The Central Synagogue of Aleppo's fame rests on the manuscript it once held, but the building itself carries a history considerably older than that custody. Tradition credits its earliest foundation to the biblical general Joab, a legend without documentary support, but the synagogue's western wing, its genuinely oldest surviving section, has been dated architecturally to the fifth or sixth century, and an inscription surviving within the complex bears the date 834, making parts of the structure among the oldest continuously used synagogue fabric anywhere in the world regardless of what it later housed.
That continuity was broken once, badly, centuries before the twentieth century's violence. Tamerlane's Mongol invasion of Aleppo in 1400 destroyed the synagogue along with much of the city, and the Jewish community did not complete its reconstruction until 1418, eighteen years later, working in a Byzantine architectural idiom organized around a large open central courtyard, a design later Ottoman era additions preserved rather than replaced. A third section, the eastern wing, was added afterward specifically to accommodate Sephardic Jews arriving in Aleppo following their 1492 expulsion from Spain, physically recording in stone a wave of migration the wider Sephardic diaspora carried across the Mediterranean.
That layered building, western wing, courtyard, eastern wing, each added centuries apart for a different community's needs, was what eventually held the Aleppo Codex in its final resting place, an iron chest set into a grotto below floors that had already stood for a millennium by the time the manuscript reached them, a building whose own history the Codex's fame has largely eclipsed.