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A German town built a granary atop its Jewish cemetery. Now the bones are yielding insights about Ashkenazi DNA.
BERLIN (JTA) – The city of Erfurt in central Germany is home to an impeccably restored medieval synagogue made possible because local Jews had been expelled long before the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Jewish sites.
Now, Erfurt’s long-hidden Jewish past is again offering new insights — this time about the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews.
Human remains from a medieval Jewish cemetery in Erfurt have allowed what researchers say is the largest ancient Jewish DNA study to date. Conducted without disinterring any remains, in keeping with Jewish law, the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell found that Erfurt’s medieval Jewish community was more genetically diverse than their modern-day cousins, and carried many of the same Jewish genetic diseases — such as Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis — that affect Ashkenazi Jews today.
“There have been many previous DNA studies, but not of Jews,” said geneticist Shai Carmi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose search for study material led him to an archaeological dig at the Jewish cemetery in Erfurt. He and his collaborators were able to analyze DNA of 33 individuals who died between 1270 and 1400, using teeth they found there.
The study follows a similar analysis revealed in August by researchers in England, who studied the DNA from skeletons found at the bottom of a medieval well and concluded that the remains were likely of victims of an antisemitic massacre in 1190. Analysis of six individuals prior to their identification as Jewish revealed that Ashkenazi Jews developed a unique genetic variation centuries earlier than realized.
The Erfurt analysis also includes samples from before the epidemic of Black Death that was until recently understood to have created the genetic “bottleneck” that created the genetic markers common among Ashkenazi Jews today.
Erfurt’s Jewish settlement existed from the 11th to 15th century, with a brief gap following a 1349 massacre perpetrated after the Jews were falsely blamed for causing the bubonic plague. Surviving Jews returned there, but after all Jews were expelled once and for all in 1454, the city built a granary on top of the Jewish cemetery.
Karin Sczech participates in the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt. (Courtesy of TLDA Ronny Krause)
In 2013, the city approved the repurposing of the unused granary into a parking lot. Because it was an historic site, a rescue excavation was initiated, overseen for the State of Thuringia by German archaeologist Karin Sczech.
Meanwhile, Carmi had been looking for Jewish cemeteries anywhere in the world “where we could analyze remains already excavated,” he told JTA in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “I consulted historians and eventually reached the archeologist in Erfurt.” Fortunately, he said, “they still hadn’t reburied the remains.”
He approached Sczech, who later became a co-author of the new study. In 2018, with a supportive judgment from Rabbi Ze’ev Litke — an Israeli expert on genetics and Jewish law — and permission from Erfurt’s then-rabbi, Benjamin Kochan, work began to extract and analyze DNA from detached teeth found in the graves. (About 500 Jews live in Erfurt today, most of them having migrated from the former Soviet Union since 1990.)
American geneticist David Reich picked up the teeth and brought them back to the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where drilling and DNA extraction took place.
While the skeletons were reburied, the teeth are still stored at the research institutes where they have been analyzed, in case scientists need to retest to verify the result.
The project provides an ethical basis for studies of ancient Jewish DNA, Carmi said. “Of course we couldn’t just go to a cemetery and dig and take out skeletons; this would be prohibited,” he said, referring to Jewish law prohibiting the removal of bones from where someone was buried.
But Litke opined that the study could be done, because the bones already had been disturbed for an unrelated reason. “He recommended using teeth, as the analysis does almost no damage,” Carmi said.
There are many motivations to study Jewish DNA: One can find lost relatives going back a few generations, and answer questions about Jewish origin of partners intending to marry. But the goal of Carmi’s team was “to fill the gaps in our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish early history.”
There are several non-destructive ways to obtain DNA from human remains, said Carmi, who also works as a consultant to an Israeli firm that helps clients trace their genetic roots.
“You can take an almost microscopic slice of bone and extract DNA in a solution, or put the entire bone in a solution and extract the DNA without drilling, without disturbing the dead. This opens the way to doing studies even without teeth,” he added.
His team found that the Erfurt community appeared to fit into two genetically distinct groups, descending either from Middle Eastern or European populations. This genetic variability no longer exists, Carmi said.
At the same time, Carmi said, the analysis found remarkable continuity in the local community, as well. “One third of the Erfurt individuals descended from one woman through their maternal lines,” he said, adding that evidence suggested that she lived between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago.
In a press statement, geneticist Reich of Harvard said the work “also provides a template for how a co-analysis of modern and ancient DNA data can shed light on the past. Studies like this hold great promise not only for understanding Jewish history, but also that of any population.”
The research team, with more than 30 scientists, included Hebrew University’s Shamam Waldman, a doctoral student in Carmi’s group, who performed most of the data analysis.
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Jewish Haverford students named a professor in their antisemitism lawsuit. Police say he responded by stalking one online.
A religion professor named by Jewish Haverford College students in a recently settled lawsuit against the school was arrested Tuesday after authorities say he used anonymous accounts to harass one of those students online.
According to an indictment unsealed in federal court Tuesday, Haverford professor Guangtian Ha used at least four burner accounts on X to send roughly 50 threatening messages to an unidentified male Jewish student between October 2025 and May 2026.
Ha is charged with one count of cyberstalking, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Federal authorities say Ha replied to one of the student’s posts with a picture of the student’s home mailbox and an emoji of a pair of eyes. After the student took security precautions in response to the messages, the professor allegedly commented on them and wrote, “The goyim have woken up, Jew. Run. Flee. Leave.”
Haverford College President Wendy Raymond informed students of the arrest in a letter published on the school website Tuesday, saying Ha had been placed on administrative leave and barred from campus while the case proceeds.
“I am deeply distressed by these allegations and want to state in the plainest of terms that any form of harassment or discrimination based on identity is unacceptable, antithetical to our values, and has no place at Haverford,” Raymond wrote.
Ha, who was on sabbatical this semester, could not be reached for comment. Federal court filings do not identify any legal representation for the defendant.
The arrest comes two months after the liberal arts college, which is located just outside of Philadelphia, settled an antisemitism lawsuit filed by Jewish students.
In that lawsuit, filed in 2024, those students had listed a number of Haverford professors who they said contributed to an antisemitic environment. One of them was Ha, a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, who had tweeted from his public account that “the only way to deal with Zionists is to stop talking to them and refuse to let them waste your time.”
He later tweeted — still from his public account — that he knew who at Haverford had been “silent on this genocide or even tacitly support it,” saying, “I will never forgive them. I know their names and I know their faces. Never forgive. No reconciliation.”
The messages Ha allegedly sent from his anonymous accounts were even more threatening. According to the indictment, one read, “Jew, get the f— out of my country.”
Another message allegedly read, “If Jews are so special then they should be placed in special camps and receive special treatments.”
According to an amended civil complaint filed in January 2025, the school took no public action against Ha, who taught courses on Islam and religion in China.
In the settlement, the college’s leaders agreed that Haverford’s policy would bar discrimination specifically against students and employees with Zionist views, as well as those who are Jewish or Israeli, according to Higher Ed Dive.
In addition to his alleged online activity, Ha had co-written an opinion column in the Haverford Clerk, the campus newspaper, in which he downplayed student concerns about antisemitism as “Zionist witch hunts” — arguing instead that pro-Palestinian students faced the brunt of campus discrimination.
“A truly inclusive learning community would necessitate our administration taking a clear and careful stance against this sort of hatred,” he wrote.
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‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7
A raft of pro-Palestinian and democratic socialist groups will protest against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, accusing the mayor of capitulating to pro-Israel pressure since taking office.
More than 20 local organizations, most of them college chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine or Young Democratic Socialists of America, are participating in the event, which will culminate with a rally at City Hall. (Young Democratic Socialists America is the student offshoot of the DSA.)
The groups’ complaints against the mayor include his allowing a law to take effect that allows NYPD to implement security perimeters at places of worship and launching a plan to combat antisemitism that includes funding for Jewish community groups that do not disavow Israel.
“Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement,” the groups said in a caption alongside a poster for the event. “He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality. Instead, he has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure.”
The protest comes even as Mamdani, who drew on the support of local progressive groups in his run for office, continues to hammer the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from City Hall. But the protest — which appears to have split the city’s DSA movement — revealed growing discontent from the far-left with how Mamdani has governed.
It also underscored how uncompromising the left flank of the democratic socialists can be on matters related to Israel.
Why leftist groups are protesting Mamdani
Mamdani rode into office last November on a swell of pro-Palestinian support and democratic socialist organizing power. He rejected many of the pro-Israel norms of New York City campaign trail, including by promising to arrest Netanyahu if he ever visited New York and calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
Since taking office, Mamdani has revoked an anti-BDS executive order signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, and the city’s previously accepted definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Mamdani also publicly defended pro-Palestinian student protesters detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and opposed the West Bank land sales at local synagogues.
And even in a public appearance conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani reiterated his stance that the Israeli premier is a war criminal.
Still, he has tried to court Jewish groups by pledging to address antisemitism through his new multimillion dollar strategy that allocates $6.4 million to community organizations. He has also visited with Jews in all five boroughs to build community relations.
Their criticism of Mamdani for the security perimeter bill reflected disappointment in the mayor for something he couldn’t do much about. The bill, Int. No. 1-B, passed in March with a supermajority, meaning he was unable to veto it. Rather than sign it into law, Mamdani did not take action on it and it became law after 30 days. (He vetoed a separate bill creating a protest buffer zone for schools that had passed with a simple majority.)
The protesting groups argue the bill criminalizes protests against synagogues that host “illegal land sales” of property in the West Bank. Additionally, the chapters take issue with Mamdani’s antisemitism strategy providing security infrastructure to “Zionist synagogues” that hold these sales. The bill provides the same security to all synagogues regardless of their affiliation with Israel.
The online poster for the event states in its caption that Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism provides “funding for Zionist propagandist groups” such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council works in partnership with the UJA-Federation of New York to fight against antisemitism and foster support for Israel, including sponsoring tours to the country. Under a Mamdani-created program, JCRC will work with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
The mayor’s office declined the Forward’s request for comment. The organizations involved did not immediately respond to inquiries, except for Lehman College Young Democratic Socialists of America which declined.
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Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him?
(JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly this year came at a critical time for Israel. Talks were underway to resolve the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel was awaiting the outcome of the on-again, off-again U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. The country had also just been sanctioned by 12 countries, led by Britain, over its West Bank policies.
Yet it was Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor who has virtually no say in international relations, who drew the Israeli prime minister’s fiercest, most lengthy criticism. Mamdani, Netanyahu charged, was an antisemite, a “buddy” of Hamas, the husband of a supporter of the Oct. 7 massacre and the friend of a 9/11 enthusiast.
The U.N. address wasn’t the only time in the weeks leading up to Israel’s Oct. 27 election that Netanyahu focused his sights on Mamdani in an unusual forum. In August, Netanyahu’s Likud party launched an election billboard campaign showing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, with the slogan, “They want Netanyahu to lose, don’t let them win.”
In the weeks leading up to his visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, the prime minister and Mamdani went at each other on social media, with Mamdani calling for Netanyahu’s arrest in New York (while acknowledging he had no power to order it), and the prime minister accusing the mayor of antisemitism and support of Hamas.
Netanyahu is making the New York mayor a central bogeyman this election season – is it working?
It’s true that Mamdani, who is Muslim, is unpopular across most of the Jewish political spectrum in Israel. During his election campaign and since taking office, Mamdani has constantly accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing, charges most Jewish Israelis and politicians from both coalition and opposition parties reject.
But it is unlikely that the average Israeli would base his or her vote on a candidate’s attitude towards the mayor of New York. After all, Israelis have many other issues on their plate that are closer to home, such as the state of national security, accountability for the failures that allowed Hamas to carry out its deadly raids inside Israel on Oct. 7 and the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Israelis from IDF service.
Still, Netanyahu aide Caroline Glick, the prime minister’s international affairs adviser, said in an interview it was “obvious” and “self-explaining” that the prime minister would push back against a person who has been “spewing antisemitism.”
Glick repeated Netanyahu’s claim in his speech that New York Jews felt unsafe as a result of Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies. She said Mamdani “got what he ordered up” in the premier’s U.N. address. (Mamdani pushed back sharply on what he called Netanyahu’s “baseless lies” in the speech.)
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Mamdani started it. Mamdani “began a smear campaign already in July,” Danon said, referring to the video in which Mamdani called on the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, and the beefs on social media since then. Mamdani “fuels the fire and incites, and our approach is not to keep quiet versus inciters,” Danon wrote to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in response to a query.
There are plenty of other targets that Netanyahu can attack to bolster his reputation as a fighter. He took aim in his U.N. speech at the “moral cowards” who left the hall when he rose to speak, the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa, French President Emmanuel Macron, Turkish President Erdogan, Qatar, and the protestors outside the U.N. building.
So why did Mamdani consume so much oxygen?
Guy Levy, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained that Mamdani is not just a personal adversary but an emblem of a larger struggle. “Mamdani is a symbol of the rise in the West of the connection between the radical Left and Islamists and antisemites,” he told JTA.
That connects with a larger theme in Netanyahu’s campaign: arguing that a governing coalition without him would be dependent on a majority-Arab party and on the left-wing Democrats to get enough seats to form a majority. As such, he contends, they would be unable or unwilling to safeguard Israeli security interests.
The campaign’s most recent slogan is, “It’s either the Right or Palestine” (the two words rhyme in Hebrew), indicating that a rival government would agree to Palestinian statehood, which many Israelis view as a danger. Mamdani, according to Levy, is part of the same left-wing/Arab camp; attacking Mamdani is therefore an attack against Netanyahu’s political rivals. (Mamdani appears to favor a one-state solution – as do many on Israel’s right, although envisioning a very different type of single state.)
Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran Israeli-American pollster and senior political analyst for the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and a staunch Netanyahu critic, speculated that the decision to go after Mamdani may not have represented a premeditated strategy but rather a “scattershot” approach born out of the prime minister’s poor performance in polls.
“First of all, not much has helped Netanyahu electorally,” Scheindlin said in a phone interview with JTA. “His party is stuck in the polls. It hasn’t changed in a very long time.” She noted that the Likud is currently polling at around 20 to 22 seats or even lower and that the bloc of parties loyal to him for forming a coalition hovers at about 50 to 52 seats – far short of the 61 needed to be in the majority.
Netanyahu has been pushing two major themes in his election campaign, according to Scheindlin: a “positive” theme, stressing his government’s successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran; and a “negative” theme against likely Arab participation in a rival government led by Yashar party head Gadi Eisenkot, who is polling best right now.
The attacks against Mamdani fit into the negative frame, Scheindlin argued.
“The one about Mamdani plays into the theme that the whole world is against us, the world is being taken over by Muslims,” Scheindlin said. “These are openly racialized and racist themes against an Arab party and the Israeli government, against Muslims and anywhere else in the world.”
She added that Netanyahu and his government have been claiming that “any criticism coming from Europe of Israel is all because Europe has been taken over by Muslims,” and the New York focus now only expands that message in arguing that radical Islam has taken over the world.
During this government’s tenure, Israel’s standing in both Europe and the U.S. has plummeted, with many European countries imposing sanctions, arms sales blocks and harsh criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Now Netanyahu “is going to be the defender by attacking people like Mamdani rhetorically and politically,” she said.
Scheindlin said she did not believe that Mamdani’s presence in the Likud’s election campaign would sway any voters. “The Mamdani sign came and went. I would doubt if most Israelis even remember it right now,” she said. And while the attacks against Mamdani generally “played into his message,” the bottom line is that Netanyahu is “trying everything” at this point in the campaign.
Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, viewed the speech less as a desperate play and more as a natural part of Netanyahu’s election campaign. In an interview with CBS, Katz said that the speech’s idea was for Israelis to think that “The world is against us no matter what, but thank God we have a leader, in this case, Netanyahu, who can stand up to everyone and stick it to them.” Katz added that “this could bring him some votes, or at the very least consolidate the base.”
Calling Mamdani an antisemite and blaming him for Jews feeling unsafe in New York “plays out well,” Katz said to CBS, “because Israelis look at people like Mamdani and they don’t see much of a difference, whether it’s Mamdani or it’s President Erdogan of Turkey, or it’s some other tent encampment or protest on the streets of Sydney or Paris or London. It’s one and the same.”
With the U.N. speech behind him and more pressing issues to address, including new revelations about warnings Netanyahu received prior to Oct. 7 and the flydubai attack last week, the Mamdani-Netanyahu fight has receded into the rear-view mirror. But if Netanyahu is reelected or if he stays on as caretaker prime minister, the issue will likely resurface.
Mamdani focuses on Netanyahu now, but he has made clear over his career that his problem is generally with Israel, whichever government is leading it. Even if a new administration takes over in Jerusalem, it may find itself at odds with the mayor of New York – and with the growing movement of young democratic socialists that he represents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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