It turns out that the Jews of Aleppo did not intend to give up the precious codex—the merchant to whom they had entrusted it had no right, they felt, to pass it along to the [Israeli] government. They wanted it back.

In Jerusalem, a gleaming white dome and a black basalt wall shield Israel’s greatest treasures—not bejeweled crowns or scepters but unadorned texts. Visitors to the Shrine of the Book, a wing of the Israel Museum, can descend a steep flight of stairs from the main hall, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display, and arrive at a small chamber that houses the oldest and most authoritative copy of the Hebrew Bible.

Or so it appears. In fact, the full Aleppo Codex, as the copy is called—a bound volume of vellum pages also known as the Crown of Aleppo—is stored in a nearby vault. Only its topmost leaf, the one that viewers see, is from the codex itself. The rest is a dummy, cleverly arranged by the curators to appear real. As Matti Friedman observes in “The Aleppo Codex,” a superb work of investigative journalism that reads like a detective thriller, this illusion is but the first sign that not everything about the codex is as it seems.

The story of the codex begins in 10th-century Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Two master scribes and philologists, facing the widening dispersal of Jewish communities, undertook to preserve the Jewish traditions that derive from the biblical text—not just from each letter but from each vowel, punctuation mark and cantillation mark. The scribes aimed to create a copy of the Hebrew Bible of such precision that it would serve as a template for all future versions. For the codex’s creators, philology was theology. They knew that layers of meaning can reside in a single syllable and that a single error can render a Torah scroll unusable.

A century later, their already revered codex migrated to Jerusalem and into the hands of a sect of strict biblical originalists, the Karaites, only to be plundered by Crusaders during the fall of the city in 1099. The codex was eventually ransomed back by the Jewish community in Egypt, where it was consulted by the philosopher Maimonides.

In the 14th century, the codex was spirited to the vibrant Jewish community in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. It was kept there for six centuries in the Cave of Elijah, a candle-lit grotto beneath the city’s Great Synagogue. For the Jews of Aleppo, the codex was a kind of talisman, protecting its own protectors from harm. Its removal, they believed, would portend the disastrous end of their community.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on online.wsj.com – however, the original URL is no longer available.]