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 S