Bibliography

Explore the references, sources, and research that support Syria's stories and cultural content.

• Literature and folktales

  Stories and Writers of the Jews of Syria

  The Jews of Aleppo and Damascus are remembered as guardians of books and songs: the Aleppo Codex, the Hebrew poems they set to Arabic melodies, and the stories they carried to Brooklyn, Mexico City, and Jerusalem.

  Guardians of a book

  The Aleppo Codex

  For nearly six hundred years, the Jews of Aleppo protected the Aleppo Codex, a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible written in the tenth century and checked by the great scholar Aaron ben Asher. Maimonides relied on it. After it was damaged in the 1947 pogrom, it was hidden and then smuggled out of Syria in 1958. Today it is kept at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

  Songs and legends

  Pizmonim and Elijah's synagogue

  Syrian Jews wrote pizmonim, Hebrew poems sung to the melodies of Arabic songs, and gathered them in the songbook Shir uShbaha Hallel veZimrah. In Damascus, the ancient synagogue of Jobar was linked by tradition to the prophet Elijah, and families told stories of the miracles that happened there.

  Modern writers

  Stories from Aleppo

  Haim Sabato, an Israeli rabbi and novelist from an Aleppo family, retold the stories of the community's rabbis and families in Aleppo Tales. Joseph Sutton's Magic Carpet: Aleppo in Flatbush recorded the memories of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, and Esther Levy Chehebar's picture book I Share My Name introduces young readers to the Syrian custom of naming children for grandparents.

  Read with students

  Start with these

  • Aleppo Tales, Haim Sabato (high school and adult)
  • I Share My Name, Esther Levy Chehebar, illustrated by Luisa Galstyan (picture book, elementary)

  See all books on the Jews of Syria in JIMENA's bibliography →

  Sources: Aleppo Codex; Pizmonim; Jobar Synagogue; Haim Sabato.