Which medieval Jewish stories must we tell?
Recent studies of Jewish bodies emphasize violence, and in this era of rising antisemitism that feels important. But is it also too limiting, making our whole history of these people a story of loss?
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
We find ourselves in an era of rising antisemitism both in the U.S.A. and abroad. It’s not that antisemitism ever went away, but it’s become more overt, more permissible, and more linked with direct threats and acts of violence.
As I’ve written before, I’ve been Jewish my whole life (I am Jewish on my mom’s side, and she was half Ashkenazi and half Sephardic). But it took the election of Donald Trump for someone to call me a kike for the first time. That was a few days after the 2016 election. It’s only gotten worse since then, with rampant antisemitism broadcast across our media platforms and rising in American right-wing politics; and of course all the mass murder and gun violence and a terrifying uptick in anti-Jewish violence of all kinds.
There is, of course, a longer history here. And that history and our current events have led me to reflect on recent academic findings related to medieval European Jews and how those findings are being refracted through the lens of the modern moment.
A few months ago, a new study was published in the journal Current Biology that identified Jewish genetic markers in bodies recovered from a medieval well in Norwich, England. The bodies (17 in all) were actually recovered in 2004, but scientists just completed sequencing the genome of six of the seventeen bodies. They found that:
Four of these individuals were closely related and all six have strong genetic affinities with modern Ashkenazi Jews. We identify four alleles associated with genetic disease in Ashkenazi Jewish populations and infer variation in pigmentation traits, including the presence of red hair. Simulations indicate that Ashkenazi-associated genetic disease alleles were already at appreciable frequencies, centuries earlier than previously hypothesized.
The bodies seem to have been deposited in a single event, suggesting mass death consistent with disease, famine, or violence. The bodies were radiocarbon dated to the 11th-12th centuries and were buried with pottery shards from the 12th-14th centuries, and because they turned out to be Jewish, the researchers suggest that these individuals were killed during an infamous massacre of Jews in Norwich in 1190. This was, of course, just after the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin and the ramp up by Richard I of England and other European rulers towards the military campaigns we now call the “Third Crusade.”1 One chronicler, as translated by Dr. Ted Booth in his article on the massacres, writes,
“A great number of youths arrived from different provinces who had taken the sign of the Lord to depart for Jerusalem. They were indignant because the enemies of the cross of Christ living in that same place possessed so much, while they having taken up so great a journey had little, from them they considered they ought to extort from the unjust possessors, that which they might apply to the urgent uses of the pilgrimage which they had undertaken…No one either from the inhabitants of the place or from those who had come to the day of the market were opposing such daring ones, in truth some were even helping them (the youths). Some of the Jews were cut to pieces.”
Norwich is also the site of the origin of blood libel myth, which came into focus (as argued by Emily Rose in her book) in Norwich in the 1140s as a strategy (Rose’s word) to justify the murder of a Jewish moneylender by a local knight, and while the 1190 massacre is not as infamous as the one in York that same year, they are linked.
Earlier this week, another study on genome data related to medieval Jews came out, this one from the city of Erfurt. Again, there’s tragedy at the core of the project. In 1349, in the wake of the Black Death, the citizens rose up and murdered anywhere from several hundred to several thousand Jews. By the end, there simply was no Jewish community in Erfurt, but the population returned in the 1350s (because they brought revenue) as the city’s rulers executed or exiled the pogrom leaders, had the Christian population pay restitution, and built new houses and a synagogue, advertising their openness to Jewish re-settlement. It worked (until 1458, when again the Jews were expelled).
The chance discovery of a Jewish cemetery in 2013 and a ruling by a rabbi that while it wasn’t allowed to sample bones, scientists could take genetic samples from loose teeth, allowed scholars another set of findings - this time in the journal Cell - that confirm widespread genetic similarities in the Ashkenazi Jewish population of medieval Erfurt. This is despite the fact that we know the later population came from all around the Ashkenazi world.
There’s something called the “bottleneck” in Ashkenazi history, which is a moment when a small group of people seeded what became the entire population. These two studies - Norwich and Erfurt - suggest that this bottleneck happened much earlier than previously thought. As reported in the New York Times:
Scientists had previously calculated that the bottleneck event of the Ashkenazi Jewish population occurred roughly 600 to 800 years ago. But the new study, along with a British study published this year that examined six 12th-century skeletons found in England, suggest it could have been even further back.
This study is also going to contribute greatly to our understanding of what happened to Jews after the pogroms of the Black Death. As historian Monica Green wrote on Twitter (quoted with her permission), this will have "obvious implications for assessing the impact of the Black Death pogroms" but that more work through that lens will need to be done.
After the Norwich study came out and generated significant media attention, the English historian Simon Schama (who is Jewish and has done important work on Jewish history for the biggest possible audience) tweeted that it was time for “the mass murder of Jews in medieval England [to be] in every British history book.”
True!
But perhaps not just that!
Perhaps not just our deaths. There seems to be a tension in how we teach and think about anti-Jewish violence in the history of Europe. On the one hand, anti-Jewish violence is at once seen as inevitable, baked into the essence of medieval Christian society, rather than something that happens because people make discrete choices for specific reasons and in specific contexts. I don’t think antisemitism should be understood as fundamental and inescapable for contemporary reasons in that I don’t want people right now to think hating Jews is something we can’t work on. But maybe more importantly for me as a historian, I don’t think antisemitism should be seen as inescapable because I think it’s not true. The blood libel for example has a specific history, a set of choices, and people could have made and still can make different choices. We have sources. This history is knowable. Everyone should know the history.
At the same time, it's easy for the history of Europe to be taught, to be remembered, without invoking Jewish history at all, let alone the most violent episodes. And that silence is complicity in murder.
Instead, we must build Jewish history, as with so many histories, into our narratives, our teaching, the stories we tell. So it’s not just the pogroms, but also so we don’t forget the pogroms.
I’ll leave it to Matt to talk about the use of the word Crusade for another day.
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