For much of its history the Central Synagogue of Aleppo held something more consequential than its own congregation's worship: the Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible manuscript written and carefully vocalized in the tenth century, annotated by the scholar Aaron ben Asher and long regarded as the single most authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible in existence. Its route to Aleppo was reportedly circuitous, passing through Jerusalem, capture by the Crusaders and ransom by the Jews of Cairo, before it came to rest in an iron chest kept in a grotto within the synagogue, shown to visitors only rarely.
The community's custody of the manuscript was not casual. Aleppo's Jews held that harm would come to anyone who removed the codex from the city, a belief that functioned as a serious form of institutional protection across the centuries the synagogue guarded it.
That long custody ended abruptly in December 1947. Days after the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine, anti-Jewish riots broke out across several Middle Eastern cities, and in Aleppo a mob set fire to the synagogue, destroying much of its structure and, it was initially feared, the codex along with it. The manuscript in fact survived the fire, but not intact: when it resurfaced years later it was missing roughly a third of its original leaves, including almost the entire Torah portion, a loss never fully resolved.
Aleppo's Jewish community, numbering in the thousands before 1947, dwindled over the following decades to a handful of families, and the Syrian civil war beginning in 2011 placed the historic city under further strain. The surviving leaves of the Aleppo Codex are held today by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem rather than the synagogue that guarded them for so long.