The Keter in the fire: the Aleppo pogrom
After the UN partition vote a pogrom swept Aleppo: the great synagogue was set alight, and in it burned the Keter Aram Tzova—the codex Maimonides had relied on. The community snatched it from the fire and hid it for ten years.
On 29 November 1947 the UN voted to partition Palestine; within a day or two crowds moved through Aleppo. Houses, shops, schools and synagogues burned—the great synagogue among them, whose crypt had held the Keter Aram Tzova for six centuries.
At first the world believed the Keter lost: so it was reported. The truth came out later—men of the community had carried the codex from the fire and hid it for ten years, moving it from cache to cache and answering no questions. In 1958 it was brought secretly, through Turkey, to Jerusalem and handed to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; the Ben-Zvi Institute keeps it, and it stands in the Shrine of the Book.
The count of losses is heavy: of some 487 leaves, 294 survive. Nearly the whole Torah burned or vanished—the very part for which the Keter was the standard. For Aleppo's community the pogrom was the beginning of the end: a city where Jews had lived since the days of the Genizah letters emptied within a generation.
How we know
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Ben-Zvi Institute: the file of the Keter — the pogrom, the rescue, the 1958 crossing, the count of leaves
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the riots in Syria after the vote of 29 November 1947
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
The Keter Aram Tzova (Aleppo Codex) · Aram Tzova—Aleppo · Aaron ben Asher · Rambam