold.

How the Aleppo Codex will change 040our understanding of the Hebrew Bible, only time—and study—will tell.

I am grateful for the generous assistance of Suzanne Siegel of the Hunter College Library, Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library and the library staffs of Yeshiva University and Fordham University.

The date was December 2, 1947, four days after the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state. Arab mobs in Syria were once again looting, burning, murdering and raping local Jews under the aegis of their, government’s anti-Zionism campaign. Similar pogroms had been staged throughout the country in 1945 to celebrate Syria’s newly gained independence from France, and they would occur again in 1949 in frustration over the Syrian army’s. defeat by the fledgling state of Israel. The 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Syria, was nearing extinction. All the synagogues of Aleppo were […]