Biblical Archaeology Review

Last week, the New York Times reported that the ancient city of Aleppo, Syria had just laid out plans for a major historical restoration. Coincidentally, Aleppo is the setting of our latest book due out this week: Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex by Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider. The book tells the incredible story of the Aleppo Codex, the most authoritative and accurate traditional Masoretic texts of the Bible. Because of its importance, it became known as the Crown of Aleppo. It traveled through Jerusalem and Cairo before finding a home at the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, where it remained until the synagogue was burned down in 1947. The Crown was believed to be lost forever, but it was discovered that most of it survived when it was smuggled into Israel in 1958 and later brought to its current home at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The Crown of Aleppo is not the only historical text that was thought to be lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 850 manuscripts, categorized as biblical, apocryphal, or sectarian, dating back to 250 B.C.E. through 68 C.E. They were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in Qumran, located on Dead Sea’s northwestern shores. Many scholars believe that the scrolls were written by a sect of Jews called the Essenes, who settled in the Judean Desert and disappeared after the Romans destroyed their settlements in 68 C.E. The Dead Sea Scrolls are now displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum located in Jerusalem.

A couple years ago, Geraldine Brooks published the award-winning People of the Book, a fictional history of a real text, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs, was written in Barcelona around 1350. After the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 it was brought to Sarajevo. The Haggadah reappeared in 1894, when was sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo. Notes written in the margins of the book have given historians clues about the book’s travels during the 300 years the book was missing.  During World War II, the Haggadah was hidden from the Nazis by the museum’s librarian who smuggled it out of Sarajevo and brought it to a Muslim cleric to hide. Then, in the 1990s, the Haggadah disappeared again during the Bosnian civil war, when the museum was broken into. It was rediscovered in 1995 and has been on permanent display in the museum since 2002 thanks to the help of the United Nations and the Jewish community of Bosnia.

These texts have been crucial in our knowledge of Jewish history. In many ways they are like the Jewish people. They have overcome war and destruction, yet they still stand strong today as a source of inspiration for us and for future generations.

For more information on the Crown of Aleppo: http://www.aleppocodex.org/

To read an article about author Dr. Hayim Tawil: http://spider.mc.yu.edu/news/articles/article.cfm?id=102020

-Jill Finkelstein