Place · Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia
Aleppo
Syrian city where the Aleppo Codex of the Masorete Aharon ben Asher was kept. The coordinate is that of Aleppo's Great Mosque in Pleiades, used as an approximate point for the city.
36.1993°N 37.1569°E · representative coordinate · approximate · Pleiades 964860496 ↗
Statements linked to this place
Each block is a sourced statement. Click the number to see the cited page.
The Palestinian tradition stayed dominant in fixing the standard text of the Bible. The Masoretes of Tiberias, active in the eighth and ninth centuries, fixed the proper reading of the biblical text and supplied it with vowels and chanting signs. The Aleppo Codex, the oldest surviving medieval manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, was made by the Tiberian Masoretic sage Aharon ben Asher and finished about 900. When Frankish armies took Jerusalem in 1099 they barred Jews from residing in the town; Jewish life there restarted solely once troops under Salah al-Din recaptured it 88 years later. A rabbi from nearby Aleppo testified to the Crusaders' ravages in Palestine. The book's timeline also records the devastation of Jewish institutions of learning in Jerusalem.