Getty Images

“EVERYONE RELIED ON IT.” Maimonides (1138–1204), the great authority on Jewish law and philosophy, made good use of the Aleppo Codex when it was in Egypt. The manuscript served as a reference text for his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah. Maimonides also used it in writing his own Torah scroll. As he reported, “Everyone relied on it, because [Aharon] Ben Asher had reviewed it.” In 1375, a descendant of Maimonides, Rabbi David Ben Yehoshua, carried many manuscripts from Egypt to Syria. The codex may have been among them.