Ancient DNA recovered from a German cemetery has opened a window into the history of today’s largest Jewish population. LongReads
On a Sabbath Saturday in March 1349, the Jewish community of Erfurt was wiped out in a pogrom. The archbishop of Mainz, who had granted Jews the right to live and work in the medieval German city, tried the pogrom’s ringleaders, local merchants and city council members who owed money to Jewish money lenders. One was executed and the rest exiled. The city’s Christian population, meanwhile, was forced to pay restitution.
A meter or two under the ground, in the shadow of the 500-year-old granary, the team found the remains of more than 60 people, almost all of them oriented with their legs pointed east—toward Jerusalem. Their skeletons were well-preserved, along with traces of wooden coffins and nails. But the period in between largely remains a mystery. Were the Jews of Erfurt and other medieval cities tenacious holdovers from the Roman era, as some have proposed? Or were they the descendants of more recent pioneers who crossed the Alps around 800 C.E.
Carmi also reached out to an Orthodox rabbi in Israel. After studying centuries-old interpretations of Jewish law and listening to Carmi’s explanation of the science, the rabbi suggested a workaround: teeth. Because they fall out naturally , the rabbi concluded that stray teeth are not part of the body in the same way as a skull or rib.
“We already see clear evidence for that bottleneck” in the 14th century teeth from Erfurt, Carmi says. Disease mutations and long stretches of identical genetic code in the medieval DNA implied the bottleneck occurred centuries earlier. One type of mitochondrial genetic material—DNA that is passed through the maternal line—was identical in one-third of the people in the excavated plot, evidence that they all descended from a single woman who probably lived 500 to 1000 years earlier.
By comparing the Erfurt genomes with modern and ancient DNA data from many different populations, the researchers were able to peer even further back, to the origins of those scattered European communities. The comparisons suggested the Ashkenazi circa 1350 had a mix of ancestry resembling populations from southern Italy or Sicily today, with components found in modern Eastern Europe and the Middle East mixed in.
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