> “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País.
So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spanish national day?
The funny part is that none of this matters for things other than nationalist talking points.
How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing.
Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.
It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, though, per the same criticism outlined in the article.
I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And because of it the Spanish Empire became one of the richest the world has ever seen, the legacy of which is still felt today.
This is not to Lionise Columbus but you have to acknowledge the context of the time. Greenland and Newfoundland were not well known and are a long way from the latitude Columbus was aiming at. He was an idiot, and cruel by our standards, but he was great.
I seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true.
Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.
That’s closer to a piece of historical trivia though, the Viking discovery of North America had very limited impact and nobody in Europe was aware of it or understood the significance.
What Columbus did led to dozens of other expeditions almost immediately. Within a few decades the largest the New World states were subjugated by Europeans and some of the worst recorded epidemics in human history swept the continent decimating societies which hadn’t even had any direct contact with Europeans yet.
He also allowed Spain to become the preeminent European power for the next century or so.
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus.
He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. And America is very big and important, so whatever it cares about, a lot of other people care about.
There's no point sneering that Leif Erikson got there first, Europe as a whole did not particularly know The Americas existed until Columbus confirmed it. Then they rushed to colonise it... which is where most of the Americans (and Canadians) ultimately come from. So that's why it's important to so many of them.
> He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus.
May I ask why you hold this opinion? I grew up with tons of Italian-Americans (NYC) and I can confidently say that I've never heard a single person express pride in the fact that Columbus was Italian. In fact, based on my experience, a lot of Americans—regardless of descent—think/were explicitly taught that Columbus was Spanish.
I looked into it a few years ago when then anti-colonialists were insisting that the US should drop Columbus Day (or replace it with a Columbus' Victims Day) as they see him as a symbol of colonialism, eradication of natives, and support for slavery.
You might ask "if he's so evil and wicked and wrong and everything bad about the world (and not just a convenient famous person to scapegoat for more general ills), why did anyone ask the US to have a Columbus Day anyway?"
> Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself
> For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following lynchings in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration.
> In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day
> in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States
> In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday
> San Francisco claims the nation's oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community's annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868, while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers around 2010
So, while the Italian-Americans you grew up with may not have been one of the 35,000 marchers in NYC, I bet most of those 35,000 marchers considers themselves Italian-American. They, and all other Italian-Americans, get a federal holiday which they can use to celebrate the connection between Italy and America (if they so wish), thanks to Italian-Americans lobbying for Columbus Day since the 1800s.
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.
Also note that around the same time other European expeditions were making similar discoveries: 2 years before Columbus, Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and a decade later Da Gama braved 10,000 km of open ocean and discovered a sea route to India.
Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.
The Portuguese were doing the rational thing and taking the much rational and safer option.
Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents
I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.
Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Calling Cortes genocidal is also quite farfetched, considering that he conquered the Aztec territory, despite being vastly outnumbered, because every native tribe and settlement they found on the way banded together to overthrow the Aztec.
I wouldn't call the Aztecs genocidal either, despite the ritual sacrifices, brutal treatment of other peoples, and everybody in mesoamerica who came to know them hating them so much that they preferred the uncertain fate of joining the white bearded men from the east.
Yeah I think the light use of the word genocide doesn't make justice for the instance where there was actual genocide, which is when you murder people with the explicit intent of destroying a nation/culture/group.
> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and assimilated into Spanish society, even though they even had their own divisions in the armed forces. They eventually culturally assimilated the rest of the meso-Americans and gave us what Mexican culture is today.
Now what happened to the Maya is a tragedy. Books burnt, people enslaved and relegated to the lowest rung even today.
The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.
> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat
Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all new and exciting to the people of the period, like they'd rediscovered an ancient civilization!
Also by "people" here we are literally talking about the 0.1% - educated people who could read and had access to books, which at the time were very rare and super expensive.
What the vikings did was not common knowledge, because basically they didn't come back regularly and so there was no real knowledge of their actions anywhere in Europe.
The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
> Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books;
I thought it was mainly the Greek refugees fleeing from the Byzantine empire who “kickstarted” the Renaissance?
Of course all the pillaging the by the Venetians etc. as well. A lot of Greek texts that survived the Sack of Constantinople ended up in Western Europe.
Regardless, most “Greek knowledge” that we know of survived in the Greek half of the Roman Empire which remained a part of the “Christian Civilization”. In fact it was the undisputed center of it until the 800s and in many ways much later.
I’m not entirely downplaying the Arab influence which was very significant as well (especially considering that the Orthodox Church wasn’t really that supportive about the preservation of some philosophical texts).
Also it started much earlier than the 15th century, the translation of various Greek and Arab texts into Latin was well underway in the 1100s and 1200s, following the Reconquista which was effectively over by the 1300s, and the conquest Sicily.
Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically.
> The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round.
[1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)
IIRC what Columbus didn't know was Eratosthones calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was <1% off, but believed Ptolemy's ~30% short estimation and figured there was no land in between Europe and the East Indies.
> How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"?
The question is not whether Columbus was Jewish of not. The question is whether he was actually Spanish. As the article states, that's heavily disputed.
From the article:
> Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish.
The article leads by referring to Columbus as a son of Genoa.
Then a Spanish researcher decides to claim Columbus is Spanish on Spain's national day, supposedly based on an authoritative scientific study but in spite of not presenting any evidence that supports his claim.
Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
That's a very strange way to present Spanish history.
Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity).
We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils.
Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term.
I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
I think you're missing the point.
OP's point was that "Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that." The truth of the matter is that it didn't, and to make matters worse even today Spain itself is comprised of regions with distinct national identities which reject the idea of being a part of the castilian-based nation.
I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe.
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”
> ...
> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”
So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.
I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.
You kind of cherry-picked two paragraphs and butchered the article. The article's point is that Reconquista, with capital R, is not a good designation for the historical events that took place. It does use the term throughout the article, though, which maybe is a bit confusing. But if you read a couple paragraphs past the one you quoted, you'll see it restated that the term Reconquista is a 20th century invention. "The idea of Reconquista" is talking about the idea, specifically, not the term; the term, and mysticism surrounding it (like the originating battle that actually never took place as such), part of which is debunked also in the article, is modern propaganda.
You keep saying "20th century" when the term was first popularised in the 1840s, and one scholar has traced the term back to 1795. See De la Restauración a la Reconquista: la construcción de un mito nacional (Una revisión historiográfica. Siglos XVI-XIX)https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ELEM/article/viewFile/ELEM... (PDF)
> the first time that the term "reconquista" was used to refer to the fight against the Muslims was in the work of José Ortíz y Sanz entitled Compendio cronológico de la historia de España, published after 1795. The use of the term, however, did not spread until the 1840s thanks to two new editions of Ortiz's work and the publication of the Historia general by Modesto Lafuente.
So the term did not originate in the 20th century, but it was added to the dictionary in 1936.
16th-19th century historians would have used the term "restoration". The northern kingdoms prosecuting this supposed restoration were keen to claim their legitimacy as a continuation of the entire Visigoth Kingdom, and made it their business to recapture it... even if they never held that territory.
What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back.
The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings.
There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation.
We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.
Columbus was famously a devout catholic; his DNA suggests that he was of Sephardic Jewish descent, most likely from a family that underwent a forced conversion.
I already posted below, but since you probably won't scroll down and I hate to see people get tricked: I would take this article with a massive grain of salt. Not "definitely wrong", but perhaps "of very dubious origin, making unusually strong claims based on unpublished, inconsistently-described evidence". For context, the "Columbus was Jewish" assertion is part of a broader "Columbus was secretly Spanish/Catalonian" fight they've been having for a while (which isn't surprising given the region's generally positive recollection of their "glory days" of genocide and slavery), as it's supposed to preclude him from being Italian.
Besides that, as an American who spent a semester in Spain and took a class focused on religious diversity specifically on the peninsula: your analysis is definitely possible, but there was also plenty of Jewish people practicing in secret throughout the reconquista. Thus the inquisition, even! The Reconquista took hundreds of years and saw multiple waves of anti-Jewish laws throughout the various Christian kingdoms, from taxes to restrictions to the famous expulsions, so there was plenty of precedent to learn from.
I'd be curious to hear from any actual experts on how the Spanish viewed national origin, and whether that played a significant role in religious persecution. AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), which makes me even more dubious that Columbus would choose to repeatedly claim to be from Italy just to hide his Jewish ancestry. He was 100% verifiably a practicing Catholic, isn't that all that should have mattered to his peers? But I'm walking pretty blind here.
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones),
While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsion of 1609 (which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for the past ~100 years).
In some cases it was pretty extreme and not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the US (and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t that dissimilar either).
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating into the American Colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as bad yet in the 1490s but had Columbus Jewish origin (assume that’s actually true) been know he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or even attracting investment for his expeditions.
I'm happy you linked to limpieza de sangre; there's a direct lineage from the crusades to said concept to the racial hierarchies that would justify mass enslavement for the new world colonies. If you want to know where white supremacy comes from, this lineage forms the origin (along with english investment and diction of course).
I see what you're saying. I tried feeding this into ChatGPT and it seems like better use of commas would make all the difference.
"While that may have been true in the 1400s, when ex-Jewish Conversos sometimes held significant economic and even political power, by the 1500s things had changed. Antisemitism (and the same applied to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race rather than just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated against, culminating in the expulsion of 1609, which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for about 100 years.
In some cases, the discrimination was pretty extreme, not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the U.S., and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t too different either.
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating to the American colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as severe in the 1490s, but if Columbus’s Jewish origins (assuming they were true) had been known, he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or attracting investment for his expeditions.
There are indications he may have been raised Jewish, and later converted to Catholicism. Or, converted but still close to Judaism.
His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
Further, It's also known that the family profession was weaving, a traditionally Jewish profession at the time and that Jewish given names like Abraham and Jacob were common in the family of Columbus' mother.
One of the hypothesis from the dna analysis says:
> hypothesis proposes that Columbus was a Jew from the Mediterranean port city of Valencia. His obscure early life, according to this theory, can be explained by the fact that he sought to hide his Jewish background to avoid persecution by the fervently Catholic Spanish monarchs.
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
This is one of the least compelling pieces of evidence: one doesn’t set out for a cross-oceanic voyage on a whim. He had sponsorship from the Spanish crown and lobbied and prepared for years for the journey. His journey was formally sanctioned by the the royal family in April of the year he left.
Conversos and Moriscos were overrepresented among the early Spanish settlers [0].
Same story in Portuguese territories as well.
An exodus of Sephardim and Muslims was a win-win for the Spanish crown - they'd lose (in their eyes) a potential 5th column in their competition against the Ottoman Empire as well as have manpower to nominally stake their claim in the New World.
> the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain
This came up in another part of the thread, but it wasn't the exact date—the decree gave Jews until the end of July [0], while August 3 (not second) is the date he sailed.
It's still close enough that it may have been related, but it's not the slam dunk that "the exact date" makes it sound like it is.
Why would anyone ever think that it could have been anything but a coincidence?
Who would have sponsored his expedition knowing that Columbus would be legally banned from entering the country if he was successful? That just seems silly…
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492,
He could have just moved to Italy or the Low Countries?
> does suggest he may have not converted yet.
And he did while he was in the Americas? Why would the Castilian crown sponsor an expedition led by a known Jew and even make him governor of the newly discovered territories (note that in a few decades even converted descendants of Jews or Muslims were banned from emigrating to the new world after a few decades)
Spain still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous sailors were a portuguese and a genovese. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the magellan voyage as the "magellan-elcano expedition ".
OTOH there's well known and documented anti-Spanish propaganda during the centuries by basically the rest of Europe (Protestants specifically), so I start to doubt claims from both sides (disclaimer: I'm Spaniard):
The English and Elizabeth projected their crimes onto Spain.
Proof is in the pudding where is the percentage of natives highest? Where Spaniards colonized (Mexico, Bolivia, Peru)? Or the Brits (Virginia, Connecticut, all of Canada except Quebec)?
Oh I don't dispute that. Despite the documented atrocities, the number of.native deaths by disease are greatly exaggerated, Charles V did write the precursor document of the human rights bill (after getting wind of what went about in Peru), and the Spaniards did promote marriages with natives. Studies of racial superiority the kind of which were prevalent at the end of the 19th century didn't come from Spain either.
History is not a black and white frame that we should either be proud or disgusted about. The fact that the Spanish state promotes such historical wash-ups says more about its current leaders.
FWIW the columbus expedition was considered a great failure at the time. He did fail to reach the indies by the west, and the couple of "indians" he brought to court was little compensation for the lack of lucrative spices. Reaching Lisbon first on the way back was also a disaster, prompting an immediate ultimatum by the portuguese by violation of a treaty, which led ultimately to the tordesilhas treaty which left the kingdom of castille and aragon out of the spice trade. He felt the failure so personally that he sailed back 4 times looking for a passage to the great sea beyond the new world, failing every time and becoming so embittered in the process, that he eventually lost his allies in court. It was only 40 years and lots of failed settlements after the columbus expedition that Spain hit proverbial jackpot and found the gold and silver which made the nation extremely wealthy in Europe, for a time. By then, the new world already had a new name: the Americas. The greatest of the hostorical humiliations, named after an ordinary italian cartographer, rather than the legendary captain which reached it in the first place.
Enshrining him as Spaniard will be of little consolation for his name.
We are ok with that, really, there is always people who give more importance to this kind of things, but for the vast majority, whatever the results, they would be cool.
Also, italians and portuguese are close friends and cultural brothers and sisters to us.
> “The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origin lay in the western Mediterranean,” said the researcher. “If there weren’t Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the likelihood that he was from there is minimal. Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very tenuous.”
Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece?
Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing? Is it not possible that many many people in Genoa could have had Jewish ancestors? After all, most of Jesus's disciples were Jewish (please correct me if I'm wrong).
A good point. I don't recall using a single Jewish reference in the things that he discovered. Where is the "Island of Januka"? Everything suggests that he adopted a full Christian lifestyle so, is somebody still a Jewish if he choose not to live as one?.
There’s also the phrasing “compatible with Jewish origin”. That doesn’t mean that he definitively has Jewish DNA either, especially given that there are no specifically Jewish haplogroups. This whole thing seems very premature until autosomal analysis is performed.
There is not such thing as "Jewish" DNA. Is a culture and religion, but not a fully different race. Some genes could be in the past more represented, but it was just "Mediterranean dotation". A mix of European, African and Asian. Today is much more mixed fortunately.
> And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed?
Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.
Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.
Jewishness by matrilineal descent was a later Rabbinic innovation, probably around the third century. In Paul’s day it was still patrilineal. Even today your tribe is patrilineal.
I’m confused by your question. Paul was from Tarsus, a Roman citizen, and brought Christianity to the gentiles/goyim, but was himself a Jew, from a Jewish family, and of long Jewish descent. Maybe I’m not understanding the implications in GP that you’re seeing? But I’m interested in seeing what you’re seeing.
I've read the new in spanish, it was not just labeled as jewish but as sefardic jewish line (the one particular from spanish jews). Most of them converted to christianity (the called "new christians") and remained in Spain.
On the other hand, Jewish were expelled from the whole italic peninsula (including Genoa, etc) after very extreme period of persecution 2 centuries earlier.
There is a theory he was from the Greek island of Chios.
"In 1982, Ruth Durlacher hypothesised that Chios was Christopher Columbus's birthplace.[64] Columbus himself said he was from the Republic of Genoa, which included the island of Chios at the time. Columbus was friendly with a number of Chian Genoese families, referenced Chios in his writings and used the Greek language for some of his notes.[65] 'Columbus' remains a common surname on Chios. Other common Greek spellings are: Kouloumbis and Couloumbis."
"A New Theory Clarifying the Identity OF Christopher Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece. by Ruth G Durlacher-Wolper 1982(Published by The New World Museum, San Salvador, Bahamas"
technical who-is-a-Jew type question, which is thoroughly intertwingled with European history: the Jewish diaspora were only the diaspora after they were kicked out of Israel by the Romans (in something like 70AD), and even then, only after they maintained their identity in the diaspora (c.f. the majority of other conquered peoples who did not maintain an independent identity)
Before that they were just the Jews, which was more of a nationality than anything else (a nationality that had a covenant with their God, but many nationalities at that time had such).
"Sephardic Jew" is a term most used to describe Jews who were kicked out of the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and Reconquista. The Iberian peninsula had had a thorough conquering by Muslims until the euro-christian reconquering, the Reconquista, wherein the last of the Muslims were kicked out, and then the Jews too for good measure, which kicking out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Other diaspora Jews lived in Muslim lands and are known as Mizrahi Jews (Mizrahi being some form of the word for Egypt which is also the word for East iirc)
Was there some distinction (theological or genetic) between Miszrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews before they were driven out of Spain?
And Columbus was born in Genoa (his house is still there) and so, was he one of these types of Jews or are the different typenames just what we call them today?
A little etymological sidenote: Sephardic is just the Hebrew word for Spain, whereas Ashkenaz was one of the great grandsons of Noah associated with eastern and central Europe.
However, when you see a Jew with the last name Ashkenazi, it's safe to assume they're Sephardi. Why? Because last names for Jews are a more recent historical development and these Jews immigrated to Sephardic territory hundreds of years ago (before the expulsion talked about in this thread) and have fully assimilated into the Sephardic tradition.
> A little etymological sidenote: Sephardic is just the Hebrew word for Spain, whereas Ashkenaz was one of the great grandsons of Noah associated with eastern and central Europe.
Sephardic comes from the name of the land of Sephard. You are correct that in modern Hebrew this name refers to Spain, however it should be noted that Biblical use of the word did not refer to Spain or the Iberian peninsula. It is a modern (in the Jewish sense, e.g. hundreds of years) idea that the word refers to that area - nobody today knows where the area is that the Bible referred to with that name.
Ashkenaz, the descendant of Noah, was from present-day-Syria. Thus the term Ashkenazi literally means "From the area of present-day Syria" or more concisely "From the Levant".
> However, when you see a Jew with the last name Ashkenazi, it's safe to assume they're Sephardi. Why? Because last names for Jews are a more recent historical development and these Jews immigrated to Sephardic territory hundreds of years ago (before the expulsion talked about in this thread) and have fully assimilated into the Sephardic tradition.
Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.
>Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.
It's thought these people were part of the expulsions. Gabbi Ashkenazi, the former IDF chief's father was Bulgarian-- Bulgaria, of course, being Ottoman territory and right next-door to Thessaloniki, a Jewish hotspot of the time would match this model well
> out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Which is notable why exactly? Surely both Columbus and his investors were hoping to return.
Who would give all that money to a descendant of Jewish converts let alone someone who might have been affected by the expulsion decree directly?
Columbus might have had Jewish ancestors a few generations back but I don’t think we can conclude anything else based on these findings. Especially not that he or his parents were actually practicing Jews.
Jewish diaspora existed way before the fall of Jerusalem. Before Jewish-Roman wars, 10% of Roman Empire was Jewish, about 8 million with only 2 million living in Judea.
1 million Jews lived in Persia (probably the ones that stayed when Babylonian captivity ended, since only 50,000 came back with Zerubbabel to build the second temple)
Nah the new wave of ancient DNA analysis since 2010 has been a game changer. Especially with euroasian history. It showed us how populations migrated and how and when admixture formed. Including identifying the yamnaya admixture in modern populations
If they actually have Columbus’s DNA intact with a good SNP resolution, it will be trivial to find out what % of jewish he is in his autosomal DNA. They can and should release it publicly as part of their paper as well. So people can confirm their hypothesis
This article is also from before the release of any test results:
“Normally, you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the piece and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it’s scientifically valid or not. If it is, it gets published and so the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree with it or not.
Interesting that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree to kick the Jews out ot Spain shortly after Christopher Columbus, a Sephardic Jew, reached the Americas.
This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
> This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
To be fair, it was also after they aided the initial Muslim conquest of Spain and assisted the new Muslim rulers in subjugating the native Christian population.
The purpose was to convert most of population to christianity to achieve cultural unity, and the ones who wouldn't convert had to leave. Usually it is explained only as an expulsion of the jews.
P.D: there are many theories around Gibraltar, specially since it was during succession war and the country was in a civil war.
The Spanish inquisition began in the 1470s so it makes sense he would hide his ethnicity.
What's really interesting however, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492, was when the Ottoman Empire accepted 60,000 Jewish refugees from Spain.
Columbus must not have been very religious. It would've probably been a much smarter decision, in terms of self preservation, to move to the Ottoman Empire.
If anything this is just proof that reading too deeply, and especially solely, into anyone’s DNA history is a mistake. Plenty of people have a background unrelated to their lives or the way they perceive themselves.
Agreed that it's important not to read too much into this about Columbus as a person, but if this is true there are plenty of interesting things to draw from it. It would suggest that he probably came from a family that converted to Catholicism (given the time period, probably under duress).
Had his ancestors made a different choice Columbus himself may have been expelled from Spain shortly before he sailed on August 3.
He and his son would have faced severe discrimination, wouldn’t even be allowed to hold public office and technically his descendants wouldn’t even emigrate to the Americans had it been publicly known that he was a descendant of Jewish converts (regardless of his religious views).
Surely that’s something the Spanish Crown would have used in the courtroom, considering that his descendants were engaged in a ~20 year lawsuit against the crown (which they won)?
That's assuming he even knew he was ethnically Jewish. His strong Catholicism and choosing not to immigrate to the Ottoman empire indicates this family history was probably withheld from him.
Possibly as a way to conceal his background? Of course that’s pure speculation and it wasn’t as bad yet until later in the the 1500s but Spain became an extremely racist society, people who couldn’t prove that they weren’t descendants of Jewish or Muslim converts were often barred from holding political office or even testify in court etc.
> r, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492,
How could that be related in any way? Presumably his investors did hope he would return and be allowed to enter the country?
> Columbus must not have been very religious
He was. As far as we can tell he was a very devout Catholic. Even if he had some Jewish origin (e.g. his grand/great grandparents were converts) that must have been a closely concealed secret and certainly not something that was publicly known.
> acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth
Nit pick.
I don't know it for sure, but if he was able to meet a king and a queen eventually, I assume he came from a wealthy family.
For wealthy families at that time, it wouldn't be an issue to travel. Especially if you turn out to be the most known traveler in human's history.
Thus, I fail to see how come we can even think of establishing the place of birth based on DNA. A likely area where his family came from - sure. But POB?
Another indication that Columbus was part of the Jewish community is that the Jewish financiers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez advanced interest-free loans to finance the journey.
You are not logic-ing correctly. The financiers were Jewish. Jews do not charge interest to other Jews; if Columbus were not Jewish they would have charged interest. This is written in Deuteronomy 23:20-21 as well as Leviticus and Exodus and also discussed by Maimonides
Well, just the best fit for being presented in the Spanish national day but, it's more complicated than that...of course. What was presented was not science.
> The evidence of Columbus's origins in Genoa is overwhelming: almost no other figure of his class or designation has left so clear a paper trail in the archives.
Oh brother. I’m sure most of the European world has some Jewish descendants somewhere in there blood line. Hell, even Hilter did! Why is that a big deal? As if having some Jewish descendant makes everything you ever did a Jewish accomplishment.
I don’t think anyone besides a few Spanish and Italian ultranationalists are interested in claiming Columbus’s “accomplishments.” Any evidence of Columbus being Jewish is mostly interesting for anthropological and historical reasons, not chest-beating ones.
The fact that he was Italian and Catholic is beyond dispute.
The possibility that he might have had some Jewish blood, doesn't really change anything except for the most tribal-inclined people (who typically make for terrible historians anyway). Hell, the Mediterranean had been a big melting pot for almost 2000 years at that point, practically anyone would have had some Jewish blood, some Greek blood, some Italian blood, some Spanish blood, some North-African blood...
...I'm a little suspicious. Spain, Portugal, and Italy have been fighting fiercely to claim cultural credit for Columbus for my whole life (hundreds of years, even?) and some of the quotes in this article display some bias on the sides of the researchers. It's possibly a result of me using Firefox autotranslate out of laziness, but:
The theory of the Colombo Cristóforo, born in Genoa, raised in Genoa, educated in Genoa, is false because all the very important historians of Italy have written black on white that it is impossible for this our Colombo to be Jewish. There is a total incompatibility...
But then,
between 10,000 and 15,000 [Jewish people lived in] the Italian peninsula [at the time].
Obviously it's an interesting point, but the certainty of the first statement set off alarm bells for me. Especially because they're placing his origin in Aragon, specifically; the Spanish are very nationalist, but the Catalonians are even more nationalist as a way to fight back. Very, very far from damning, but certainly makes these surprising claims a little suspicious.
It's pointed out that although the professor that did this DNA study is indeed an academic[1] specializing in the relevant field--which cannot be said of the main proponent, who appears to be a super biased enthusiast [2][3][4]--he hasn't actually published any of these findings yet, instead choosing to announce them via his own "thriller" TV show. Right off the bat, that's the absolute opposite of what a typical scientist would do with absurdly controversial findings -- and apparently this is the same pattern he's followed since 2005 on this topic, publishing no data of any kind in actual journals, just "announcing" various findings.
He does say "The scientific results, he says, will be presented at a press conference probably at the end of November", but... that's sus af, as the kids say.
Beyond that, the DNA analysis itself seems to be in doubt:
After the 2003 exhumation, no DNA could be extracted from the bones, Bottle says. The anthropologist says he stopped collaborating with the research team after those first analyses and has not wanted to participate anymore.
Carracedo recalls that the DNA that came to him was tremendously degraded and later disassociated from the project. He says he won't give his opinion on Lorente's new results until there is a serious scientific study published in a specialized journal.
The most damning evidence is non-circumstancial/character-based, of course, and it's what originally had me scratching my head in doubt:
In any case, possessing a gene, haplogroup, or haplotype associated with Jewish or Sephardic ancestry does not challenge the historical sources that support Columbus' birthplace in Genoa. Furthermore, it provides no information about the religious beliefs held by Columbus' close relatives (parents, grandparents, etc.), the researcher emphasizes... there is no Y chromosome that can be defined exclusively as Jewish-sephary, Chambers argues. Even if the total DNA of an individual was recovered, it would still be impossible to reach definitive conclusions about its exact geographical origin.
In other words: that's not really how genetics works...
Thanks for sharing OP, this was a fascinating little dive. I, for one, will stick with the consensus view that this idiotic monster of a person was from Italy, until this researcher publishes some peer-reviewed results!
It's sad because 1) this sort of nationalistic chest-thumping is stuff we should have overcome, after WWII, and 2) why is it so hard to accept that an Italian navigator with a Greek surname and (maybe) Middle-Eastern blood, used Spanish money and skills to reach the edge of the known world? If anything, it should be cause for celebrating how the joint efforts of Mediterranean societies changed history forever.
As I get older, I am more and more convinced that us "Meds" are our own worst enemy.
> Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula
Wait, so the name „ghetto“ wasn’t contrived there?
Snark aside, is there any proof or qualification delivered with that quite important yet ambiguous side node, that there supposedly wasn’t any significant jewish presence in Italy?
Depends on how you define a “big population,” no? Prior to 1492 a lot of Jews had been driven out of Italy, and the remaining communities were quite small.
Italian city states took in a lot of Jewish refugees from Spain after the 1492 expulsion. The first ghetto was in 1516. But that doesn’t line up with Columbus’ chronology.
I thought sephardim scattered into a lot of places, including elsewhere in Europe (even places like Amsterdam) and North Africa. Not to mention conversos that stayed put.
I say "even" because the stereotype is Southern Europe, Turkey, or North Africa. The further north you go in Europe, the more Jewish and Ashkenazi identities get merged and blurred in people's minds. So the history of sephardim in Netherlands goes against the stereotypes.
I'd find it hard to believe all the cities in Spain decided to expel the Jewish people all on the same day. The inquisition began decades earlier so there probably were indications something bad was going to happen
They're probably referring to the Alhambra Decree [0], which did expel all Jews by a set date. That date was the end of July, and Columbus sailed on 3 August, so it's very close but not quite the same date.
> “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País.
So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spanish national day?
The funny part is that none of this matters for things other than nationalist talking points.
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