The Jewish Book Counsil has announced Matti Friedman, author of THE ALEPPO CODEX, winner of the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the most lucrative literary prize in the world for young writers. The Rohr Prize – given annually since 2007 and factoring the author’s potential to make significant ongoing contributions to Jewish literature – honors emerging writers who explore the Jewish experience in a specific work.

Matti Friedman’s book is an account of his investigation into the remarkable story of one of the world’s most precious manuscripts: The Aleppo Codex, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible.

Written a millennium ago by a scribe at the Sea of Galilee, the codex was stolen by the Crusaders, ransomed by Jews and spirited from Jerusalem to Egypt, where it was studied by the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. In the fourteenth century, it was brought to the Syrian trading city of Aleppo, where it was concealed in an ancient synagogue for six hundred years. In November, 1947, when the United Nations voted to create the state of Israel, a mob of Syrian rioters burned the synagogue, and the codex seemed to have vanished.

Based on extensive documentary evidence, most of it never before published, as well as hundreds of hours of interviews, this extraordinary book uncovers the true story of what happened to the codex. Torn from its hiding place, the manuscript was thrown into the turbulence of the twentieth-century Middle East, smuggled across borders, lied about and fought over.

THE ALEPPO CODEX follows the trail from Aleppo to Jerusalem and then to London and New York, through a dramatic trial, two thefts, and a murder. The cast includes Mossad agents, antiquities dealers and collectors, rabbis, and scholars with something to hide. Friedman, an AP correspondent, tells the fascinating story of how the codex came back to its current home in Jerusalem, and unravels an enduring mystery surrounding the codex – the disappearance of some two hundred of its priceless pages – and brings the investigation to an unexpected conclusion.

Rights sold to:
USA, Algonquin Books; Germany, Herder Verlag; France, Albin Michel; Holland, Lanoo Publishers; Australia: Scribe Publications; Czech Republic, Pistorius; Korea, Gloseum; Israel, Kinneret Zmora Bitan

Reviews:

”The Aleppo Codex could be read as a thriller. It could also be read as a history of the Jewish people, or as a meditation on history and myth... This great book comes closer to containing everything than any book I’ve read in a long, long time.”
Jonathan Safran Foer

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