The Afghan Siddur, also known as the Afghan Liturgical Quire, is a booklet from the Afghan Geniza in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and is considered the oldest Hebrew book ever discovered.
The medieval manuscript contains Hebrew liturgical texts and is a small prayer book dating from around 700 AD, which includes prayers, blessings, and poetry.
The manuscript was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Persian, and one of its most unusual features is that, for some unknown reason, a portion of the Passover Haggadah is upside down in the book.
The manuscript is on display in New York City at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Library in Morningside Heights. The exhibition, titled “Sacred Words: Revealing the Oldest Hebrew Book,” will be open to the public until July 17.
The book is a remnant of an 8th-century Jewish community that lived along the Silk Road, specifically in the Bamiyan Valley in present-day Afghanistan, a region then ruled by Buddhists.
The manuscript was discovered in 1997 by a member of Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic minority in a cave near the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.