Archaeologists reconstruct the massacre of Jews in the Middle Ages

DNA analysis of skeletons found inside an ancient well in the UK helped archaeologists reconstruct a brutal attack on the Jewish community during the Middle Ages. The genome of the murdered people is also the oldest clue to the genetic history of the Jews, reinforcing their link to the Middle East and showing that they already had many of the characteristics typical of their DNA today.

“We’ve been trying to figure out who these people were for over 12 years, and the technology is finally up to what we wanted to do,” geneticist Ian Barnes of the Natural History Museum in London said in a statement. He is the coordinator of the team responsible for the analyses, whose findings were recently published in the scientific journal Current Biology.

The discoveries are even more significant because they come from the English city of Norwich, 160 km from London. In Norwich, in the year 1144, the first record of an anti-Semitic legend that would boost the persecution of Jewish communities in and outside England for centuries took place in Norwich.

That year, the town’s Jews were wrongly accused of having performed a ritual to kill a boy named William, whose body, with stab wounds, was found in the forest. The murder would eventually inspire the legend of the so-called blood libel, according to which Jews would use the blood of Christian children for the purposes of black magic.

It turns out that the bodies found in the Norwich Well, corresponding to at least 17 people and including several children, appear to have been thrown into the pit all at once, and dating of the remains indicates that this took place between the 11th and 12th centuries or so. least at the time when the legend of the blood libel began to circulate. Finally, the well was close to the city’s Jewish quarter in the Middle Ages.

All the clues seemed to converge, which led researchers to propose that the murders had taken place in 1190. In that year, a new wave of violence befell the Jewish community of Norwich, occasioned by the beginning of the Third Crusade (these military expeditions were often accompanied by anti-Semitic massacres, because Jews were considered enemies of Christ, as were Muslims).

However, more detailed information on the identity of the victims was still lacking. The researchers obtained the most complete DNA from six of the individuals thrown into the pit, demonstrating, first, that three of them were female — a young adult, a girl aged between 10 and 15 years, and another aged between 5 and 15 years. 10 years—they were sisters. Another of the deceased was more distantly related to all three. Their genome also indicates the occurrence of marriages between relatively close relatives in that community.

The final step was to try to identify which ethnic group the victims belonged to. To do this, British geneticists used a number of ingenious techniques. Betting that those murdered in Norwich belonged to the subgroup that would give rise to Ashkenazi Jews (basically those of Central and Eastern Europe until the 20th century), they used statistical techniques to estimate whether today’s Ashkenazi could descend from people with the genomes of those murdered in Norwich. . They also estimated whether the Jewish subgroup could have descended from a mixture of other populations, such as Turkish Jews (who are not Ashkenazi), Sicilians, French and Poles.

The result could not be more resounding: the ancestry that most closely matches that of today’s Ashkenazis is that of the dead in the English city. Of course, many of them were childless, but their relatives who escaped the massacres in England and elsewhere in Europe managed to reproduce and leave descendants to this day. Furthermore, a series of DNA markers from the victims correspond to a Middle Eastern origin, which is exactly what is expected for the founding population of European Jews, who left the region of present-day Israel and Palestine in the early centuries of the Roman Empire.

The analysis also showed that the DNA of medieval Jews was already characterized by an increased frequency of certain genetic variants linked to hereditary diseases, a problem that still affects Jewish communities today. This is because the history of persecution, massacres and prejudice made these populations relatively small and closed in the past, with consanguineous marriages that tend to concentrate these variants.

However, the most poignant detail of the study was the decoding of the appearance of one of the victims, a boy who was not more than 3 years old when murdered. Apparently, he was a boy with blue eyes and red hair – characteristics that medieval texts associated with Jews, especially with regard to hair color.