The Aleppo Codex Quotes

“At first these stories were one of many threads making up the national life of the Jews. They also had a land, and a language, and a temple that was the center of their religion. But that changed with the destruction of the temple by Rome in AD 70 and the exile of the Jews. There was no precedent for a scattered people’s remaining a people; dispersion meant disappearance. If the Jews were to be an exception, instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, they needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.”
― Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books

“Since the rise of Islam, Jews had lived as a tolerated minority, or dhimmi, a status granted to Jews and Christians because they were monotheists. Despite a growing tendency in our own times to paint the premodern Islamic world as an Eden of religious tolerance in which Jews flourished, they always lived by the whims of fickle rulers and the mood of a hostile majority. In the eyes of that majority they were effete, lacking in honor, and powerless by definition, but as long as they accepted the supremacy of Muslims they were usually allowed to live and observe their faith and occasionally to prosper.”
― Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books

“The Jews of Syria have no connection with the Zionist question,” read one plaintive advertisement that a Jewish youth club in Damascus, Syria’s capital, published in local papers in 1929. “On the contrary, they share with their fellow Arab citizens all their feelings of joy and sadness.” Muslims, it read, must “differentiate between the European Zionists and the Jews who have been living for centuries in these lands.”
― Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books

“Let there be light.” He created the world with words, which are therefore a kind of blueprint for creation and for the nature of the universe.”
― Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books