JEWISH ALEPPO, LOST FOREVER

The Syrian diaspora in Israel watches its once-vibrant ancestral home fall to ruin in the country’s civil war

By Joseph Dana

August 23, 2012 • 7:00 AM

Jewish family in Aleppo (left) and the Aleppo Citadel seen from the southwest, c. 1910. The original stereographic images have been altered into an anaglyph. When viewed through red-cyan glasses, the above image will produce a stereoscopic 3D effect. (Anaglyphs Tablet Magazine; original photos Library of Congress)

The northern Syrian city of Aleppo, once a pillar of Jewish existence worldwide, is slowly being destroyed by the fighting that has engulfed Syria for the past 17 months. Last week, a Free Syrian Army rebel warned that soon “there will be nothing left to destroy in Aleppo.” Imagine Rome or Paris destroyed by civil war in the social media age.

Coincidentally, Aleppo had already been in the news thanks to a new book and a lengthy New York Times Magazine article about one of the city’s most famous claims to recognition: the Aleppo Codex of the Hebrew Bible, said to have been complied in Tiberias in the 10th century and ransomed by the Jews of Cairo from the Crusaders after their conquest. After a short but monumental stay in the hands of Maimonides, it wound up in Aleppo, where it was kept hidden in a crypt lining the walls of the city’s great synagogue for the next 600 years. The codex, believed to be the oldest manuscript containing the entire Hebrew Bible, was smuggled out of Syria in the 1950s thanks to the courageous efforts of a handful of Aleppine Jews. Like a segment of Aleppo’s Jewish community, the codex found a home in Jerusalem, where it sits under lock and key at the Israel Museum.

What made Jewish existence in Aleppo so unique and vibrant? For thousands of years, Aleppo was an unofficial capital of the Sephardic Jewish world. Fueled by wealth from international trade and waves of Jewish immigration, the city’s Jews sustained a pious community revered for educational excellence and as a guardian of traditions with roots in ancient Israel. Aleppine folklore—some even say that one of Kind David’s generals personally laid the foundation for its great synagogue, now located at the heart of fighting—hints at the prestige of the city in Jewish history.

But the city is lost, and Jewish existence has been all but erased from its cobbled streets. Remarkably, what has not disappeared is the Aleppine way of life in diaspora communities spanning the globe.

“I would say without any hesitation that the [community of Jews from Aleppo] is the strongest Jewish community in the world in the sense of solidarity,” Yom Tov Assis, a professor of medieval history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told me in his book-saturated office. Assis was born in Aleppo and briefly experienced the violence in the city that accompanied Israel’s independence. He recently founded the center for the study of Aleppine Jewry at the Hebrew University in an effort to preserve and study the traditions of his vibrant community. “There is hardly any Jewish community apart from the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, that is so strongly attached to its past and traditions,” he said.

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Outside of Israel, few cities in the Middle East have a richer history of Jewish cultural activity, education, and trade than Aleppo. Legend has it that the city, which is referred to as Haleb in both Hebrew and Arabic, derives its name from a story of Abraham guiding a flock of sheep through the fleecy shrubbery of the surrounding mountains. He is said to have distributed his sheep’s milk (halev in Hebrew) to the local residents of the city, nestled in Northern Syria’s rolling hills, which thereby was known as Haleb.

Starting in the late 10th century, Aleppo grew to serve as a passageway between the Jewish communities of the Babylonian center and Israel. Its geographic position and impressive sphere of influence bridged the divide from Persia to the lucrative markets of southern Europe. The city held an almost mythic or legendary status among Jews worldwide. Visiting the city in the late 16th century, Italian monk Pietro Della Valle observed in a travel journal that, “Here, in one district [in Aleppo], converges all the Orient, with its jewels, silks, drugs, and cloths; and it is also joined by the Occident, namely France (in force), Venice, Holland, and England.” Aleppine Jews also used their wealth to establish prominent educational institutions and were recognized for their carefully kept traditions in line with the biblical practices of ancient Jews. In a letter to the Jewish community of Lunel in Southern France, Maimonides noted that “in all the Holy Land and in Syria, there is one city alone and it is Halab in which there are those who are truly devoted to the Jewish religion and the study of Torah.”

Historically, Aleppo found itself at the crossroads of two of Jewish history’s major developments: the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the rise of the Zionist movement. As refugees from Iberia flooded the Eastern Mediterranean in the early part of the 16th century, Aleppo became one of the most important centers of absorption. When Aleppo fell under Ottoman rule in the 16th century, the Caliphate maintained a relatively warm relationship with the Jewish community. Provisions ensuring that synagogues were not built taller than mosques and that Jewish religious behavior was performed quietly—part of their status as Dhimmis—meant that Jews found a fragile entente.

In 1947-48, after the United Nations voted to implement a two-state solution in Palestine, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Aleppo. False rumors spread that the codex had been destroyed in an attack. From this point until the late 1980s, the community dismantled itself, and the Aleppine Jewish diaspora began to take shape—mainly in Israel, Brooklyn, and South America. “We used to summer in Lebanon near Beirut,” Assis told me. “One summer my parents rented a large bus with other Jews from Aleppo, and only after we crossed into Lebanon did they inform us that we would never return to Aleppo.”

They were not alone. Some Jews do remain in Muslim countries, from Morocco to Iran. Their numbers, however, are too small to legitimatize the notion that outside of Israel there are still vibrant Jewish communities in the Middle East.

What, then, is the best way to remember Jewish life under Muslim rule in the Middle East? It’s a question that has floated through the halls of Jewish academia for at least 30 years, alternately provoking idealized versions of peaceful life in the Arab world and dramatic tales of persecution. Especially among those dedicated to European Jewish history, which still struggles to understand the tragedy that befell European Jewry in the 20th century, there is a tendency to view life under Muslim rule as exceedingly peaceful, marked by co-existence and even mutual respect. Outside of academia, the question tends to adopt political contours, with people seeking to place blame either on the Zionist movement or the Arab populations that expelled their ancient Jewish communities after the creation of the state of Israel.

Whichever side one falls on politically, it is clear that, for Jews, Aleppo was lost in 1948. The recent destruction of the city’s ancient monuments is merely a reminder of what had already been lost. While the Aleppine community in Israel is not nearly as numerous or powerful as their brethren in Brooklyn—the largest Aleppine Jewish community in the world, covered widely for their financial success and excess—their proximity to Syria and relationship with Jews from other Arab countries give the events in their lost city a more immediate feel.

Like for the Aleppine community in Brooklyn, the idea of Aleppo lives on in schools and synagogues in the exile community in Israel. During our conversation, Assis relayed stories of his adolescence moving around the Middle East. “When I arrived in Beirut and Istanbul, I found myself far more learned than any other kid my age,” he said. “We had a very strong Jewish education, we used to read the Bible and translate it on the spot to the astonishment of our teachers.”

Aleppine synagogues, especially in Israel, have tried hard to protect the unique aspects of their religious observance. On winter Shabbat mornings, tucked deep in the serene streets of Jerusalem’s Nahlot neighborhood, Syrian Jews sing Bakashot, Kabbalistic poetry originating in Spain. The Great Synagogue of the Aleppo Jewish community in Jerusalem, established in 1901, maintains these and other traditions, such as liturgical singing heavily influenced by Arabic, known as the Sephardi Hazanut.

For people like Assis, maintaining this tradition in the face of the winds of history is nothing short of an obligation. “The Jewish world under Islam has vanished,” he said. “You can mourn the whole Jewish world under Islam, there is nothing left. What happens to the cemeteries, to the synagogues, to the books, to everything? Well, God knows.”

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Correction, August 29: Due to reporting and editing errors, a number of inaccuracies appeared in the original version of this text, which has been updated. The Aleppo Codex was compiled in Tiberias, not near it, in the 10th, not the 6th, century. The Codex was not smuggled out of Cairo, nor was it ever in Europe. It is now at the Israel Museum, not the Ben Zvi Institute.

(Movie still courtesy of American Pastoral Media Gallery)

American Pastoral, Ewan McGregor’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, is easily the most successful attempt at capturing Roth’s work on screen. Which is a bit like saying that the Tenerife airport disaster of 1977 is the most successful attempt at killing 583 people by slamming two Boeings into each other on the tarmac: a distinction, sure, but not one of which anyone ought to be too proud.

This is in no way a reflection on McGregor, whose kindness and decency is doubled in every frame of the movie: It comes off first in McGregor’s portrayal of Seymour “Swede” Levov, the former star athlete turned successful businessman and upstanding citizen, and then again in his choices as the film’s director, giving each of his fellow actors the light and the air they need to let their characters bloom. Which is more than Roth has ever done for any of his creations, save for the ones who were blunt stand-ins for the author himself, and which leaves McGregor facing a chasm he never really manages to bridge.

Call it the Empathy Gap: A movie, unlike a book, isn’t a thesis; it’s a relationship, and if it doesn’t make us feel, we grow cold and resentful and begin to contemplate our escape. A movie, unlike a book, can’t hide behind clever ideas or shield itself with the beauty of its language. A movie shows us people, and we keep watching them because they somehow move us. But Roth’s people don’t, because, in Roth’s world, the only one who matters is Roth.

This profound sense of self-centeredness, ironically, grows clearer with each of the author’s attempts to stride past the preoccupations of his youth and into bigger, bolder books that wrestle with the meaning of America. To his lionizers, the pride of American letters may have started out as an audacious young writer who trained his eye on middle-class Jews and their frustrated desires, but he grew as an artist and so did his appetites, and by the time American Pastoral was published, in 1997, Roth, a man in full, was satisfied with no canvas more modest than American history itself.

It’s a good pitch, but it loses its velocity when met with Roth’s prose. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, American Pastoral’s last: “They’ll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

Roth never answers the question, mainly because doing so would mean letting life unfurl in all its complication, and that requires letting others flourish, not as thumbnails or caricatures but as real people who contain multitudes. When performed by a master, this thrust of literary empathy is the closest thing on earth to a true communion of souls: Think of Middlemarch’s Rosamond Vincy, permitted by her creator to be vain and fragile, charming and infuriating, beautiful and reprehensible and, to those reading about her, never less than real and whole. But Roth is no Eliot, and his Levovs are drawn in thick, crude lines: Merry, Swede’s daughter, is obese and angry, a difficult child whose frustrations are rooted in banal miseries. She’s just as much of a bore when she bombs a rural gas station to protest the war in Vietnam as she is when she chooses to convert to Jainism and mortify her body and her soul to repent for having taken innocent lives. The country we see through her eyes, and through the eyes of her father, is just as Manichean, a republic that had inexplicably skidded from high school football games and young sweethearts in love and riding horses in the meadow to race riots and home-brewed explosives. These places and people reflect to us anything that feels true or warm or lived-in. Like bad pop music—the artist Roth most closely resembles, arguably, is Billy Joel, another navel-gazer with operatic ambitions—American Pastoral, like Roth’s other work in the past three decades or so, asks you to hum along to an instantly familiar tune without spending too much time contemplating the words or the inch-deep sentiments they express.

This leaves serious and committed artists who have somehow decided to grapple with Roth in a pickle. Doing her best with Merry, Dakota Fanning draws her character’s stutter one note longer than is comfortable to watch and quivers with the inchoate rage of those who have too many emotions and no idea what to do with any of them. McGregor is just as earnest, and when he finally makes his way to the filthy hovel where Merry is hiding from the law and looks into her unlit eyes, his face glows with that wounded kindness that has carried the actor through even the most deadening films of his career (see under: The Phantom Menace). But neither these graceful and well-meaning performances nor McGregor’s calmly confident debut as a director can make up for the fact that Roth had made the Levovs nothing more than emblems of a simplistic idea: America had promise, and that promise somehow soured. It’s rank nostalgia of the cheapest sort, the kind that shares with the most reprehensible political instincts of our contemporary moment the belief that America used to be really great once and that we ought to try and make it great again.

We deserve better. I’ve little sympathy for the violent radicals of the 1960's, but they were capable of speech and thought that went beyond hurling vulgarities at the TV and lobbing bombs at innocents, just as real life’s Swede Levovs have in them more than the single mental note of uncomplicated rectitude. We deserve to see these intricacies; after all, we can hardly be expected to feel anything for our brothers and sisters, flesh and blood or page and ink, if we see them only as clothespins on which the crudely woven quilt of human history heavily hangs.

This basic empathy is lost on Roth. His books are impossible to film not because they are, as my friend Mark Oppenheimer argued in a recent piece, too rich, but because they’re too thin: While Roth’s earlier novels bubbled with the sort of sensual solipsism that may amuse as a book-length rant but grows dull when chopped up into bits of dialogue delivered by actors, his later work explores thorny social and political junctures with all the subtlety and insight of a seventh-grade civics textbook. In such a wilderness, not even McGregor can strike water. He is, like Swede Levov, a good man humbled by circumstances, doing his best but realizing, finally, that everything is against him.

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