In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin. 

Over the years, the manuscript had been variously identified as a fragment of the Talmud, a seventeenth-century book of Psalms, a relic from Babylon, a ninth-century prayer book, and a remnant of a famous medieval repository of texts from a synagogue in Cairo. It was rare enough to draw the attention of scholars, if not the public. Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal. 

The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed.