An analysis of a collection of human bones found buried together in the English city of Norwich suggests that they belonged to Jews of the 11th or 12th centuries. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich writes:
The mass grave in a dry well, less than half a meter deep and one meter in diameter, contained the highly compacted remains of at least seventeen people. The overrepresentation of youngsters and the unusual location of the burial outside of consecrated ground suggested that they may have been victims of a mass fatality event such as mass murder.
Ancient DNA from 25 bones was screened, and six individuals were selected for sequencing. “They represent the present-day population that we would expect to be genetically most similar to Jews in medieval England,” [the archaeologists] wrote. The researchers found that four of these individuals were closely related and six had strong genetic affinities with modern Ashkenazi Jews. Some had genes for red hair.
The DNA evidence also yielded genes linked to hereditary diseases common among Ashkenazim—the first such evidence that these illnesses date back at least to the beginning of the last millennium. But violence, rather than disease, was the likely cause of death for those buried in the grave, and comparison with the historical record led the archaeologists to conjecture about the circumstances:
The . . . historical event in Norwich within this date range was in 1190, when members of the Jewish community were murdered during anti-Semitic riots precipitated by the beginning of the Third Crusade. Norwich had been the setting for a previous notable event in the history of medieval anti-Semitism when, in 1144, the family of [a Christian boy named] William of Norwich claimed that local Jews were responsible for his murder—an argument taken up by Thomas of Monmouth [in one of the earliest documented instances] of the blood libel.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-715841