Includes bibliographical references.

Ester Velasquez is an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city. Helen Watt is an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming. In a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents' scribe, the elusive "Aleph."