Spanish scientists take teeth from Jewish graveyard

The Jews of a small Spanish town have gotten a dental checkup – a thousand years after their deaths.

A website based in Lucena, in the country’s south, reports that investigators have been examining the teeth of the town’s Jewish community, taking them from the local Jewish cemetery. The scientists are presenting the study partly as a way of “better knowing the Jewish community” and “promoting the city’s Jewish past,” according to the article. The teeth came from residents who lived around the turn of the 11th century, the website says.

The study, conducted by the University of Granada in partnership with Lucena’s city hall, has reached a couple conclusions that strike us as fairly predictable: medieval Jewish residents of the landlocked town didn’t eat a lot of fish or meat, instead living mostly on rice and wheat.

The study’s “dental pathologists” built their analysis by examining how the teeth have decayed, as well as the amount of tartar they’ve retained and the state of their enamel. Teeth tend to hold up better than other human bones, making them valuable for this sort of research.

The article says the Jewish burial ground also revealed a possible case of gigantism, as well as a corpse that suffered a “trauma to the jaws” — findings that were presented at a meeting of Spain’s Physical Anthropology Society last year.

The article makes no mention of efforts to secure permission to conduct the study from Spain’s Jewish community, which of course isn’t as large as it used to be.