Meeting the ancestors: History of Ashkenazi Jews revealed in medieval DNA

DISCUSSIONS of religious ethics preceded the Norwich study, because it was only after an initial analysis in 2011 that the researchers realized the 17 people whose remains were found during construction work might have been Jews killed in a pogrom. The presence of DNA sequences also found in Ashkenazi Jews today was one clue. “When we first tested the DNA, we got just a few hundred base pairs,” says Ian Barnes, an evolutionary geneticist at London’s Natural History Museum who worked on the study. “The best I could say was they were compatible with Jewish origin.” The bones were reburied in 2013 in a multidenominational ceremony. Five years later, the local Jewish community asked to move them to a quieter spot. Before they were reburied a second time, the authors secured permission to analyze them again, this time yielding higher resolution results that definitively linked them to modern Ashkenazi populations. Subsequent radiocarbon dating, meanwhile, showed the bones were about 800 years old, placing them around the same time as an 1190 massacre of the town’s Jews, which took place on the eve of the First Crusade. “The minute you get dates, it seems reasonable it could be this one antisemitic event,” Barnes says. “Put together, everything helped to build the case.” The DNA results from Norwich and Erfurt both confirm that modern Ashkenazim are descended from a small founding population. Based on modern Jewish DNA, some researchers had spec...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research