The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible

Overview

Listened to on Hoopla from the Pima County Library, finished 2026-10-29. Recommended. A few times I felt I wanted to look up something earlier in the book, but that’s hard to do with an audiobook during commuting.

Review

This book tells the fascinating tale of the recovery and theft of the Aleppo Codex.

The early part of the book is written in a nonlinear style alternating between medieval and modern history. (The jumps are a little annoying in audio format.)

While the medieval history is a bit sparse, the modern history is well fleshed out. The author (Matti Friedman) is an Israeli journalist by trade and he interviewed several people inside and outside of Israel to get the story.

Of course, like most real stories, there is no neat conclusion. But there are certainly several bad actors, not least of which is the Israeli state who essentially stole the book from the Aleppo Jewish community. A theme of the book is that Israel’s European (Ashkenazi) Jewish leadership frequently disregarded the concerns of middle eastern Jewish communities, taking several books and scrolls from them for ‘safekeeping’ because ostensibly the communities couldn’t care for the books themselves. Never mind they’d been doing it for hundreds of years.

This is particularly interesting because several books went missing from the Ben Zvi Library. The author suggests that this might be when the Torah section of the Aleppo Codex went missing. (He gives this theory the final place in the book.) But there were several hands involved in getting the Codex to Israel, so it’s inconclusive when the Torah and sections of the Prophets went missing.