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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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How the New Palestinian Authority ‘Constitution’ Could Lead to Endless War
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
When then-Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Yasser Arafat walked away from Israeli peace deals in 2000 and 2001, his main pretext was reportedly a refusal to compromise over the Palestinian demand for a so-called “right of return” to pre-state Israel for Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants.
In 2004, the UK newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi published an account of an associate of Arafat that confirmed this:
I admit that I was very close to the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, but the period when I was close to him was at the height of his lean years, particularly the period of the first Gulf War and after it … President Arafat was not willing to sign a permanent agreement with the Hebrew state, because he knew full well that that agreement would put him among the traitors in the annals of history, as it [the agreement] would be at the expense of conceding the right of return and most of the sovereignty over East Jerusalem. [emphasis added]
[Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper (UK), Nov. 19, 2004]
This was corroborated by a White House insider as well:
Professor Alan Deshowitz: I can tell you that President Clinton told me directly and personally that what caused the failure of the Camp David-Taba accords was the refusal of the Palestinians and Arafat to give up the right of return. That was the sticking point. It wasn’t Jerusalem. It wasn’t borders. It was the right of return.
[Debate, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Nov. 29, 2005]
As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA’s leaders endlessly cite UN General Assembly Resolution 194 as though it were some kind of instrument of “non-negotiable rights” under “International law”:
Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “It is the right of Palestinian refugees, according to Resolution 194 published by the UN in 1948, to return to the villages and cities from which they were expelled. This is an authentic and non-negotiable right.
The right of return and compensation is an authentic right of the Palestinian refugees. We say that the solution to this issue will be implemented based on Resolution 194 published by the UN. There may be agreements here and there, but the basis for solving this problem is Resolution 194, which concerns the return of refugees and compensating the refugees for the suffering and leaving their towns, cities, and villages, from which they were forcibly and violently expelled in 1948 during the Palestinian Nakba.” [emphasis added]
[Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash, YouTube channel, Sept. 23, 2025]
However, there is no “right of return,” which is not a right at all. Palestinians distort Resolution 194’s interpretation and mask their intent behind their demand for it — which is to demographically erase the Jewish majority in Israel in the PA’s vision of a “two-state” outcome. Moreover, like all UNGA resolutions, Resolution 194 was non-binding.
Currently, the Palestinians are in the process of drafting a “constitution” that aims to tie the hands of future Palestinian leaders who might make peace with Israel in a variety of ways, but specifically by making the right of return part of Palestinian law and thus make any concession on the “refugee” issue unconstitutional.
The PLO Department of Refugee Affairs, in cooperation with the Center for Refugee Policy Research, held a dialogue meeting under the title “Draft Interim Constitution of the State of Palestine for 2026: Constitutional Approaches and Strengthening Refugee Rights in Light of the Current Challenges.” The meeting discussed the status of the refugee issue and the right of return in the draft interim constitution.
The meeting was attended by PLO Executive Committee members Ahmad Abu Houli, Ahmed Majdalani, and Bassam Al-Salehi. Also present were representative of the Constitution Drafting Committee Ammar Dwaik, secretary of the Constitution Committee Mounir Salameh, and Secretary-General of the [PA] Parliament (Legislative Council) Ahmed Abu Hashish.
The participants noted that the PLO, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, holds the original and sole authority in handling the refugee issue, and that this issue and the right of return are at the core of the Palestinian cause. They also emphasized that the right of return is a non-derogable and inalienable ‘supra-constitutional right.’” [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 27, 2026]
“Non-derogable,“ you could say, is not a household word. It is, however, terminology lifted from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It describes a fundamental human right that cannot be suspended, restricted, or taken away by a government under any circumstances — even during times of war, public disaster, or a state of emergency.
This is far from the only problematic aspect of the emerging “Palestinian constitution” — an attempt to graft the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence into the core identity of any potential future Palestinian state.
It’s but one more compelling argument why a PA-Palestinian state would be a disaster for the world. It would not bring peace, but guarantee endless war.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.
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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — But Exposed Hezbollah Instead
People walk past a billboard portraying the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at the site of a rally held by protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, to show support to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen, Oct. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel, but has also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.
Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.
That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.
When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.
So when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.
The “investigation” — titled, “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” — attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians.
But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.
The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.
In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.
Mohammed claims that had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing.
It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country.
Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.
According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.
Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.
Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.
Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.
Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.
The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.
The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?
The answer may lie even closer to home.
Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.
Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.
This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.
By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.
Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.
The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.
Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.
Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.
There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.
The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.
Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.
The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.
When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created. And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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When it comes to Israel/Palestine, everyone is sure that everyone else is a bigot
Welcome to the Great Hardening, in which Zionists and Anti-Zionists have each decided that the other side is made up of Nazis.
Literally.
For many on the Hard Left, all Zionists are Genociders. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Standing Together or Smol Emuni — Zionism is settler colonialism and entails genocide. And on both the Hard Right and what I have come to call the Hard Center, Anti-Zionists are Antisemites. Doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, or even a rabbi — all anti-Zionism, and even strong criticism of Israel, is antisemitism and thus bigotry.
As is typical of this decade of purity politics, each side embodies their rigidity by excluding the impure from the camp, as Leviticus 13:46 commands. On the Hard Left, some of my own progressive communities now explicitly ban “Zionists” (as they understand the term) from participation — at one event, a community meeting was halted because one person identified themselves as Israeli. Israeli DJs, including some who are vocally critical of Netanyahu and others who have “renounced their Israeliness,” have been banned at venues in London, Belgium and New York. Radical inclusion does not include “genociders.”
The Hard Center is equally uncompromising, defining its political opponents (often including liberal Zionists) as bigots who must be defeated, deplatformed and delegitimized. Anti-Zionist Jews aren’t even Jews, they say, and the term “genocide” is a blood libel. I have seen this firsthand as well; since daring to consider whether the term might apply to Gaza, I have not been invited as a scholar in residence or keynote speaker by a single mainstream Jewish organization. Meanwhile, leading institutions of the New York Jewish community now platform centrist or right-wing speakers exclusively, including at religious events happening next week.
On the Left, Right and Center, I have seen artists, academics, writers and musicians de-platformed for not condemning Israel, not condemning Hamas, mentioning Oct. 7, not mentioning Oct. 7, or issuing one’s condemnations without invoking the appropriate shibboleths. And, like the Levitical tzaraat, wrong views are contagious. If you fail to condemn someone who fails to condemn Israel, or Hamas, or antisemitism, or the occupation, then you are condemned.
As Shaul Magid has recently written, the limits of pluralism seem to have been redefined — and tightened. American Jews can accommodate disagreement on theology, halachic observance, intermarriage, LGBTQ inclusion and American politics — but not Israel. Magid himself was recently informed by a synagogue that “no one who is not a Zionist is permitted to speak from the pulpit.” (He identifies as a post-Zionist.) Meanwhile, students who privately protested the choice of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to speak at the JTS graduation had their jobs and livelihoods threatened as a result.
I know that there are many of us who feel caught between the Hard Left and Hard Center (and aren’t engaged with the Hard Right). Present company included, we are exhausted by all the shouting and shadow-banning. Is there nothing we can do about this? Is it just the new normal?
I want to make a case for a softening of the Hard Places — but I admit to some pessimism, because doing so may require a rethinking of what political arguments are really about. And the prescription I offer is thus, well, a little “soft.”
By which I mean: It addresses the real sources of all this hardening, which are emotional, and even spiritual. I mean a softening of the hard walls — built out of certainty, rage, and trauma — that demarcate the boundaries of pure and impure.
I don’t mean resolving our disagreements or pretending they don’t matter. They do matter. I also don’t mean centrism; writing this article, I took one of those online political quizzes and on a scale of 100, with 100 being the most conservative, I scored 15 on economic issues and 10 on social issues. That’s not the center.
What I mean is that our responses to these disagreements are not a matter of political ideology, but of more primal, instinctual drives. Consider: When someone says something you find strongly objectionable, how do you feel, physically? Often the response is physical disgust — like our Israelite ancestors, we want to put the defilement outside the camp. This is not an accident: Neuroscientists tell us that moral disgust activates the same parts of the brain as physical disgust. Which makes sense evolutionarily — it’s safest to keep the contaminant far away — but which affects how we tolerate dissent and disagreement in our midst. Often, we are repulsed by it.
Or consider this: Take a moment to reflect on how you feel — psychologically, tribally, morally, physically — about (take your pick) Israel or Palestine. Speaking for myself, I grew up loving Israel. Even before I visited it (in 1987, on a USY teen trip), I understood that it was the only place where I could feel fully at home. My group was in the majority. I could eat in all the restaurants. And I hated anyone who hated it. I had no space, intellectually or emotionally, for their narrative of 1948. And I still, to this day, have a love for the land and culture of Israel, where I lived for three years.
Is it not obvious that, when we love a person or place or country, we might be biased toward it?
Or maybe you’re on the other side of the emotional-political spectrum. Maybe you are in communities or close relationships with Muslims, Arabs, or others who have family directly impacted by Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or Iran. Maybe you have seen videos or movies of atrocities in those places — of innocent children dead or maimed, of entire cities flattened by a supposedly defensive war. So of course you have emotional as well as political responses; you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.
No wonder the Left and Center are putting up walls. They are in pain. And, as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.
This is why nationalists never want to see the suffering on the other side. The cognitive and emotional dissonance is unbearable. The people you love have done horrible things. The enemy is not entirely evil; in fact there are many innocent people who have suffered. Their blood, too, cries out from the ground.
Now can you reread the preceding paragraph from the other ‘side’? Maybe the real sides aren’t Israel and Palestine, but Coexistence and Violence.
If these last few paragraphs sound a little ‘soft’, that is the point. Paraphrasing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., hardness cannot drive out hardness. Only softness can do that: coming to see our own pain, sharing vulnerability and uncertainty, and understanding that questions of Palestine and Israel are as emotional as they are political, for all sides of the debate, including the center and right.
I am not naïve here, which is why I am pessimistic. I know, obviously, that the Hard Left, Hard Right, and Hard Center are composed precisely the people least interested in processing our grief or leading with vulnerability. But that doesn’t mean their trauma isn’t there. They’re just enacting it unconsciously rather than consciously.
They may seem like the strong ones, but they are not strong enough to face their own pain.
But doing this kind of inner work is not impossible; I have seen it work in my own life. And then seeing multiple narratives, cultivating intellectual humility, and recognizing that, in fact, there are coherent worldviews on all sides — all that becomes the easy part. When it comes to Israel/Palestine, I have Socialist and Jewish Voice for Peace friends whom I regularly consult for their takes, and I have Security Hawk and Soft Center (by which I mean: sad that coexistence seems impossible, but not hardened or nationalist) friends with whom I do the same. It works because we have been friends for a long time, and when we have argued intensely in the past, there’s been time to let the anger cool. We are invested in one another as people, not as bearers of positions. And when I see myself getting triggered, I step back from the brink.
Maybe we need a change of Jewish metaphor, away from Leviticus and its lepers, and toward the Talmudic sages and their modeling of constructive disagreement. Sincere debate, they said, is l’shem shamayim — for the sake of heaven. And when the disagreement cannot be resolved, elu v’elu divrei Elohim Chayim; both views are the words of the living God. The sage Rabbi Meir even continued to learn from Elisha Ben Avuyah after he committed apostasy.
These rabbis were not softies; they resisted imperialism, created a new form of religious life, and probably saved the Jewish people. Many of them were martyred. And yet they were ‘soft’ in the best ways: They were emotionally, spiritually and intellectually permeable, and, though still limited by their culture in many ways (sexism, for example), they were able to live in community even while strongly disagreeing with one another.
Can we?
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