The Aleppo Codex
The most intriguing detective story in Jewish studies
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10 September 2017, 19:00
Matti Friedman's book, The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, published in May 2012 by Algonquin Books, is an account of how the Aleppo Codex, "the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible," came to reside in Israel. It was believed the codex had been destroyed during the 1947 Anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo when the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, where the codex was housed, was set on fire and badly damaged. Friedman also investigates how and why many of the codex's pages went missing and what their fate might be.