In a report from the World Israel News Staff dated August 31, 2022 and titled, “Antisemitic mass murder behind mysterious English grave, researchers say” the question was raised in the same report as to why the bodies of the Jewish martyrs had not been buried, especially as all 17 of them were found as long ago as 2004 and had been kept in storage all that time without respectful burial. Arutz Sheva, in reporting the research results, mentioned that that "the bodies were reburied in a Jewish cemetery years ago in a religious ceremony."
I have discovered that, according to author Sam Sokol, writing in a 2013 edition of the Jerusalem Post, “the British Board of Deputies arranged for the remains of the 17 Jewish martyrs, discovered at the bottom of a well in the British city of Norwich in 2004, to be given a Jewish burial in Earlham Cemetery in Norwich in 2013."
“The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the umbrella organization for England’s Jewish community, estimated that, “some 50 people attended a ceremony that was composed of both Jews and Christians. Members of both faiths shoveled dirt onto the newly dug graves, while local Rabbi, Alex Bennet, read an introductory prayer and his counterpart from the Norwich church eulogized the deceased.”
The remains were discovered during the construction of a new shopping center and researchers from the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification at Dundee University had deduced that all 17 bodies were thrown headfirst down a well in either the 12th or 13th centuries.
The conclusion from DNA research was that they were Jews and that at least five were from the same family. Eleven of the bodies were of children from the ages of 2 to 15 with five of them below the age of five.
Since 1135 Jews had lived in Norwich. In 1146, the local Jews were falsely accused of having kidnapped, tortured and killed a Christian boy before the Passover to use his blood in making matzahs. This was the first instance of the senseless accusation (Jews are forbidden to eat blood) known as the blood-libel that spread throughout Christendom and resulted for following centuries in the massacres of countless Jewish victims.
England was no different from most of Christendom during the Medieval period and beyond. Europe then was as much a charnel house for the stateless and hapless Jews as it was during the Holocaust. The same relentless hatred of the Jews lay like a psychosis among most Europeans, and England was no exception.
In England, a catastrophe broke upon the Jews during the Third Crusade (1189-1192) when the coronation of Richard, Coeur de Lion, took place. Anti-Jewish mobs attacked and murdered Jews from Norwich to Dunstable and throughout many other English towns because of a false rumor that King Richard had ordered the Jews who had come to honor him at the palace to be turned away.
During the king’s absence while on the crusade, the Jewish community of York tried to find refuge in the lord's castle from ravening mobs bent on the Jews’ destruction. Rather than fall into the hands of the fanatical mob, the Jews, at least 150 in number, took their own lives on March 17th, 1190.
Rabbi Yom Tov ben Isaac uttered these final words: “It is plainly the will of G-d of our Fathers that we die for his holy Law. And lo, death is at our door … for if we fall into their hands, we shall die in mockery at their arbitrary choice.” A rabbinic ban (cherem) prohibited Jewish residence in York after that pogrom.
Peter Abelard, the French scholar, himself a victim of persecution by the Church, was a lone voice in sympathizing with the harried and tormented Jews throughout so much of Europe. He wrote in 1135: “No nation has undergone such sufferings for God. Scattered among all the nations, having neither king nor secular prince, the Jews are oppressed with heavy taxes as if they must buy their lives anew every day … The Jews are not permitted to own fields and vineyards … Thus, the only livelihood that remains to them is usury, and this in turn excites the hatred of the Christians.”
In his book, Diaspora, the historian, Werner Keller, described the atrocities and persecution of the Jews in Europe by the Church as - The Medieval Inferno. It is why I once wrote in a published article that the name for the largest Jewish cemetery in the world is, Europe.
In short, the discovery of the 17 Jewish bodies in the Norwich well attests to the anti-Jewish hatred that permeated every facet of medieval life throughout Christendom from the Popes to the secular kings and princes on down to the peasants. In Poland and Russia at Easter time, which so often corresponds with the Passover festival, Jews were routinely slaughtered in pogroms. Tha same occurred routinely on New Year's Eve.
Nahum Sokolov, writing in 1920, spoke of the massacres in the Ukraine. He wrote as follows: “For this cold murder of whole communities, not Heaven itself nor all the mercy of the angels could find palliation. There is no instance that shows so much as this the ghastly descent of human character into primitive brutality and cannibalism. This is a deed which in its horror and wicked purposelessness should have stunned the world.” Of course, Sokolov wrote this before the towering horrors of the Shoah a mere few years later.
Inflamed Christians leaving their respective churches during medieval times and bent on murdering Jews after hearing vitriolic and hateful anti-Jewish sermons from their priests, were no different from today’s Muslims who leave their mosques with a blood lust after hearing their imams preach hate filled anti-Jewish diatribes.
Today the same aberrant anti-Semitism manifests itself in unfounded hatred towards the Jewish state and Zionism and in a perverse ultra-support for the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
In contrast, most Christians in America - not all - have historically eschewed the hate that their European coreligionists spewed for centuries. Indeed, millions of American Christians have embraced the Jewish roots of their faith and have been stalwart friends of the reborn Jewish state. Their support has been an immense encouragement to embattled Israel whose enemies encompass it with growing strength and enmity.
Sadly, however, too many liberal churches and denominations in the United States have fallen victim to the lies and modern-day anti-Israel blood libels spewed by the likes of the Rev. Naim Ateek and his Christian Sabeel organization and the anti-Israel Palestinian Arab propaganda campaign, a repetitious catalogue of calumnies against the Jewish state.
As it says in the Passover Hagadah, “ Not one man alone has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation, there have risen up against us those who sought to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”
But it is also worth remembering what Albert Einstein told us back in 1920. He wrote: “Before we can effectively combat anti-Semitism, we must first educate ourselves out of it and out of the slave-mentality which it betokens. Only when we respect ourselves, can we win the respect of others; or rather the respect of others will then come of itself.”
It will be of inestimable value for this lesson to be accepted by the current weak Jewish leadership in America and the equally problematic government in Israel.
Victor Sharpe is the author of the four-volume work,Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.