You’ve heard of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946, but you may never have heard of another momentous discovery of Hebrew texts that occurred fifty years earlier in Cairo, Egypt. In 1896, over three hundred thousand Jewish documents dating back over a thousand years were found in a synagogue genizah (geh-NEE-zah), a storeroom for worn-out holy texts. Among these texts were multiple synagogue lectionary lists. To the amazement of the discoverers, these were not the annual readings they knew so well but were from a more ancient synagogue tradition that had persisted in Israel,
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