Aleppo Codex
The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate,[1] and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides.
[2] The fate of the codex during the subsequent decade is unclear: when it resurfaced in Israel in 1958, roughly 40% of the manuscript—including the majority of the Torah section—was missing, and only two additional leaves have been recovered since then.
[3] The original supposition that the missing pages were destroyed in the synagogue fire has increasingly been challenged, fueling speculation that they survive in private hands.
In Arabic, the term tāj was used mostly as a stock superlative title (Muslim caliphs did not wear crowns) and applied liberally to model codices.
[1] It was preserved by the Karaites, then at the Rabbanite synagogue in Old Cairo, where it was consulted by Maimonides, who described it as a text trusted by all Jewish scholars.
[1] The Codex disappeared, then reemerged in 1958, when it was smuggled into Israel by Syrian Jew Murad Faham and presented to the president of the state, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
Israel submitted the Aleppo Codex for inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World international register and was included in 2015.
[9] It was cared for by the brothers Hizkiyahu and Joshya, Karaite religious leaders who eventually moved to Fustat (today part of Old Cairo) in 1050.
[13][11][10] A Judeo-Arabic inscription on the lost first page of the Codex described that the book was Transferred according to the commandment to redeem captives, from the loot of the holy city of Jerusalem, may she be rebuilt and reestablished, to the Egyptian congregation, to the Jerusalemite synagogue, may [Jerusalem] be rebuilt and reestablished in the life of Israel.
The community received queries from Jews worldwide, who asked that various textual details be checked, preserved in the responsa literature.
The only modern scholar allowed to compare it with a standard printed Hebrew Bible and take notes on the differences was Umberto Cassuto, who examined it in 1943.
[18][3] In particular, the 2012 book The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman calls attention to the fact that eyewitnesses in Aleppo who saw the Codex shortly after the fire consistently reported that it was complete or nearly complete, and then there is no account of it for more than a decade, until after it arrived in Israel and was put, in 1958, in the Ben-Zvi Institute, at which point it was as currently described; his book suggests several possibilities for the loss of the pages including theft in Israel.
Goshen-Gottstein suggested in the introduction to his facsimile reprint of the codex that not only was it the oldest known Masoretic Text (𝕸) in a single volume, but it was the first time that one or two people had produced a complete Tanakh as a unified entity in a consistent style.
[22] Later, after the university denied him access to the codex, Mordechai Breuer began his reconstruction of the Masoretic text based on other well-known ancient manuscripts.
[23] Among the Jewish community of Aleppo and their descendants in the post-1947 diaspora, the belief always was that the Codex holds great magical power and that the smallest piece of it can ensure its owner's good health and well-being.
[25] The ben Asher vocalization is late and in many respects artificial, compared to other traditions and tendencies reaching back closer to the period of spoken Biblical Hebrew.
[11] This halachic ruling gave the Aleppo Codex the seal of supreme textual authority, albeit only concerning the type of space preceding sections (petuhot and setumot) and the manner of the writing of the songs in the Pentateuch.
[3] The manuscript has been restored by specialists of the Israel Museum, whose director declared that, given the Codex's history, it is "in remarkably excellent condition".
[26] In 2016, the scholar Yosef Ofer published a newly recovered fragment of the Aleppo Codex with some portions of the Book of Exodus 8.
[30] Several complete or partial editions of the Tanakh based on the Aleppo Codex have been published over the past three decades in Israel, some of them under the academic auspices of Israeli universities.
