13 Tishrei / Heshvan 5773 / 3325 from Exodus / October / November 2012

The Jewish Journey Through hisTory

Tishrei 5773 October 2012 3325 from Exodus www.segulamag.com Issue 13

WANDERERS
OF THE WORLD
Pilgrims progress

HESCHEL Twentieth centur

prop et on the

Pilgrimage | Heschel | Gamla | Argentina | Aleppo Codex

Romans

roofs

of Gamla

Learning Hebrew til the Cows Come Home

39 NIS

Contents Issue 13

October/November | Tishrei/ Heshvan

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Together in Spirit

COLUMNS
62 16 26 34

What do the many places of pilgrimage have in common? And what do so many pilgrims find there? In a world full of lonely people, increasing numbers of both Jews and non-Jews are seeking inspiration, solace, and healing sometimes in the most unlikely places Dov Kesselman

6 12 14 60 64 66 67

Snapshots Picture of the Month This Month in History Heads and Tales In-sites Trivia Contributors

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Critics
56 The inexplicable exploits of the Vilna Gaon provide Arie Morgenstern with the basis for a new messianic theory | Elka Weber 58 Journalist Matti Friedmans scoop on the lost pages of the Aleppo Codex reads like a thriller Elli Fischer

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26 Twentieth-Century Prophet
More than any of his scholarly works or popular lectures, Abraham Joshua Heschels life story was the truest embodiment of his belief in a Jewish philosophy with a message for all mankind | Dror Bondi

Argentina

44 The Jerusalem of

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In the dying Jewish communities of Moiss Ville and Basavilbaso, old-timers complain that they sowed wheat but reaped doctors. What happened to the vibrant Yiddish Zionist culture created by the Jewish gauchos? | Hana Holland

34 Romans on the Roof

The rooftops of Gamla proved to be the nemesis of the Roman legions in the Great Revolt of 70 CE, if only temporarily. Was it the weighty equipment carried by the legionaries that brought about their downfall, or did the clifftop city possess a secret weapon? | Hughie Auman

Archives

62 From the
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A synagogue notebook provides surprising insights into the seating arrangements in a long-forgotten congregation and the bitter arguments that went with them | Yochai Ben-Ghedalia

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October/November 2012

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The Jewish Journey through History

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Critics

A Biblical Detective Story

An exciting new book probes the mysterious disappearance of parts of the Aleppo Codex allegedly from under the noses of Israeli officials | Elli Fischer
n the age of digital readers, books are fast becoming mere packets of infinitely duplicable data. The book as an object, a thing to hold in ones hand, will become obsolete within a generation. Once upon a time, however, some books were literally oneof-a-kind. The movement from printed to digital books is not Jewish historys first radical change in information technology. Not even the printing press, perhaps the most influential invention of the past thousand years, was first. At some point in the latter part of the first millennium, Jews shifted from the scroll to the codex (Christians made the switch several centuries earlier). A codex is handwritten like a scroll but bound in the center and folded into book form. Codices have several advantages over scrolls. For one thing, they are cheaper, since both sides of the parchment are used. They are also slimmer and more portable. Perhaps most important, whereas a scroll must be read sequentially, codices can be opened to any page. A codex may thus serve more easily as a reference work or as a master copy, against which all others may be checked. With respect to the Hebrew Bible, the master copy was composed in 10th-century Tiberias in the scriptorium of the famed Ben-Asher family of masoretes (experts in the vocalization and cantillation of Hebrew Scripture). The Ben-Asher codex is the subject of Matti Friedmans outstanding new book, The Aleppo Codex. Friedman traces the codexs journey from Tiberias to Jerusalem to Egypt, where none other than Maimonides deemed it the authoritative version of the Torah. In the 14th century it was moved to Aleppo, Syria, where

it remained until the late 1950s. The crux of Friedmans story, though, is what happened in the decade between the ransacking of Aleppos Jewish Quarter in November 1947 and the immediate aftermath of the arrival of the codex in Israel in 1958, during which around twofifths of the manuscript including the vast majority of the Pentateuch disappeared.

The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible
Matti Friedman
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012 298 pages

Most damning is the fact that there is no record of any missing pages until the codex was already officially in Israeli custody
The official version of events, espoused by the codexs current custodians at Jerusalems BenZvi Institute, is that the pages went missing or were burnt during the 1947 pogrom. Friedman, an investigative journalist by trade, believes otherwise. Describing his reaction after reading the institutes own book-length account of the codexs rescue, the author comments: I got the impression, the amplitude of which inched upward with the page numbers, that the author was going to great lengths not to reveal something, or many things, and I closed the book with the unsettling feeling that I knew less than I had when I opened it.

the series of hands through which the codex passed between Aleppo and Jerusalem. Having established that it was not significantly damaged by fire, he begins to investigate other central questions: What really happened? And why, and by whom, was the truth covered up? For Friedman, anyone who handled the codex during the fateful decade is suspect, from the cheese merchant who smuggled it out of Syria to Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and his associates. Most damning, though, is the fact that there is no record of any missing pages until the codex was officially in Israeli custody. Although Friedman leaves open the possibility that unscrupulous individuals were responsible for the disappearance, his main criticism is reserved for the State of Israels handling of the entire affair. The irony of a largely secular Ashkenazic apparatus taking a condescending attitude toward a literary treasure guarded faithfully by a Sephardic religious community for centuries and promptly losing nearly half of its pages is not lost on the author or his readers: A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it. It fell victim to the instincts it was created to temper and was devoured by the creatures it was meant to save. The Aleppo Codex is indeed one of a kind, whether one sees it as an indispensable and authoritative text, a talisman, a treasure of the Jewish people, or a collectors item for which one would be willing to pay a small fortune or commit a crime. In Friedmans book, we
The Jewish Journey through History

encounter individuals representing all of these views, and their opaque motives, conspiracies, and misdirections are sure to make the readers bile rise.

A fragment of the Aleppo Codex encased in plastic, currently housed in the Israel Museum
Photo: AP

Whodunit?

Garbled Transmission
The Masoretic Bible draws its name from the masorah, the transmission of the text and its meaning from master to disciple. Friedman focuses on a different kind of transmission:
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Though a work of non-fiction, The Aleppo Codex is definitely a page-turner. Marshaling all his skills as a seasoned reporter and writer, the author manages to deploy the history and scholarship of the codex without getting bogged down in technical details. The book is organized in order of Friedmans discoveries rather than according to the chronology of events surrounding the codex itself. This arrangement provides a narrative arc, drawing the reader into the authors own experience as the thrill of his revelations descends into cynical disillusion with the lies, condescension, and perhaps corruption at the heart of the lost pages disappearance, and possibly the heart of the state. n
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