Aleppo's Jews were told their 1,000-year-old Bible was burned in 1947; it reached Israel in 1957, and the community sued for it

The Aleppo Codex is a 10th-century Hebrew Bible. Aaron ben Asher added the vowels and notes. It was given to the Karaite community of Jerusalem in the 11th century. Crusaders took it when they captured Jerusalem in 1099 and held it for ransom. The Karaite community of Cairo paid. Maimonides consulted it in Egypt. It was taken to Aleppo in the 14th century and kept in the Great Synagogue for over 500 years. In December 1947 rioters burned the synagogue. The official account says pages were lost in the fire. In 1957 the cheese merchant Murad Faham smuggled the codex out of Syria. According to the court records found by the journalist Matti Friedman, the community's rabbis told Faham to deliver it to an Aleppo-born rabbi. He handed it to state officials, who gave it to President Ben-Zvi's institute. In 1958 the Aleppo community sued in a rabbinical court. The case lasted four years and was settled out of court, with custody going to the Ben-Zvi Institute. About 294 of an estimated 487 pages survive, and most of the Torah is missing. The codex is shown at the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The missing pages have not been found.