In 1957, two Aleppo rabbis, fearing their community was approaching its demise, decided to take advantage of a chance to smuggle the codex to Aleppo Jews now living in Israel. Murad Faham, an Aleppo Jewish merchant who had been expelled from Syria, was chosen for the mission. “Just before I left,” Faham, who died in 1982, would later relate, “Rabbi Moshe Tawil said to me, ‘I want to tell you something, but I fear for your well-being, because this thing is a danger to your life, and whoever is caught doing it will be executed by hanging.’ ” Faham, who would take every opportunity later to trumpet his own courage, recounted that he told the rabbi: “With the help of God, I will take it out. Don’t worry about my life, because if the Creator of the Universe has decreed that the book be taken out by me, it will be a great miracle that the Creator of the Universe is performing for my sake.”

A man in charge of looking after the codex arrived at Faham’s residence carrying a sack that contained the precious cargo. According to a report based on an investigation conducted later, Faham’s wife “was aware of the importance of the contents of the sack and of the risks involved, and without opening it, she wrapped it up in sheets of cheesecloth” — the family earned its living making cheese — “and blankets and hid it in a washing machine.”

According to the official story told by the Ben-Zvi Institute, the head rabbis of Aleppo employed Faham to deliver the codex to President Ben-Zvi, and through him to the institute. But a number of documents, examined by Matti Friedman and discussed in his book, reveal an entirely different story. The rabbis in Aleppo did not enlist Faham to deliver the codex to the president or his institute, but rather to the chief rabbi of the Aleppo Jews. What the rabbis never suspected was that Israeli agents from the Mossad and the Jewish Agency (which was in charge of the Jewish diaspora and of immigration to Israel) had been in touch with Faham and that he would receive special treatment upon immigration to Israel.

Officials from the Jewish Agency met Faham in Turkey and informed authorities in Jerusalem of all his movements. When Faham arrived safely at the port in Haifa, instead of handing the codex to a representative of the Aleppo community, he handed it to a member of the Jewish Agency’s immigration department, who passed it on to President Ben-Zvi.

“The official version of the story, the one I knew at the outset, states that the Aleppo Codex was given willingly to the State of Israel,” Friedman told me. “But that never happened. It was taken. The state authorities believed they were representatives of the entire Jewish people and that they were thus the book’s rightful owners, and also, perhaps, that they could care for it better. But those considerations don’t change the mechanics of the true story — government officials engineered a sophisticated, international maneuver in which the codex was seized from the Jews of Aleppo, and then arranged a remarkably successful cover-up of the fascinating and unpleasant details of the affair.”

In February 1958, leaders of the Aleppo Jews petitioned the rabbinical court to order Ben-Zvi to return the codex to them. During the course of the trial, the two Aleppo rabbis who gave the book to Faham testified angrily that they had instructed him to hand it to the chief rabbi of the community in Israel, not to anyone else. Faham claimed that they left it to him to decide what should be done with it. Ben-Zvi’s counsel asked that the details of the trial be kept secret, which remained so for 50 years.

Ezra Kassin, the head of the organization of Aleppo Jews in Israel today, has investigated the story of the codex and the fate of its missing pages for many years. He and Friedman recently managed to obtain the secret trial transcripts. According to the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Faham’s testimony was full of contradictions. On March 27, the counsel for the state reported to President Ben-Zvi that Faham’s cross-examination “reached very high tension; but Mr. Faham stuck to his story.” During the trial, representatives of the Aleppo Jewish community accused Faham of accepting perks from the Israeli establishment and Ben-Zvi’s associates in exchange for handing the codex over to them, a charge that Faham denied. This month, I had a long conversation with his son at a shopping mall near Tel Aviv. He claimed that, first, it was his father and not the synagogue’s sexton who rescued the codex after the synagogue was attacked (in his story, Faham went into the flames to rescue the book); and second, that Faham smuggled it out of Syria because he believed that it belonged to the Jewish people and not to one community. Everything else, the son asserted, was a pack of lies. “My father never gave the codex to the [Aleppo] rabbis in Israel because he feared they would sell it,” he said. “He never received any perks from anyone.”