The Birth of the Blood Libel

A new breakthrough in genetic research unlocks the history of European Jewry

Medieval manuscript-Jews identified by rouelle are being burned at stake via Wikimedia Commons.

On the eve of Easter in 1144, less than a century after Jews first migrated to the growing east England town of Norwich, population 10,000 and fast becoming a center of European trade, the body of a young boy was discovered in some nearby woods. Rumors quickly spread that the boy, whose name was William, had been tortured; that the local Jews had done it; that miracles now surrounded his body—bright lights, strange emanations, healings. 

In 1150, these rumors were canonized as sacred history by a Benedictine monk, Thomas of Monmouth, in The Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich, a hagiography that helped secure William’s status as a martyr.

Now in that year in which we know that William, God’s glorious martyr, was slain, it happened that the lot fell upon the Norwich Jews, and all the synagogues in England signified, by letter or by message, their consent that the wickedness should be carried out at Norwich. 

Here is the origin of the anti-Jewish blood libel, inaugurating the long and horrific history of Jews being accused of ritualistically murdering the children of their neighbors. 

Only 40 years after Thomas’ version of the libel appeared in print, pogroms across England targeted the country’s Jews. Now new genetics research analyzing remains found in Norwich presents comprehensive evidence that English Jews were the victims of deadly pogroms in the late 12th century and offers new insights into the demographic history of European Jewry.

Dr Adam Rutherford @AdamRutherford

The deaths of 17 medieval Jews: An incredible new genetics paper has just dropped: The earliest Jewish genomes and the story of where they are from and how they died is incredibly important, and central to the origin of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy hatred. 🧵

The pogroms of the time were fueled by groups embarking to Jerusalem on the Third Crusade (1189-1192). As Ralph de Diceto, a 12th-century historian, wrote in his history of medieval Christianity, Ymagines historiarum, “many of those who were hastening to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews before they invaded the Saracens. Accordingly on 6 February [in 1190] all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle.” A similar pogrom took place in York that same year, where as many as 150 Jews who took refuge in the city’s castle were massacred. Some chose suicide rather than forced conversion while others who were coaxed out of the castle with promises of safety were then murdered in the streets.

The massacre in York has been memorialized and mourned for almost a half century, since, in 1978, a plaque was set at the base of the castle to commemorate the tragedy. Daffodils, their six petals reflecting the six sides of the Star of David, are planted around the castle every year. Other pogroms, however, such as that in Norwich in 1190, lacked markers of memorialization and had no sites for mourning.

A new genetics paper published in Current Biology on Aug. 30 might have finally resolved some of the mysteries surrounding this unmarked massacre in Norwich. In 2004, while excavating at a construction site for a shopping mall, workers in Norwich discovered a large collection of skeletal remains at the bottom of a medieval well. The remains quickly attracted the interest of forensic scientists and historians. The construction site was not a burial ground: 11 of the 17 bodies belonged to children, and the bodies were buried at odd angles, including some that were buried headfirst, suggesting that they’d been deposited hastily and in an act of violence. Still, opinion varied on what had caused the deaths of those found at the site; some researchers argued they were likely the victims of plague or a local outbreak of disease.

After several years of research, forensic scientists determined that the bodies likely were those of Ashkenazi Jews, and in 2013, despite lingering doubts from some community members, Norwich officials decided to follow the advice of local rabbis who believed that “there was sufficient possibility that the bones should be interned in a Jewish cemetery.” A headstone in that Norwich cemetery marks the resting place of 17 souls who met “violent deaths,” but there was nothing clearly tying the tragedy of those 17 murders to the history of European antisemitism. 

The paper in Current Biology, however, offers the strongest evidence to date that the skeletal remains are “consistent with accounts of the 1190 CE antisemitic attacks.” Led by Dr. Selina Brace from the Natural History Museum in London, the team first used more advanced carbon-dating techniques than those available in the earlier investigations to determine that the remains dated to 1161-1216 AD—the period when historical records show the pogroms took place. Using DNA analysis, the scientists found that the six victims with remains well-preserved enough to be tested were predisposed to certain genetic diseases strongly associated with Ashkenazi Jewry. Evidence continued to mount, piece by piece, until Brace and her team concluded that these 17 bodies were the skeletal remains of victims from that 1190 massacre. “I’m delighted and relieved that 12 years after we first started analyzing the remains of these individuals, technology has caught up and helped us to understand this historical cold case of who these people were and why we think they were murdered,” she said.

The research also sheds light on a crucial episode in the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews, as the DNA recovered from these Norwich remains ranks as the oldest Jewish samples ever tested. Jewish law typically bars any tampering with or testing of buried remains—it was only because of the uncertainty surrounding these recovered skeletons that the DNA was able to be collected at all—and Brace and her team were surprised that “when we look at the DNA from [the remains], they’re actually more closely associated to modern day Ashkenazi Jews than to any other modern population.” This led to a significant genetic discovery with deep implications for the history of European Jewry more generally. Scientists have long believed that the Ashkenazi population experienced a “bottleneck,” or sudden population reduction, which led to more endogamous relationships among the remaining members of the group and resulted in a higher likelihood of certain genetic diseases among Ashkenazi Jews. Brace’s findings suggest that the bottleneck happened as much as a century before when was previously thought, changing the timeline of Jewish history in Europe.

Brace and her team have critically improved our understanding of these 17 lives and of European Jewish history more generally, but there remain political and social questions about how scapegoating leads to mass murder and what role the history of blood libels plays for Jews today. “The ritual murder legend,” Hannah Johnson writes in Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (University of Michigan, 2012), “operates like an overloaded circuit, a high-friction relay point in efforts to account for the difficult course of Jewish-Christian history, the violence of the Holocaust, and even modern Israeli politics.” This new paper lets us lay to rest certain historical questions about the pogrom in Norwich, but it raises anew the questions about the political and social afterlives of the blood libels.

In Excluding the Jew Within Us, his recent consideration of European antisemitism, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes that “today an antisemitism circulates all around the Mediterranean—and, more widely, throughout the world—that has become banal again; that is, it feeds on beliefs and images produced over the course of a very long history, in which modern forms have mostly taken over for ancient ones.” Nancy notes that the modern forms, which center around global conspiracy theories not so different from Thomas of Monmouth’s 12th-century account of a cabal of murderous Jews meeting in Spain, “come together in what Hannah Arendt characterizes as the making of the abstract figure, ‘the Jew,’ bearer of all flaws and perpetrator of all evils.” If we draw a line from the 12th century to today, the vision of Jews gathering at the dark edges of decency is a constant of Western history.