In 1190 C.E., Christian soldiers making their way to Jerusalem to fight in the Third Crusade stopped in eastern England to “rise against the Jews before they invaded the Saracens,” or Muslims. According to medieval chronicler Ralph de Diceto, on February 6, “all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle.”

The Norwich massacre was part of a broader wave of violence against England’s Jews, who faced mounting anti-Semitism in the late 12th century due to the “religious fervor of the Crusades,” per Historic U.K.’s Seth Eislund, and baseless accusations of blood libel. (The blood libel myth—the false notion that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes—actually originated in Norwich, where a boy named William died in 1144; his family accused local Jews of murdering him.)

Scholars are unsure of how many lives the 1190 pogrom claimed, but a new genetic analysis published in the journal Current Biology suggests that 17 skeletons found in a well in Norwich in 2004 belong to victims of the attack. DNA extracted from six of the deceased contains close links to modern-day Ashkenazi…