By chance I wandered last week into the Jerusalem cinematheque for a screening, in the presence of the director, of “The Lost Crown“. It’s a doco-detective story about the fate of the Aleppo Codex, a thousand year old medieval manuscript now in the Israel Museum, but minus hundreds of missing pages. Over the years a couple of these have turned up, but when a dealer tried to offer another 30 pages he was found dead, in mysterious circumstances. The film debates whether the theft of the missing pages could have been an inside job and if so, by whom? A former Israeli president? A deputy? an archivist? There’s a dedicated website inviting viewers to help solve the mystery.
