The text has been recognized as the official Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) since 2001.
The Jerusalem Crown is a printed edition of the Aleppo Codex, known in Hebrew as the כתר ארם צובה (Keter Aram Tsovah – "Crown of Aleppo"), a Masoretic codex worked up circa 929 CE and claimed to have been proofread and provided with vowel points and accents by the great Masoretic master, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher.
During the pogrom on December 1, 1947 (two days after the United Nations voted to recommend partition of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state) the Syrian Army firebombed the Great Synagogue of Aleppo and the Codex was originally reported as completely destroyed.
The pages smuggled into Israel were verified as the authentic Aleppo Codex, which owed its high reputation partly to the praise heaped upon it by Maimonides in the late 12th century, and partly also to its claim to have been personally proofread and marked with the vowel points and accents by the last of the great family of Masoretes, Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher, not only by matching the various descriptions which had been published, but also by matching descriptions by Maimonides in documents which had not yet been published.
[5] As might be expected, the handwritten notes made by scholars who had been privileged to handle the Codex could not be as completely reliable as the manuscript itself.
The poetic passages in the Pentateuch and the Prophets are printed in the traditional layout (“half-bricks set over whole bricks”).
The books of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms have been printed in a different layout; each verse of these books being presented in a single line and divided into two hemistichs (according to their poetic meter);[10] this layout enables even readers unfamiliar with the biblical accentuation marks to read the text correctly.
In previous editions worldwide, most of the text could be typeset by machine, but the special characters had to be positioned by hand.
As with all printed Hebrew Bibles, there were about three million characters, including letters, vowels, accents, and other marks, to be typeset.
For example, that the Masoretic notes were almost totally omitted and the printed edition showed only some of the original Codex's qere and ketiv notes and incompletely indicated the Codex's sedarim divisions, the printed edition lacked the rafe cantillation mark and the ornamentation that marks the beginning of each parsha.
[14] Certain bits of text had to be compared with the Codex itself, which was on display in the Israel Museum, because the photographs of the manuscript left some doubts.