The remains of children and adults found in a disused well in Norwich have been identified as victims of a bloody medieval pogrom, researchers have revealed.
The team said the discovery not only underscored the horror of the antiSemitic atrocity, but provided new insights into when the genetic disorders often found among Ashkenazi Jews first appeared.
“I am very excited after 12 years [from our first investigations]we have finally been able to use historical records, archeology and ancient DNA analysis to shed new light on a historic crime, and in doing so have sequenced the oldest genomes of a Jewish population,” said Dr Selina Brace, lead author of the research from the Natural History Museum in London.
The remains of at least 17 individuals were discovered in Norwich in 2004 during construction on a site intended for a shopping centre.
With no signs of trauma to the bones, it was possible that the remains were victims of starvation or disease. But analysis of the bones and associated pottery more than a decade ago, which suggested they were dumped in the 12th or 13th centuries, ruled that out.
As a result, the research team suspected that the bodies might have been victims of violence.
“We don’t actually know how they were killed, but it seems very likely that they were,” Brace said, adding that it appears the bodies were deposited at the same time, with many being thrown headfirst.
Now Brace and his colleagues say they have finally cracked the medieval mystery.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says further radiocarbon dating analysis has revealed that the bodies were deposited in the pit between AD1161 and AD1216.
The team says the time period is consistent with an antiSemitic massacre in Norwich in 1190, detailed by the chronicler Ralph de Diceto.
“Many of those who hastened to Jerusalem decided first to rise up against the Jews before the Saracens invaded. Consequently, on February 6 [in AD1190] all the Jews who were found in their own houses in Norwich were massacred; some had taken refuge in the castle”, he wrote in his Imagines Historiarum II.
But there were other violent events in the same period, including the sacking of Norwich by Hugh Bigod in 1174 AD.
To dig deeper, the team turned to genetics.
The researchers’ previous DNA work, done for a TV show, suggested that the individuals might have been Jewish and therefore killed in the pogrom, but the work had involved only short fragments of genetic material and the results were inconclusive.
Now, using recent advances in DNA analysis, the team was able to assemble entire genomes for six individuals.
“When we look at DNA from [the remains]are actually more closely related to presentday Ashkenazi Jews than to any other modern population,” Brace said, noting that with Jewish law largely prohibiting exhumation or disturbing burials, genomes are the most ancient yet sequenced Jewish individuals.
The team discovered that three of the victims were sisters: a young adult, a 10 to 15yearold, and a five to 10yearold with brown eyes and dark hair.
Another was a young redhaired boy with blue eyes, an important find given that this hair color was associated with European Jews at the time. The other two individuals were a young male and an adult.
The team also found genetic variants associated with diseases often seen in Ashkenazi Jewish populations today, such as a predisposition to certain cancers and delayed puberty.
But the frequency of these variants was much higher than expected. “It’s what you would expect to see if these diseases were as common as they are now,” Brace said.
Because genetic disorders tend to be more common when a population shrinks in size, it appears that Ashkenazi Jews experienced a “bottleneck” before the 12th century, hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.
The team says the low frequency of the same genetic variants in the Sephardic Jewish community suggests that this bottleneck likely occurred when the Jewish diaspora split during the early medieval period, rather than in a later event as previously thought
Brace added that the remains were buried several years ago. “They’ve had a Jewish ceremony for them,” he said.