secondary issue in The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch. Cassuto insisted throughout this work that it was merely a summary, in eight lectures, of his much more detailed and thorough examination of the documentary hypothesis in his La Questione della Genesi (1934). He refers all serious students to the latter work in almost every chapter. Some idea of that more thorough consideration, however, is available in English in his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) from Adam to Noah (1961) and (Part II) from Noah to Abraham (1964), and also his Commentary on the Book of Exodus (1967). Cassuto's criticisms, while influential amongst many Jewish scholars, were dismissed by the overwhelming majority of Christian scholars at the time, although Oswald Thompson Allis (1943) argued along parallel lines. Most scholars have tended to ignore Cassuto's The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch beyond mentioning it in their footnotes listings. Scholars such as Rolf Rendtorff and John Van Seters have put also forward theories on Pentateuchal historical origins very like Cassuto's, at least insofar as their views on its mode of composition are concerned. Modern ideas about the dating of the Torah, however, have not endorsed Cassuto's specific early historical dating, and the trend today is for the final act of composition to be seen as lying in the period 500–400 BC, or even later. Text of the Hebrew Bible Cassuto felt the need to produce the most accurate possible text of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). He realised that the texts generally published at the time had mostly been edited by non-Jews, and Jews who had converted to Christianity. While Cassuto saw no reason to believe that major alterations had been made, he felt it was important to compare these printed editions with older manuscripts as a check. Thus Cassuto sought to use the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of the Tanakh, dating back many centuries before the invention of printing. In particular, in 1944 he managed to visit the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria and study the Aleppo Codex. He was one of the very few scholars to study this key manuscript before most of the Torah section and some of the Prophets and Writings sections disappeared in the 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo. From his research, he concluded that the printed Bibles generally had an accurate text. However, he corrected the spelling of