Rare DNA from Medieval Jewish cemetery in Germany sheds unprecedented light on origin of Ashkenazi Jews

And Hashem shall be king over all the earth; in that day there shall be one Hashem with one name.

Zechariah

14:

9

(the israel bible)

November 30, 2022

2 min read

In 2013, the local authorities of the city of Erfurt, the capital of the German State of Thuringia, decided to grant permission to turn a building that had been built as a granary in 1454 into a parking lot. However, at the time, the granary was erected in an area that had previously been part of the Jewish cemetery. The rescue excavation conducted for the has project allowed scientists to shed unprecedented light on the origin of Ashkenazi Jews.

Jewish law prohibits disturbing the dead in the vast majority of cases, but in this instance, a group of researchers got permission to collect detached teeth from the remains. Of the 47 individuals they identified, the scientists were able to extract the DNA of 33 people.

The study was published in the journal Cell on Wednesday.

The term Ashkenazi Jews usually refers to a group of Jews who lived in Rhineland, Germany.

“Modern Ashkenazi Jews are genetically very similar to one another, sharing a lot of genetic material,” Professor Shai Carmi told Israel365 News. “This means that with limited exceptions, modern Ashkenazi Jews today are one single uniform population. In Erfurt in the 14th century, this was not the case.”

A geneticist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Carmi co-authored the study together with over 25 researchers from several universities from all over the world.

“We identified two different groups buried in the cemetery,” Carmi said. “One group presents a Middle Eastern ancestry and it is closer to modern Ashkenazi Jews, while the other group’s ancestry seems to be more Eastern European, possibly because they mixed more with local populations.”

The researchers were able to determine that the “founder event” that gave origin to the Ashkenazi Jewish population must have occurred before the 14th century.

“The term ‘founder event’ means that a population was very small for many generations, marrying inside the community,” Carmi explained. If the population then grows even into the millions, they will still all descend from the same founders and share a lot of genetic mutations, he said. “We also refer to this phenomenon as ‘bottleneck’.”

Among the individuals analyzed in the study, at least eight carried disease-causing genetic mutations common in modern-day Ashkenazi Jews.

A thriving Jewish community lived in Erfurt between the 11th and the 15th century, with a brief interruption following a massacre in 1349, before Jews were expelled for good until modern times in 1454.

The local Jewish museum carries many unique artifacts from those centuries, including a treasure trove of 28 kilos of silver coins and other valuable objects that was probably buried during the pogrom. Several biblical manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries were also found in Erfurt.

All the remains analyzed by the scientists were dated with radiocarbon and lived in the 14th century.

For the future, Carmi hopes that they are going to be able to find and analyze DNA from other ancient Jewish populations to compare it with the results of this study.

“There are still so many questions that remain unanswered,” he said.

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