The Disappearance of the World's Most Valuable Manuscript

Year: 1947. Location: Aleppo, Syria

The official story is well-known. The Aleppo Codex, the most famous manuscript in the Jewish world, attributed to the scribe Ben Asher and described by Maimonides, was kept in a special room beneath the ancient synagogue in Aleppo until November 29, 1947. The day after the UN adopted the partition plan, riots broke out in Aleppo. The synagogue was set ablaze, along with the cultural treasures within it. The synagogue's caretaker managed to save part of the codex, which was later smuggled into Israel and entrusted to the state. As for the rest of the manuscript - it was said to have been consumed by fire and lost to the world.

"It turns out that almost nothing from this story is true," says journalist Matti Friedman. The codex reached Israel through a cunning operation later validated by the rabbinical court, without the consent of the Aleppo rabbis. More critically, the question remains: where did 200 of the 500 original pages disappear?

Friedman discovered that contrary to the accepted story, there is no evidence that the codex was burned or even arrived in Israel with missing parts. "By all indications, the 'Codex' came to Israel almost entirely intact," says Friedman. "This implies that someone made sure to make them disappear here."

The investigation revealed that initially, the codex was held under shockingly poor conditions at the 'Ben Zvi Institute'. "Anyone could access it and do as they pleased," he says. "The fear is that this is exactly what happened."

In 1985, a Charedi Judaica dealer approached antiquities collector Shlomo Moussaieff and offered him 90 pages of the codex for an exorbitant sum. Moussaieff claims he declined the offer. Shortly thereafter, the dealer was found dead. The mystery of the missing pages remains unsolved.