Ask most scholars of modern Syrian Jewish history and they’ll tell you the interesting if painful “official” history of the Aleppo Codex the oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and perhaps the most valuable treasure in the Jewish world.

Here’s what you’ll hear: In November 1947 as the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states an Arab mob set upon the ancient Jewish community of Aleppo in northern Syria. Over a day of rioting approximately 150 Jewish-owned buildings were ransacked and burned including 10 synagogues and five schools. One of those synagogues Aleppo’s Great Synagogue was the home of the Codex. During the rampages nearly half of the Codex’s priceless pages were lost in a fire set by the mob. When the rioting subsided community elders entered the synagogue packed the manuscript away in a secret location and circulated rumors that the Codex also known as the “Crown of Aleppo ” had been completely destroyed in order to discourage Syrian authorities from trying to seize the priceless manuscript.

Ten years later in 1957 an Aleppo cheese merchant named Mourad Faham received an exit visa from the Syrian government (a rarity for Jews). Two leading Aleppo rabbis Rabbi Moshe Tawil and Rabbi Shlomo Salim Zafrani persuaded Faham to hide the Codex in his washing machine and after he reached Israel to deliver it to “a religious man” of his choosing. Faham agreed and dutifully handed the remains of the manuscript to one Shlomo Zalman Shragai the head of the Jewish Agency’s Aliyah Department.

Shragai was also a close associate of Yitzhak Ben Zvi Israel’s second president and a recognized scholar of “oriental” Jewish communities. Shragai decided to give the Crown to Ben Zvi and it immediately became a prized possession for the president’s new research institute Yad Ben Zvi as well as a feather in the cap of the young country that claimed to represent the Jewish People in its entirety.

It’s a neat story one that offers clean explanations for both the presence of the Codex at Yad Ben Zvi for the past 55 years as well as the fact that the Codex contains some 300 pages out of the original 500 leaves (manuscript pages are properly referred to as “leaves” or “folios”). Of the Crown’s five books of the Torah all that remains from the 1947 fire is the final half of the book of Devarim.

The only problem with the story is that large parts of it aren’t true and the rest is riddled with holes conflicting versions and contradictory testimony. For instance the Ben Zvi Institute in a 1987 publication entitled The Story of the Aleppo Codex presented the fire story as fact even though some leading Syrian Jews have argued that the Codex was complete or nearly complete at least as recently as 1953 — a good six years after the riots. The same volume mentions a court case in 1958 that created a trustees’ council for the Crown a year after it arrived in Israel but it makes scant mention of the nature of those proceedings; namely that Syrian Jewish leaders claimed the Ben Zvi Institute stole the Crown from the community or at least obtained it by highly questionable means.

Despite the contradictions a series of academic works and television documentaries have repeated the myth that some 40 percent of the Codex was destroyed by fire back in Aleppo. These and other accounts have downplayed the anger among Syrian Jews at the loss of a community treasure and their frustration at being denied access to records of a four-year lawsuit to get the Crown back. The reports have also glossed over the dismay expressed by a group of Aleppo rabbis in Israel who on February 21 1958 alerted the Israeli president that “pages [were] missing from the great Crown.”

Since Yad Ben Zvi officials and other parties involved with the Crown’s history in Israel have repeatedly and pointedly refused access to the relevant documents dating from that period the official version of the story might have remained the only version as far as the outside world was concerned. But in 2007 the Syrian community got a new advocate a determined Canadian-born journalist named Matti Friedman who after he heard about the story was consumed by a burning desire to uncover the truth.

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