Exhibit Watch: A Jewel from the Crown

It was celebrated as the “Crown of Aleppo.” The Aleppo Codex, a thousand-year-old copy of the Hebrew Bible, was created in about 930 C.E. and edited by Aharon Ben Asher, who was one of the Jewish sages in Tiberias known as the Masoretes.a With Ben Asher’s additions of vowel and vocalization markings, it became the textus receptus, or authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible—relied on by no less than Maimonides, the 12th-century expert on Jewish law and author of the Mishneh Torah. After hundreds of years of tumultuous capture, ransom and travel, the codex somehow ended up in the […]