Remains found in Norwick well belong to Jewish victims of medieval pogrom

Using archaeological records, historical documents and the analysis of ancient DNA, a team of British scientists has put an end to the mystery and the details of their research, published in the journal Current Biology, shed new information on the history of the Jews in Europe.

The main objective of the study was to determine the ethnic group to which the remains belonged, explains Ian Barnes, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London and lead author of the work.

During the investigation, the authors saw that the victims had some genetic disorders that currently affect Ashkenazi Jews (as the descendants of the medieval Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe and whose own language is Yiddish) are known.

Genetic disorders affecting certain populations can arise in 'bottleneck' events, that is, situations that cause a rapid reduction in the number of individuals, which can lead to large jumps in the number of people carrying rare genetic mutations. .

Using computer simulations, the authors showed that the human remains had genetic mutations that would be expected if the diseases were as common then as they are now in Ashkenazi Jews.

The results point to a 'bottleneck' event that took place about 500 or 700 years ago and that shaped the genetics of the XNUMXth century Ashkenazi Jewish population and gave rise to the current one.

Furthermore, unlike other group burials, in which the bodies are deposited in an organized manner, the skeletons in this pit were mixed in a strange way, most likely - the authors point out - because they were thrown into the grave shortly after death.

According to the study, the victims were six adults and eleven children who probably died of hunger, disease or murder.

Radiocarbon dating of the remains places the deaths between the late 12th and early 13th centuries, a period in which many outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence have been documented in England.

To reconstruct the lives of these people, the team analyzed the DNA of six skeletons with new technology that decodes millions of DNA fragments at a time, and the results showed that the victims were almost certainly Ashkenazi Jews.

Of them, four were closely related and three were sisters: a girl aged five to ten, another aged ten to fifteen, and a young adult.

DNA analysis also revealed that one of the victims was a child under three years old who had blue eyes and red hair, a trait associated with historical stereotypes of European Jews.

"It was quite surprising that the initially unidentified remains filled the historical gap about when certain Jewish communities first formed and the origins of some genetic disorders," details evolutionary geneticist and co-author Mark Thomas of University College London.

"No one had analyzed ancient Jewish DNA before because of prohibitions on disturbing Jewish graves. But, we found out this after doing the genetic analysis," clarifies the researcher.

After learning the identity of the remains, the local community arranged a formal Jewish burial for the individuals.

Barnes and Thomas still don't know what directly caused the deaths of the 17 individuals, a puzzle that ancient DNA cannot solve.

However, by working with local historians, archaeologists, and the community, researchers offered new insights into historical violence and the origins of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

"When you study ancient DNA from people who died hundreds or thousands of years ago, you don't usually work with a living community at the same time. “It has been really satisfying to work with this community on a story that is so important to them,” Barnes concludes. EFE