EDWARD D. ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House. He has authored ninety-two books. Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV).
Isaiah 40:8 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)
8 The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God…
In six months I will mark the end of my first century. I have been searching for a way to celebrate my hundredth birthday that will give the world something worthwhile after I am gone.
A year ago I wrote on these pages that the Cairo codex, with its 13 full-page illustrations called carpet pages, has been hidden from the public in the basement of the Israel National Library in Jerusalem.
I decided to liberate the Cairo codex from the shackles of fear that have kept it hidden.
The Cairo codex is one of three attributed to the Ben Asher Karaite scribes who lived near Tiberias and Cairo in the 10th to 12th centuries. Named after the cities in which they were found by Western scholars in the 19th century they are the Leningrad, Aleppo and Cairo codexes.
The Cairo codex is the oldest. It was written and illustrated by Moses Ben Asher. It took him 25 years, he wrote at he end. Many of the unique carpet pages are written in micrography. Lines made up of tiny Hebrew letters spelling Biblical verses.
The Karaites are almost as old as the rabbis who wrote the oral law. The Karaites say that it is neither oral nor law.
The Karaites were the preservers of the masorah, the text of the Bible. The words we read today are he same as those in the Cairo and Aleppo codexes, which were vocalized by Moses Ben Asher's son Aharon.
The Leningrad codex was acquired in Cairo by a Karaite collector from Crimea, Abraham Firkovich, about the time that Abraham Lincoln was fighting to preserve the union. Firkovich was a leader of the Karaite nationalists who denied that they were Jews and thus acquired civil rights denied to Jews.
Firkovich's vast collection was inherited by the Soviets and is housed at the Russian national library. The Russians have published a facsimile edition of the Leningrad codex which Amazon is selling for $960. Firkovich had also acquired one of the carpet pages of the Cairo codex which they use for the cover of the Leningrad codex.
The Russian facsimile edition of their codex, which uses a carpet page from the Cairo codex as a cover, gave me an idea. I would subsidize a facsimile edition of the Cairo codex, with the remaining 13 carpet pages in all their magnificent color and gold leaf.
I wrote to Aviad Skollman, curator of Hebrew manuscripts at the Israel National Library, whom I had identified a year ago as the custodian of he codex, and to Neria Haroeh, president of the Karaite community in Israel, who were the owners of the codex.
I wrote that 40 years ago the sexton of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo had asked me to photograph the carpet pages and give the slides to the Hebrew University. The sexton did not tell me that many years before the Hebrew University had hired a professional photographer take pictures of all 565 pages of the codex and that these pictures were used in a facsimile edition published in Jerusalem in 1971 but for reasons unknown the carpet pages were not reproduced in this facsimile edition.
Neither Skollman nor Haroeh replied to my email offering them money. So I went to see them on my visit to my family in Israel last month.
I found Skollman to be a pleasant outgoing young man who is trying his best to educate the Israeli public with the material he has. He has gathered together a dozen odd ancient Hebrew manuscripts and calls them Keter Damesek, the Crown of Damascus, emulating the Aleppo Jews who called their codex Keter Aleppo.
He has published eleven 2x6 cards with excerpts from the ancient manuscripts. None of them begin to compare with the Cairo codex, which is lying in his basement and which he is forbidden to mention by its owners, the Karaite community in Israel.
And that is a shame.
I asked him to get a copy of the 1971 facsimile edition to confirm my guess that it did not contain the carpet pages. He went to the archive and was back in a jiffy. I marveled at the efficiency of their modern retrieval system as I recalled waiting for the arrival of a requested book in the reading room of the Fifth Avenue library in Manhattan.
Skollman riffed through the pages twice. Much to his surprise there were no carpet pages.
I told Skollman that Moment magazine was planning to mark my hundredth birthday in December with the first publication of the photo of the codex that I took in 1974 together with an interview. I would relate that the sexton told me that the 14th carpet page was stolen by a Russian. I asked Skollman whether he would release to Moment the photos taken by the Hebrew University 70 years ago. He looked surprised and shook his head.
My interview with Neria Haroeh, president of the Karaite community in Israel was as unpleasant as the interview with Skollman was pleasant.
Haroeh proved to be a young and bitter man of 30. "I was not born in Cairo and neither was my father," he said, but he is doing his best to hold the families that originated in Cairo together. They are fast assimilating into Israel society.
As for the Cairo codex, it is still in Cairo, he asserted, and any publication to the contrary would harm the Karaites. The American Karaite who had informed me that he had seen the codex in the basement of the national library was "stupid."
None of my arguments that his fears were groundless, that he owed it to the world to publish Moshe Ben Asher's fabulous contribution to Jewish art, would budge him.
So I will have to look elsewhere to celebrate the beginning of my second century in December.
Jews come in many shapes and colors. One of the strangest is the Karaites, founded in the 7th century by a charismatic Jew named Anan Ben David. He totally rejected the holiness of the Talmud and strictly obeyed only the 613 mitzvot found in the Torah.
The Karaite claim to fame: Scribes who lived in and near Tiberius in the 9th and 10th centuries. They were the preservers of the Masoretic text of the Bible as we know it today. They wrote many Bibles on parchment in book form instead of a scroll. A Bible in book form is called a codex.
Three of these Bibles were discovered by scholars in the 19th century. They are known by the cities in which they were found, Cairo, Aleppo and Leningrad. All three were were written by Karaites and were in the possession of the Cairo Karaites at one time. Each codex has its history inscribed on the last page. It is called a colophon.
This column will deal with the Ben Asher family of scribes, father and son, who were attacked by the Sa'adia Gaon, a contemporary Rabbinate scholar, as dangerous heretics.
The father, Moshe Ben Asher, wrote the oldest codex, now called the Cairo codex. According to the colophon, it took him 25 years. It was finished in 894 and presented to the Jerusalem Karaite community by the wealthy Karaite Ya'abes Ben Shlomo al-Bably, who had commissioned it and paid all expenses for 25 years.
The Cairo codex consists of Neviim, the Prophets, the second book of the Bible. A scribe can write the entire Bible in a few years. Why did it take Moshe Ben Asher 25 years? I could not find any scholar who had addressed this question, but to me the reason is obvious.
I took him 25 years because he he had designed 14 carpet pages and meticulously drew them in micrography, complex geometric patterns in which all the lines are actually tiny Hebrew letters that spell out biblical phrases. These are wonderful examples of medieval Jewish art which have been ignored for a thousand years.
There were only 13 carpet pages in 1974 when the sexton of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo, who knew that I was going on to Israel, invited me to photograph the 13 carpet pages and give the slides to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The 14th carpet page was "stolen" said the sexton, and taken to Russia.
I did as I was told but the university wasn't much interested. "We have a complete set of photos," they said. They were not interested in carpet pages.
A recent inquiry at the Hebrew Univeristy failed to unearth my photos or any record of them.
I made copies of a few of them and piblished one on a full page in color in the March 1979 issue of Hadassah Magazine, which I edited for 34 years. I examined it last week. It is magnificent.
I found a second carpet page on the Internet under "micrography." I learned that the Moses Ben Asher pages are the earliest known examples of micrography. A carpet page with a complex design accompanies the article on the Internet. Also on the Internet under "Cairo codex" you can click all 575 pages of the Prophets, from Joshua to Malachi. But no carpet pages.
Here is another example of Karaite indifference to the carpet pages. During Pesah I took advantage of the Seder which I hosted in Oakland, Calif., for 26 Lurie relatives to attend the Sabbath services at the Karaite synagogue in Daly City. The service, which superficially resembles Orthodox prayers, is actually totally different except for the reading from the Torah scroll. I counted four scrolls when the ark was opened. A full description of the service will have to wait for another column.
David Ovadia, 62, a former president of the congregation who arruved in the Bay area 50 years ago along with his parents and many other Cairo Karaites, handed me a 21-page brochure on the history of the two Ben Asher codices. It was written in 2004 by Murad al-Qudsi, a Karaite historian who has since passed away.
On the last page the historian reproduces one of the carpet pages with the simple caption: "A decorative page from the Mozshe Ben Asher codex."
There is no mention of the carpet pages in the 21 pages of the brochure. To the Karaite and non-Karaite scholars, who studied the codex, they were decorations which could be ignored.
Only the sexton who asked me to photograph them in 1974 recognized their importance. He told me that that Nasser had proclaimed the codex a national treasure of Egypt but the Karaites intended to smuggle it out.
According to Mr. Al-Qudsi they succeeded 10 years later. He writes that the codex left Cairo in 1984. From another source, the New York Times, we learn that there were only a handful of Karaites in Cairo by 1980. No journalist and no scholar that I know of has seen the Cairo codex since 1980. That is the way the Karaites want it.
The second Ben Asher codex, the Aleppo, is another story.
According to its colophon, it was written by Shlomo Ben Buya'tta and was punctuated with little vowel signs by Moshe Ben Asher's son, Aharon. It was completed and presented to the Karaite community in Jerusalem in 930. Both Ben Asher codicies were part of the loot of the Crusaders who captured Jerusaslem in 1099. They were redeemed a few years later by David Ben Yaphet, a wealthy Cairo Karaute.
The Aleppo codex was placed in the hands of the Karaites in Fustat, which is Old Cairo. Fustat is also the site of the oldest functioning Rabbinate synagoge of Ben Ezra, which contained the famous Geniza of medieval Jewish documents.
The Aleppo codex remained in Fustate until the 13th century, when a grandson of Maimonides, Hanagid Abraham, converted the Karaite congregation in Fustat. He acquired the Aleppo codex and it was transfered to the Sephardic congregation in Aleppo. The Aleppo codex consisted of all three books of the Bible. It was intact until 1947 when the Syrians in Aleppo rioted to protest the United Nations decision to partition Palestine.
Matti Friedman, a Jerusalem journalist, has written a book on who vandalized the Aleppo codex. It will be published on May 15 by the Algonquin Press. The Hebrew University has published a facsimile of the Aleppo codex with a multipage guide. Amazon Books offers several other books on the codex published in Europe. Amazon Books has nothing on the Cairo codex or its carpet pages. And that is a double mystery.
