‘Well, even if you’re right, my biblical Hebrew isn’t that good. And neither is yours.’

‘Then maybe we should call in someone who has specialized knowledge of biblical languages.’

‘I’m not going to call in anyone from Israel,’ said Mansoor. ‘At least not at this stage. It would just be too controversial.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of an Israeli. The man I have in mind is British.’

‘Who?’

‘Daniel Klein.’

‘Klein?’ said Mansoor, not recognizing the name. ‘That sounds like a…’

‘He was my uncle’s star pupil,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Just like I was yours,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye.

Mansoor was silent for a moment. After a while, he nodded reluctantly. ‘Well, I guess if this Daniel Klein was Harrison Carmichael’s star pupil, then that’s good enough for me.’

‘Shall I call him?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘He knows me.’

‘Okay, you call him and introduce me and then put me on.’ Sensing her excitement, Mansoor added, ‘But let’s not tell him at this stage that we think we’ve found the original Ten Commandments.’

Chapter 4

‘This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,’ Nathan Greenberg solemnly intoned.

In a house in Golders Green, Nathan Greenberg, father of three, was holding up a plate of three matzos, reciting a paragraph attesting to its significance. Nathan’s own parents and siblings lived in America, but he and his glamorous wife Julia had invited some of Julia’s extended family for the Passover seider.

The seider is a quasi-religious service performed at the dinner table before the festive meal marking the beginning of Passover in which Jewish families retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. ‘Bread of affliction’ was perhaps a misnomer, because it wasn’t the bread the Israelites ate when they were slaves in Egypt, but rather the bread prepared in haste when they were allowed to leave by the Egyptian Pharaoh whose will had been broken by the Ten Plagues.