The Mystery of the Missing Pages of the Aleppo Codex

The world’s oldest and most authoritative copy of the Hebrew Bible reposed for more than half a millennium in a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria, before it was desecrated in riots that followed the United Nations vote in 1947 calling for a Jewish state and an Arab state in the British mandate of Palestine. Known as the Aleppo Codex—or the Crown of Aleppo or simply the Crown—it was the work of scribes called Masoretes in Tiberias, Israel, on the Sea of Galilee in about 930 C.E. The Crown contained not only the holy words but also cantillation marks indicating how […]