Five years ago, I got the thrill of a lifetime when, as a collections manager for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, I placed a 10th-century parchment fragment into a display case for a Bible exhibition. This fragile fragment was a palimpsest, a layered text on which an earlier writing had been replaced by a later one. The first was a sixth-century copy of a Greek translation of a section of the Book of Kings by the famed second-century writer Aquila. The later text was a 10th-century copy of a liturgical poem fragment by the seventh-century Palestinian Jewish poet Yannai, a precursor to the poets of the later Golden Age in Spain. The fragment was found in the famed Cairo Geniza, a repository of sacred texts, and is just one piece in a collection...

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