Yad Ben-Zvi Institute

Most people who see the Aleppo Codex see it at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in the same building as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and reasonably assume the museum owns it. It does not. What remained of the codex was entrusted in 1958 to Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and to the institute he founded, and it is a board of trustees under that institute, and not the museum, that holds it. A loan agreement signed in 1986 is why it is on the museum's wall.

The split is worth understanding because it is common and almost never visible to a visitor. The body that owns an object decides what may be done to it, who may examine it and what may be published from it. The body that displays it decides what a visitor sees and reads. Where those are the same institution a reader cannot tell the two roles apart, and where they are not, as here, a question about access goes to one address and a question about a label goes to another.

The institute has also published the codex in full online, image by image. For a manuscript this fragile that is a more consequential act of custody than the display is, because it removes most of the reasons anyone would need to handle the object at all. The atlas records the institute as the custodian and the museum as the place of display, and keeps the two facts apart deliberately.

The codex was written in Tiberias about 930, and its vowel points, accents and masoretic apparatus were added by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last of the Tiberian masoretes. It went to Jerusalem, was seized when the Crusaders took the city in 1099 and ransomed by the Jewish community of Fustat in Cairo, where Maimonides consulted it and declared it the manuscript he relied on. It reached Aleppo late in the fourteenth century and stayed there for about six hundred years, kept in an iron chest in the Great Synagogue and shown to almost nobody.

In December 1947, after the United Nations partition vote, the synagogue was burned in a riot. The codex survived, in fragments and in private hands, and was brought to Israel in 1958 by way of a Syrian Jewish merchant, Murad Faham. It arrived missing roughly two fifths of its leaves, including almost the whole of the Torah.

What became of those leaves is disputed and remains so. The account long given was that they burned in 1947. Journalism and archival work since have argued that a substantial number survived the fire and disappeared afterwards, whether in Aleppo or after the codex reached Israel, and members of the Aleppo community have said that the manuscript should never have left their keeping at all. Individual leaves have surfaced since. The atlas records the loss, records that the explanation for it is contested, and does not choose between the accounts on a reader's behalf.