One of the world’s oldest known Bibles has been brought back to Israel, smuggled page by page by Jewish immigrants from Syria, an Israeli newspaper recently reported.
The Aleppo Codex, known as the Keter Aram Tsova in Hebrew, was written in Tiberias about 1,000 years ago. It is the first known Bible produced in book form and not on scrolls, said biblical scholar Menachem Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.
It is also considered the most authoritative and grammatically perfect copy of the Old Testament in existence, Cohen said.
The book is believed to have been seized in Jerusalem by 12th-century crusaders and sold to Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, where Maimonides is said to have studied it while composing some of his most important works.
It subsequently found its way to the Jewish community of Aleppo in northern Syria. The Jews there apparently guarded the book zealously, rarely allowing outsiders to see the parchment.
About two-thirds of it – 295 pages – was smuggled into Israel under still mysterious circumstances in the 1950s.
For decades, Jews were not allowed to emigrate from Syria. Only in past few years, after the Middle East peace process began, did Syrian President Hafez Assad allow the Jews to leave.
As a result, recent Syrian Jewish immigrants reportedly brought the missing pages of the Bible to Israel.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
