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In August 2013 Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian put to rest more than 100 years of bitter rivalry over a vast trove of manuscripts from an Egyptian synagogue, the famous Cairo Genizah, and joined together to purchase for £1m one of the first collections of Genizah fragments. Acquired in the 1890s by two remarkable and intrepid sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, it led to the discovery of the world’s greatest collection of Jewish manuscripts, a medieval archive like no other.

Dr Ben Outhwaite, head of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, tells the story.