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

Author:Matti Friedman [Friedman, Matti]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Religion, Azizex666, History
ISBN: 9781616200404
Google: hffyfz5zwu0C
Amazon: 1616200405
Barnesnoble: 1616200405
Goodreads: 13606183
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

19

The Officer and the Scroll

THE LAWYER’S PONTIAC sped through deserted streets toward the old border between Jerusalem’s eastern and western sectors, then across it. The rattle of gunfire was audible from the direction of the Old City, where Jordanian troops were holding out. It was June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War.

The Pontiac was currently in the custody of the Israel Defense Forces, and it had a new driver: Rafi Sutton, originally of Aleppo, last seen just after his arrival on a beach in northern Israel. Dear soldier, read a note that the car’s owner, an attorney from Haifa, left on the dashboard when the army commandeered his car a few weeks before the outbreak of fighting, may this vehicle bring you safely to your destination. Please take care of it.

Sutton, now thirty-five, was an officer in military intelligence. His mission that day, it turned out, would have nearly nothing to do with the war. Instead it would make him a bit player in the saga of a collection of manuscripts far more famous than the one from his own city, and it would serve as an illustration of the importance of ancient texts in the eyes of some in Israel’s halls of power—and of the lengths to which they were willing to go to obtain them.

Sutton’s sharp mind and native Arabic had helped him work his way up the ranks of the army’s intelligence branch, running agents in the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem, compiling dossiers, recruiting informers, and debriefing them in safe houses along the frontier. In the divided Jerusalem of the 1950s, Sutton discovered that useful connections could be made by frequenting Mandelbaum Gate, the crossing point between the two halves of the city, where Israeli and Jordanian officers met for regular talks on the 1949 armistice agreement that had split the city between them. He would come to chat up the Jordanians, changing his Arabic from the Syrian dialect to that of the local Palestinians. One of his early intelligence successes involved a Jordanian official who believed he was passing military secrets to an Arab leader, when in fact the man the officer believed was his liaison with the leader was passing the secrets to Sutton. This network was blown after a few productive years when the Jordanians caught one of Sutton’s couriers on his way to a rendezvous along the border. Sutton’s deputy around the time of the war, Samuel Nachmias, remembered his commander walking through Jerusalem massaging worry beads like an Arab. The deputy, with the direct style of native-born sabras, would take twenty minutes to debrief an agent, he recalled; Sutton, schooled in the intricate pleasantries of conversation in the Arab world, would take hours. Sutton invariably got better information, Nachmias said. These skills are important to the story of the Aleppo Codex because, much later, Sutton would use them against his own community in an attempt to shed light on the fate of the Crown.

The Syrian Jew was known as

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