Piece by piece, scholars hope to rescue the Aleppo Codex

It's been a long journey for the brittle pieces of parchment inked more than 1,000 years ago along the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

The manuscript considered the most authoritative text of the Bible, the Aleppo Codex, was studied by Maimonides, ransomed by Crusaders and ripped apart during rioting in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

A tiny patch of the codex even spent several decades in the wallet of a businessman from Brooklyn, N.Y. — Sam Sabbagh revered it as an amulet with sacred powers.

Several weeks ago that fragment was brought to Israel, prompting a new drive for the return of the text's other long missing pieces.

"Our feeling is that if there is one piece of it, there must be others," said Michael Glatzer, academic secretary of the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, which has worked to track and study the codex.

Last week the institute launched a new campaign to bring other missing pieces of the famous codex home to the Holy Land.

"There must have been other fragments held by people today who might not even know that it is the Aleppo Codex, who don't know this is the most important manuscript of the Bible," Glatzer said. "We are trying to reach out to Jews from Aleppo who live all around the world to see if they have [pieces] and if they will come forward.".

About 60 percent of the manuscript is in Israel. It was smuggled in from Syria by a Jewish family in 1958, but more than a third of it remains incomplete. Originally it was assumed that the remainder was burned during the anti-Jewish riots that broke out in Aleppo in 1947 following the United Nations vote in favor of partitioning Palestine.

But an additional page presented by a Syrian Jewish family in the 1980s and recent forensic testing on the part of the manuscript that is in Israel found that the codex was not burned. That fueled speculation that other pieces may yet be found.

"We are like detectives trying to hunt down these missing pages," said Yosef Ofer, a professor in Bar-Ilan University's Bible department and an expert on the text.

"Some of it did possibly burn or could have been stolen," Ofer said. "Other parts could be with people, but so many years have passed that it might be in the hands of the second or third generation who do not realize what they have in their hands."

Glatzer said the institute is negotiating with several former members of the Aleppo community in the hopes of retrieving at least part of the remaining codex. He would not give any further details for fear of disrupting progress.

The Jews of Aleppo, who trace their origins in the city to the period following the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, saw the codex as something holy in itself — a relic that protected them.

Indeed, it was soon after the synagogue that housed the codex was set ablaze in the 1947 riots that the Aleppo community fled to cities across the world.

"It had an aura of sanctity beyond scholarly value. They were protective of it," Glatzer said of the codex, which is also known as the Masoretic Text.

Sabbagh, the Brooklyn businessman, found his small piece of the codex on the floor of the Aleppo synagogue after the 1947 riots. For years he kept it in his wallet, refusing to part with it. He even kept it with him during open heart surgery.

"This is the No. 1 asset of the Jewish people," Zvi Zameret, the director of Yad Ben-Zvi Institute, said at a news conference. "And I believe the Jewish people would do a great deal to have it back."