Winner of the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize

Winner of the American Library Association's 2013 Sophie Brody Medal

Winner of the 2013 Canadian Jewish Book Award for history

One of Booklist's top ten religion books of the year, 2013

Finalist, Religion Newswriters Association award for best religion book of 2013

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. By the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex.

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 secret agents, pious clergymen, obsessive antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity.

Friedman has unearthed documents kept secret for fifty years, interviewed key players from around the world, and followed the trail of the missing pages up to the present, including the charged four-year court battle to determine the codex's rightful owners. Friedman also takes us back in time, revealing the once vibrant Jewish communities in Islamic lands. Epic in its sweep, The Aleppo Codex features a fascinating cast of characters—all of whom claim the codex as their own.

The Aleppo Codex is published in the U.S. by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; in Australia by Scribe; in Israel by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir; in the Czech Republic by Pistorius; in Germany by Verlag Herder; in Holland by Lannoo; in Russia by Text; in France by Albin Michel; and in Korea by Gloseum.