genizah

Ideally, he would like to add to the cemetery a genizah, a place for the proper disposal of worn-out or damaged Jewish religious items.

One salient document, a letter Hamoutal carried with her from France, was recovered in 1864 from the genizah of a Cairo synagogue.

But the scroll’s possible age means that it may sit squarely between the older Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Genizah, a cache of medieval Hebrew books.

“We see a document in Cambridge, England, and another in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we think if the handwriting matches,” explained Mark R. Cohen, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University who has been studying the genizah since 1972.

Marina Rustow, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, said about 15,000 genizah fragments deal with everyday, nonreligious matters, most of them dated 950 to 1250.