A medieval manuscript, believed to be the oldest Jewish book in the world, is now on view in New York City.
The Afghan Liturgical Quire, which dates to approximately the year 700 CE, is on display at the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in Morningside Heights as part of an exhibit, “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest Hebrew Book” that opens Wednesday and runs until July 17.
Also known as the Afghan Siddur, the diminutive prayer book measures five inches by five inches and “is comprised of prayers, poems, and pages of the oldest discovered Passover Haggadah, which was mysteriously written upside down,” according to a JTS press release.
The tome was previously on view at the the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which said the book is relic of an 8th-century civilization along the Silk Road, the ancient trading route, and was created by Jews who lived among the Buddhists who ruled the Bamiyan Valley in modern-day Afghanistan.
A member of Afghanistan’s Hazara ethnic minority discovered the manuscript in 1997, in a cave near one of the ancient Bamiyan Buddha monuments that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, as JTA reported.
The book went on a roundabout global journey to eventually reach the Green family, evangelical Christians based in Oklahoma who own the Hobby Lobby chain. The family purchased the book without knowing its actual age or origin, and added it to a collection that would evolve into The Museum of the Bible.
The book was mislabeled “Egypt, circa 900 CE,” until carbon testing in 2019 confirmed that the siddur was even older, “astonishing researchers at the museum,” JTA reported in November 2024.
“Far more ancient written Hebrew texts had been discovered, but only on scrolls, most famously the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls that are displayed prominently in Israel,” according to JTA. “The carbon dating indicated that this was the earliest intact Hebrew codex by more than a century.”
The JTS exhibition was developed in partnership with The Museum of the Bible and in cooperation with the Afghan Jewish Foundation, the American Sephardi Federation and Congregation Anshei Shalom of Jamaica Estates, Queens.
“The Afghan Liturgical Quire offers an extraordinary opportunity to discover a volume of Jewish prayers that predates any known Siddur, revealing a rich liturgical tradition that extends back well over a millennium,” JTS’s curator of Jewish art, Sharon Liberman Mintz, said in a statement. “I am delighted to present this remarkable treasure at JTS and invite the public to engage with this unique and historic artifact of Jewish heritage.”
The exhibit will be open to the public on Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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