Winner of the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity.

"In Crown of Aleppo, Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider tell the incredible story of the survival, against all odds, of the Aleppo Codex—one of the most authoritative and accurate traditional Masoretic texts of the Bible. Completed circa 939 in Tiberias, the Crown was created by exacting Tiberian scribes who copied the entire Bible into book form, adding annotations, vowel and cantillation marks, and precise commentary. Praised by Torah scholars for centuries after its writing, the Crown passed through history until the 15th century when it was housed in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria. When the synagogue was burned in the 1947 pogrom, the codex was thought to be destroyed, lost forever. That is where its great mystery begins. Miraculously, a significant portion of the Crown of Aleppo survived the fire and was smuggled from the synagogue ruins to an unknown location— presumably within the Aleppan Jewish community. Ten years later, the surviving pages of the codex were secretly brought to Israel and finally moved to their current location in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. "

Michael the Great was elected patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox church in a most instable period. He nevertheless, found time, clarity of mind, and determination to write a voluminous world chronicle, which he completed four years before he died in November 7, 1199. The present edition and its translation begin with Book XV and end with Book XXI, the last Book in the Chronicle, thereby covering more than 160 years, from AD 1031 to AD 1195.

A Global Community is pertinent to current discussions and debates concerning ethnic persistence and assimilation, transnational diasporas, and nationalism."--BOOK JACKET.

Translating the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia provides the princeps diplomatic edition and a comprehensive study of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hunt. 268. The manuscript, produced in the Iberian Peninsula in the late thirteenth century, features a biblical glossary-commentary in Hebrew that includes 2,018 glosses in the vernacular and 156 in Arabic, and to date is the only manuscript of these characteristics known to have been produced in this region. Esperanza Alfonso has edited the text and presents here a study of it, examining its pedagogical function, its sources, its exegetical content, and its extraordinary value for the study of biblical translation in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Sephardic Diaspora. Javier del Barco provides a detailed linguistic study and a glossary of the corpus of vernacular glosses. For a version with a list of corrections and additions, see https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/265401.

Keter Yerushalayim, the Jerusalem Crown, is the first edition of the Aleppo Codex as a printed Bible. This codex is the oldest known complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The famous grammarian and scribe Aaron ben Asher inserted the vocalization signs, accentuation marks and the Masorah. Because he also proofread the manuscript several times over, it became the authoritative text due to its accepted accuracy. After a long odyssey the codex found its way to Jerusalem in 1958, with unfortunately a major portion missing. In 1976 a facsimile of the manuscript was published and inspired the book edition closely resembling the original text. Thanks to the painstaking work of the renowned Scholar Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, the lost parts - almost the entire Pentateuch - could be reconstructed. To emulate the original, the Jerusalem Crown is laid out in three columns and employs a unique typeface re-creating the calligraphy of the Aleppo Codex. The census for the chapters and verses as well as the names of the weekly torah portions and their divisions for the synagogal reading were added. A short appendix explains the principles of the text recreation and lists the deviations from the standard Leningrad Codex. Dr. Mordechai Glatzer, a globally recognized expert in the history of printing, edited the companion volume. It contains contributions on various aspects of the manuscript's significance and an in-depth description of its history. Notably, Dr. Yosef Ofer's introduction to the Masorah clarifies from where the codex's authority stems and why its text can be regarded as nearly error free. The documentation folder of the Keter Yerushalayim contains an original set of pages, the Book of Ruth, and the original decorative front page with its gold printed title as a sample booklet, complete with an embossed cover of heavy crimson paper. There is also a sample chapter of the companion volume included in the set which is presented in a gold-embossed dark-blue folder of raw silk. The charge for the documentation kit will be credited if a copy of the numbered Special Edition is ordered subsequently.

“A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —The Wall Street Journal “Friedman’s sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.