Алеппо кодексі: Құдай сөзінің мың жылдық тарихы

10th century Hebrew Bible manuscript
the 2012 book about the codex

The Aleppo Codex (, romanized: Keṯer ʾĂrām Ṣōḇāʾ, lit. 'Crown of Aleppo') is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. Together with the Leningrad Codex, it contains the Aaron ben Moses ben Asher Masoretic Text tradition. The codex was kept for five centuries in the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, until the synagogue was torched during 1947 anti Jewish riots in Aleppo.

The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased the codex about a hundred years after it was made. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, the synagogue was plundered and the codex was held for a high ransom, which was paid with money coming from Egypt, leading to the codex being transferred there.

The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem received the book from Israel ben Simha of Basra sometime between 1040 and 1050. It was cared for by the brothers Hizkiyahu and Joshya, Karaite religious leaders who eventually moved to Fustat (today part of Old Cairo) in 1050. The codex, however, stayed in Jerusalem until the latter part of that century. The Aleppo Codex website cites two letters in the Cairo Geniza that describe how the inhabitants of Ashkelon borrowed money from Egypt to pay for the books. The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon, the more descriptive of the two, states that the money borrowed from Alexandria was used to "buy back two hundred and thirty Bible codices, a hundred other volumes, and eight Torah Scrolls." The documents were transported to Egypt via a caravan led and funded by the prominent Alexandrian official Abu’l Fadl Sahl b. Yūsha’ b. Sha‘yā, who was in Ascalon for his wedding in early 1100. Judeo Arabic inscriptions on the first page of the Codex mention the book was then "transferred to the Jerusalemite synagogue in Fustat." The Aleppo codex website reveals how the book changed hands. blockquote|[It was] transferred [ ] according to the law of redemption from imprisonment [in which it had fallen] in Jerusalem, the Holy City, may it be rebuilt and reestablished, to the congregation in Egypt of Knisat Yerushalayim, may it be built and established in the life of Israel. Blessed be he who preserves it and cursed be he who steals it, and cursed be he who sells it, and cursed be he who pawns it. It may not be sold and it may not be defiled forever. This secrecy made it impossible to confirm the authenticity of the Codex, and indeed Cassuto doubted that it was Maimonides' codex, though he agreed that it was tenth century.

During the 1947 Anti Jewish riots in Aleppo, the community's ancient synagogue was burned. Later, while the Codex was in Israel, it was found that no more than 294 of the original (estimated) 487 pages survived. The missing leaves are a subject of fierce controversy. Originally it was thought they were destroyed by fire, but scholarly analysis has shown no evidence of fire having reached the codex itself (the dark marks on the pages are due to fungus). In particular, the 2012 book The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman calls attention to the fact that eyewitnesses in Aleppo who saw the Codex shortly after the fire consistently reported that it was complete or nearly complete, and then there is no account of it for more than a decade, until after it arrived in Israel and was put, in 1958, in the Ben Zvi Institute, at which point it was as currently described; his book suggests a number of possibilities for the loss of the pages including theft in Israel. Documentary filmmaker Avi Dabach, great grandson of Hacham Ezra Dabach (one of the last caretakers of the Codex when it was still in Syria), announced in December 2015 an upcoming film tracing the history of the Codex and possibly determining the fate of the missing pages. The film, titled The Lost Crown (documentary) [he], was released in 2018.

In January 1958, the Aleppo Codex was smuggled out of Syria and sent to Jerusalem to be placed in the care of the chief rabbi of the Aleppo Jews. It was given first to Shlomo Zalman Shragai of the Jewish Agency, who later testified that the Codex was complete or nearly so at the time.

Later, after the university denied him access to the codex, Mordechai Breuer began his own reconstruction of the Masoretic text on the basis of other well known ancient manuscripts. His results matched the Aleppo Codex almost exactly. Thus today, Breuer's version is used authoritatively for the reconstruction of the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex. The Jerusalem Crown (כתר ירושלים, Keter Yerushalayim, lit. "Jerusalem Crown"), printed in Jerusalem in 2000, is a modern version of the Tanakh based on the Aleppo Codex and the work of Breuer: It uses a newly designed typeface based on the calligraphy of the Codex and is based on its page layout.

Among the Jewish community of Aleppo and their descendants in the post 1947 diaspora, the belief always was that the Codex holds great magical power and that the smallest piece of it can ensure the good health and well being of its owner. The ben Asher vocalization is late and in many respects artificial, compared to other traditions and tendencies reaching back closer to the period of spoken Biblical Hebrew. The Leningrad Codex, which dates to approximately the same time as the Aleppo codex, has been claimed by Paul E. Kahle to be a product of the ben Asher scriptorium. However, its colophon says only that it was corrected from manuscripts written by ben Asher; there is no evidence that ben Asher himself ever saw it. However, the same holds true for the Aleppo Codex, which was apparently not vocalized by ben Asher himself, although a later colophon, which was added to the manuscript after his death, attributes the vocalization to him. The community of Damascus possessed a counterpart of the Aleppo Codex, known as the Damascus Pentateuch in academic circles and as the "Damascus Keter", or "Crown of Damascus", in traditional Jewish circles. It was also written in Israel in the tenth century, and is now kept at the National Library of Israel as "ms. Heb 5702". It is available online here (This should not be confused with another Damascus Keter, of medieval Spanish origin.) The Aleppo Codex was the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down the exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah, Hilkhot Sefer Torah ("the Laws of the Torah Scroll") in his Mishneh Torah. In particular, only the last few pages of the Torah are extant. The ink was made of three types of gall, ground and mixed with black soot and iron sulfate.