Seventeen bodies found at the bottom of a medieval English well were likely Jews who were murdered in an anti-Semitic massacre more than 800 years ago, scientists have revealed.
The massacre took place in 1190 AD in the eastern city of Norwich, where just decades prior the seeds had been planted for an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that persists up to the present day,” they said in a new study.
The scientists used an array of techniques — including analysing the oldest known Jewish genomes — to unravel the mystery.
It began when construction workers were digging up land for a future shopping center in Norwich in 2004. They stumbled upon the remains of at least 17 people — 6 adults and 11 children, including three sisters — in the old well.
The bodies were buried at strange angles, some head-first, suggesting the possibility of violent death.
Ian Barnes, a geneticist at London’s Natural History Museum, first started looking into the remains while working on the BBC documentary series “History Cold Case” in 2011.
“We first thought it more likely that they were the victims of some sort of plague, epidemic, famine, something like that,” Barnes, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Current Biology this week, told AFP.
Using radiocarbon dating, the team narrowed down the date of the deaths to between 1161-1216 AD.
DNA analysis of six of the victims found they were predisposed to certain genetic diseases.
Computer simulations then showed that the frequency of these diseases was roughly the same for the Norwich victims as for modern Ashkenazi Jews, indicating a common ancestry.
This would make them the oldest Jewish genomes ever analyzed.
“Nobody had analyzed Jewish ancient DNA before because of prohibitions on the disturbance of Jewish graves,” Barnes said. “However, we did not know this until after doing the genetic analyses.” (CBS)
