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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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Some named names, some didn’t, but it’s not just a story of good guys and bad guys
It was written in 1972 and takes place between 1947 and 1959. It consists of testimony given before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which damaged or destroyed the lives of many people in the entertainment world during the Communist scare and the blacklisting of the 1940s and 50s. But for its Tony-winning director, Anna D. Shapiro, Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, a docudrama that is being revived at New York City Center, is relevant today — in more ways than one.
“I think that everybody will enter this play from a different perspective, because it’s in conversation with things that we’re dealing with as a country right now,” Shapiro told me over the phone. “For instance, my producer, Jeffrey Richards, who is of a certain generation, for him, it’s just deeply about freedom of expression. He has spent his whole life making art, championing artists, and the idea that he feels like we’re moving towards, which we clearly are, is a more fascist behavior around freedom of expression. He wants to remind people how dangerous some of these moves from the current administration are.”
“But I’m just a little bit younger than Jeffrey,” Shapiro, 60, continued. “I did the play when I was in college. So I was probably 22, 23, actually, just finishing college. And it was very clear then, right? It was about good guys and bad guys, and it was very easy to demonize the people who named names and champion the people who were brave enough not to name names. And now, as I’m older, I realize there’s a lot more complexity when the entire system is coming after you in a way that makes you feel like your entire livelihood is threatened. So on one level, it’s one thing for Arthur Miller not to name names. It was Arthur Miller. They weren’t going to be able to destroy Arthur Miller. But it’s another thing for an actor whose career is fading and who doesn’t have any control over his destiny to be kind of pushed into naming names. And I think that that’s what interests me, which is how difficult it becomes to be good in America, how difficult that is becoming, how terrifying and terrorizing the current administration is.”
The play, by Eric Bentley, highlights testimony by some of those — Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, Larry Parks, Abe Burrows — who named names of Communist Party associates and some of those who didn’t, such as Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Lionel Stander. It features a rotating cast that includes Steven Pasquale, Molly Ringwald, Santino Fontana and Bob Odenkirk.
Bentley, who died in 2020 at age 103, taught dramatic literature at Columbia University during the 1950’s and 60s. He was a champion and translator of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Shapiro won her Tony for Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County and is a former artistic director of the famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Most recently on Broadway she directed the Tony-winning revival of Eureka Day.
‘Of course they were antisemitic’
Six of the Hollywood Ten screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted and sent to prison for their refusals to testify were Jews. In the Bentley play, Miller, Robbins, Hellman, Stander and Burrows are Jewish.
As the play records, one key committee member, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, a known racist who was called out for his antisemitism, insisted on reading out the birth names of actors who he presumed to be Jewish, such as June Havoc (June Hovick), Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminsky), Eddie Cantor (Edward Iskowitz), Edward G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) and Melvyn Douglas (Melvyn Hesselberg).
“Of course they were antisemitic,” Shapiro said. “One of the things that they went out of their way to point out was how many of the actors and directors in Hollywood had changed their names and that their original names were so clearly Jewish. For them, this exposed a kind of nefariousness. They assumed a nefarious intent, as opposed to being what it really was, which was a way for Jews to defend themselves and keep themselves safe from antisemitism by changing their names, to be able to be in the public eye in a way that was less dangerous for them.”
The committee, she said, “twisted that and said, see, all these people, all of these people in Hollywood, are pretending not to be Jews, but they are, and they’re the problem.”
Actually, though, she said, “when you really look at what being a quote-unquote Communist was in this time, for the most part, these were essentially Democratic socialists. They were people who had gotten a little lucky, were making a little money. Many of them for the first time in their families. And they wanted to help the underdog. They wanted to look at what was corrupt in the system and make things better for people. They weren’t ‘burn the system down.’ They weren’t those people.”
Many Jews were victims of blacklisting, but many top executives in Hollywood who perpetrated or supported blacklisting were themselves Jewish. One reason, of course, was fear of the committee and other anti-Communist zealots like Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But there was another.
“I think that’s our complex history, isn’t it?” Shapiro said. “And we’re in a complex moment as Jewish people. We have been in such a conversation with our existential threats. And what we think of as the solution to that very, very real historic and current threat. And what I appreciate about you bringing that up is that Jews are not a monolith. Right now, that’s happening again, right? I disagree actively with my older brother, right? Now, what we don’t disagree with each other about is that we’re Jews.”
Making an impact
Although Shapiro says her family were not practicing Jews, she said she is very conscious of her Jewish heritage. “My mother didn’t practice primarily because she was a Marxist and she didn’t believe in God. And also, quite frankly, she was raised in a very conservative Jewish household. And the sexism of her day, of when they were in shul, the women were upstairs. Every Friday night, her grandmother would cook everything and eat in the kitchen. So she saw a lot of the sexism. And that really made her walk away from her Judaism. But with both of my parents, whenever Judaism was being attacked or somebody wanted to take it away from them, they would fight for it.”
“What I’ve realized, Shapiro went on to say, “is how without practicing, without going to shul, without even celebrating Passover, my Judaism is in my body, and it informs decisions I make. I think it’s the reason that I’ve done so much work around equity and systemic racism and systemic sexism. I think I essentially understand that part of my task is to seek justice, and to make an impact in the world.”
So what impact would she like the play to make on audiences?
“I always say that I direct plays really for one reason, and that is to make the audience’s world bigger. And that really only happens two ways, right? You go into a theater and you either see something familiar and you go, wow, there’s other people like me, or you go into the theater and you see something so different from your own experience and you think, my God, the world is so much bigger than I know. In this play, based on the way that you calibrate the performances, you can either make a very black and white statement, or you can make more nuanced and ambiguous statements.”
She agrees with the philosophy, she said, that every society’s survival is based on its ability to embrace ambiguity.
“And where we are right now — and I’m not even talking about on the right, because I don’t have anything to say about the right. They’re very confusing to me. So I can only speak to the people with whom I share essential beliefs. I think that we are not talking to one another well. I think we are looking at black and white and good and evil, and it’s way more complex than that. So I hope people come away going, wow, I really thought it was just going to be like the good guys who didn’t name names and the bad guys who named names.”
‘Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been’ runs through Sept. 11 at City Center in New York.
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Israel dominates debate as Rep. Dan Goldman defends seat in referendum on Zionism
American support for Israel and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerged as a central point of contention during the first televised Democratic primary debate between Rep. Dan Goldman and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on Tuesday night.
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, is challenging Goldman with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in a campaign that has gone after Goldman as allegedly out of step with Democratic voters who seek change in Israel.
Recent events in and near the 10th Congressional District, in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, provided plenty of fodder. The Celebrate Israel parade, the vote by members of the Park Slope Food Coop to boycott Israeli products, military assistance for Israel and investments in Israel bonds made up the first 15 minutes of the one-hour debate, hosted by Spectrum News NY1.
The exchange highlighted growing divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel and the war in Gaza.
“With all due respect, we’re now 10 minutes into this, and we’ve only spoken about Israel,” Goldman, a two-term incumbent, complained. “Israel is not the most important issue in this district.” The district voted heavily for Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. Jewish voters make up an estimated 20% of the electorate.
“This is one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time, and our representative failed,” Lander pushed back, citing Goldman’s support for U.S. aid to Israel and refusal to call the war in Gaza a genocide. In his opening remarks, Lander criticized Goldman for accepting donations from AIPAC, the U.S. campaign fundraising group allied with the Israeli government.
The Goldman-Lander contest is expected to serve as an early test of Mamdani’s political influence following his upset victory in the mayoral race. Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other in the mayoral race, and Mamdani made his endorsement of Lander for Congress along with democratic socialists in two other congressional primaries. Recent polling has shown Goldman trailing Lander.
Both candidates, who describe themselves as liberal Zionists, drew sharp contrasts over their approach to the conflict in the Middle East and the movement to boycott Israel.
Lander defended his decision not to march this year the annual Israel parade by pointing to the participation of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition who has made past controversial statements, including advocating for the displacement of Palestinians. “We shouldn’t be marching with war criminals,” Lander said.
However, Lander announced he would not attend the parade before it was publicly known that Smotrich would participate in the event, and shortly after Mamdani announced that he too would skip. Smotrich’s appearance drew little attention during the march itself. The Israeli minister joined the march at East 63rd Street along the route and walked primarily with a delegation of Knesset members. His participation sparked backlash afterward, with prominent Democrats condemning his appearance and critics of Israel excoriating Democratic elected officials who marched along the same route.
In an interview on Monday, Mamdani said he’s “offended” by the participation of Smotrich, saying he represents “a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide, and frankly a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza.”
Goldman defended his march. “I was unaware” of Smotrich joining the parade, he said. “And I am incredibly disappointed that that occurred.”
Israel appeared again in the cross-examination period, with Goldman asking Lander to explain why he left the Democratic Socialists of America after Oct. 7, 2023 — with Lander citing a “heinous” rally DSA promoted on Oct. 8 cheering on the attacks.
In the debate Lander emphasized his support for Israel as a Jewish state that is also one where Palestinian rights thrive.
In remarks on Sunday, ahead of the parade, Goldman spoke about the stakes of the race in an appeal to Jewish voters. “It’s a difficult time for many of us, but what we need is more than anything is moral clarity,” Goldman said at the Met Council annual legislative breakfast. “We need to stand for what we believe in, and I will do that right through the tape with the support of many of you.”
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Canada ‘is failing Jewish Canadians,’ prime minister says as he unveils effort to address antisemitism
(JTA) — Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney announced on Monday a new government body to combat racism, saying its first priority would be tackling antisemitism.
Carney addressed Canada’s surge in antisemitic hate crimes during a speech at Holy Blossom Synagogue, Toronto’s oldest Jewish congregation. He said the government had to “start with clearly admitting that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians.”
Carney referenced the wave of attacks on Canadian Jews since Oct. 7, 2023, including bullets fired at synagogues and Jewish schools and attacks on Jewish businesses, community centers and Holocaust memorials.
Over two-thirds of the country’s religion-motivated hate crimes last year were directed at Jewish Canadians, who make up only 1% of the population, he said.
Carney said the government was responding by launching the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion, with the mission of advising Canada’s government on combating all forms of hate.
“I am directing that the first responsibility of that council is to address antisemitism,” he said.
The council will be chaired by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller. Carney also announced that Marc Gold, a lawyer and Jewish community leader who retired last year from the Senate of Canada, will join the council.
Carney said the council will be tasked with reassessing the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism, developing a whole-of-government approach to align federal policies and public safety programs, improving the collection of data on hate incidents, and measuring the impact of government efforts.
Several Jewish organizations are likely to be disappointed that Carney’s announcement did not include more sweeping enforcement measures against antisemitism.
Rich Robertson, the director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, said the speech was a “missed opportunity.” The organization was advocating for a task force that could respond immediately to antisemitic incidents and a commission of inquiry to identify their root causes, he said.
“We were hoping for true tactical changes that could positively be actioned to change the lived experience of Jewish Canadians, and unfortunately, that is not what we received today,” Robertson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Pressures on Carney were mounting ahead of the speech. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, pushed for him to strengthen law enforcement.
“Government and law enforcement must address the drivers of this crisis, including radicalization, promotion of terrorism, and terrorist entities operating here in Canada,” CIJA said in a statement shortly before Carney’s address.
The group added, “The Prime Minister has an opportunity to set the tone from the highest office to make clear that nothing can justify the hatred, intimidation, and violence Jewish Canadians are experiencing and that every tool at the government’s disposal will be used to confront it.”
Carney’s messages about Israel, Gaza and antisemitism have divided Jewish voters. In September, he led Canada to officially recognizing a Palestinian state. He said in October that he would fulfill the commitment of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Canada. (The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza in 2024.) Last week, he spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the experiences of Canadians detained after trying to sail to bring aid to Gaza.
But Carney, the leader of Israel’s Liberal Party, has also introduced public safety legislation supported by national Jewish organizations, including CIJA and B’nai Brith Canada. Most significant among them is Bill C-9, which would strengthen Canada’s criminal code by creating new offenses for intimidation and obstruction at houses of worship, schools and community centers used by religious groups.
That bill has also faced backlash from free speech advocates, including both Jewish conservatives and progressives. Pro-Palestinian Jewish groups say that it would wrongly criminalize protesting against events like real estate sales for Israeli settlements in the West Bank if they take place in synagogues.
Carney appeared to acknowledge those criticisms in his announcement of the new ministerial council.
“I want to be clear about what these measures are and what they are not,” he said. “They are not curtailments of freedom of expression. They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere. But they are the basic standards we owe one another in our shared public institutions.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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