Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
- Analysis that is not shared to review
- Data that is not shared for review
- Broad assumptions that are quickly narrowed down to "facts"
- There is "more evidence but we can't show you because.... reasons"
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.
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).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre
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.
Take, for instance, Cantor (the father of the set theory), who was a second generation convert, if memory serves. Even though he was a devote Christian, he had some ties to Judaism (eg. choosing Hebrew letters for the infinite sets he worked with). And, in general he was somewhat insane, and religion played a central role in his insanity, where both Christianity and Judaism had some degree of influence.
Me, coming from a family of converts, who later became atheists, I can attest to that neither me, nor my parents ever cared for organized religion or for following tradition. But, some things remained through generation regardless. I never learned enough Hebrew to read Bible comfortably (i.e. I need to look up words in a dictionary sometimes), but I almost teared up when I watched a collection of recordings someone made of people from different national / linguistic backgrounds reading Hebrew Bible, because at that point I realized that even though imperfectly, I'm able to understand someone writing many thousands years ago. The ability to connect over centuries to your ancestors, to get even an approximate idea of what they thought and how they felt -- this is something that's very unlikely to go away with conversion or a change of one's affiliation. This is also probably the reason you find quite a few people with vague Jewish ancestry still coming to Israel. Also, there's a "weird" trend of people wanting to be berried in Israel (because of how important that specific place is in Jewish tradition), even if in life they are nothing like religious Jews.
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Bottom line: It's just a weird question. It's like trying to calculate the percentage by which any convert has converted. Maybe, even if Columbus' parents were converts, it's still not a question anyone can answer: how much Catholic was he?
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.
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.
[0] https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/pjhr/chhre/pdf/hh-alhambr...
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…
It's definitely a Dan Brown plot, but it's not entirely inconceivable.
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.
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.
[0] - https://www.jewishideas.org/article/between-toleration-and-p...
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)
"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."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chios
"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"
https://www.geraceresearchcentre.com/pdfs/1stColumbus/13_Dur...
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).
And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
Also, a comedian spinning his experience into material.
Being born into it is the most common and ‘supported’ way.
Judaism is actually one of the major world religions, though it's much smaller in terms of population compared to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism [1]. Despite its smaller numbers, it has had a significant influence on Western culture, ethics, and religious thought, particularly as the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.
Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process.
Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as you don’t believe you are something else, you are Hindu. Notably, caste can be tricky. There might also be a form you should fill out.[https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/407/is-it-true-...]
Buddhism, you join the Sangha (show up), or follow teachings. There is no test or anything. Many Buddhists don’t directly do those things, and I’ve never heard anything say they ‘weren’t Buddhist’. Maybe a terrible Buddhist, but what else is new?
By those standards, is not Judaism the toughest and most difficult? Personally, I’d take it as a point of pride.
> Generally not an arduous process.
Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.
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.
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.
I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.
I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.
DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).
But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.
No that's not what I said. I said that DNA, though inherited, is irrelevant for determining cultural identity.
If I discover tomorrow that I carry YDNA haplotype J1, that doesn't make me Jewish, either culturally or ancestrally. Nobody could claim me as ancestrally Jewish based on that either.
Having a documented lineage stretching back many generations, however, would possibly do both, should I choose to embrace it.
Then substitute it with haplotype G or E1b, or include all of them. Or swap out both the haplotype and the cultural group for different ones, i.e Y Haplogroup R1b among people from Iceland.
The particular haplotype is irrelevant to the argument, which is that genes don't define cultural identity, and at best are trailing and largely low resolution indicators of historical social patterns.
30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.
Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
That's my point. By "common ancestor" I meant, common ancestor common to them only. That's what I find to be unlikely.
And yes, you are right about this. There is plenty of vids on YT that explain the math
If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.
This case is much closer to the latter than the former.
Of course people have DNA in common with their ancestors as a group, hell we share a lot in common with fish. But it's because these genes are common that they enter and re-enter your family tree at multiple points.
And your mitochondrial DNA definitely doesn't descend from Abraham, a male incapable of passing on mitochondrial DNA, so there's a reason I gloss over female line descent.
Good sign of someone arguing dishonestly is that when you call out their lies, they tell you that the truth doesn’t matter.
Having in mind that we share a majority of our genes with other mammals, and almost all with chimps, so the range of allowed variation among people is in itself small.
To start, this genes aren't exclusive from the group. And it is not a monofiletic group anymore, because is a religious one and anybody can join it. So from a "taxonomic" point of view is not what we would call a "natural group", speaking genetically.
Is not different than claiming that there is a "Christian DNA". Biologically it does not have any sense.
It’s as if you said my family didn’t share DNA with me because an adoption or two had occurred over the centuries. It’s a bizarre argument that keeps coming up here, I don’t know what the real underlying root of it is.
https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/15-ways/human-genomic-variati...
I’ll let him speak for himself.
I'm not against the use of taxa below species level for humans; Its use is widespread on life sciences, but we need to apply it wisely. Race was a poorly defined biological term kidnapped to justify doing evil things against other people. The term may be a lost cause at this moment.
If we take a look to a Wolof from Senegal near an Aboriginal from Camberra we can always say who is who. If we take a look to somebody from Israel and somebody from Palestine, we can't. At the naked eye, both are indistinguishable. At a physiological level, both breath air and work exactly in the same way. Genetic differences between both are smaller than current genetic variability among Jewish.
If Jewish are some kind of taxon below species level, we would have to include Palestinians (and a lot of other Middle East people) on that taxon. This is how Taxonomy works.
If the reason is because they were a closed group for some time; applying the same reasoning, the European monarchies should be also a race. Is also a reproductive closed group, showing high frequencies of some rare diseases and even developed an unique look as consequence (See a portrait of Charles II from Spain).
Anthropology books should talk about Africans, Caucasians, Asians, Jewish... and Kings.
Why stop here? Should Mormons be also their own human race? Are Amish a race? Are rednecks a new race of humans?
The obvious answer is not. Maybe in 65000 years, but not now.
That would introduce a lot of noise in Anthropology, just for fulfilling a wish of "but I feel special", and should be avoided. We all feel special.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034383/
Couldn't find a page on the government website, but I remember reading about it there in the not too distant past.
A DNA test can be used to obtain Israeli citizenship, but this is reserved to prove that a person is the child of an Israeli citizen. According to Israeli law, if a child is born to an Israeli mother or father abroad, they can be granted Israeli citizenship. The DNA test is used to authorize this, proving this familial link. We discuss more about obtaining a paternity test in Israel in another article.
In some very rare cases, a DNA test can be used to prove their relation to a Jewish parent, sibling or grandparent, even though the applicant doesn’t have documents proving this relationship, but said person has to have documents verifying that they are Jewish.
By what measure? And how is "race" defined?
Judaism is based on matrilineal descent, so depending on where the DNA comes from, yes.
On the other hand, Jewish were expelled from the whole italic peninsula (including Genoa, etc) after very extreme period of persecution 2 centuries earlier.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_(surname)#cite_note-...
I haven't been to Hebrew school in a long time but still remember a few things :)
It's not really his house, but a reconstruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus_House
> “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.
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.
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.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-cov...
We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
In their view they did, the existence of the “Spanish nation” is tangential. From their perspective they were culturally/politically Christians and whatever exact language they happened to speak was secondary to that. So in that it was obviously a “reconquest” from the perspective of the Christians living in Iberia.
> So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Hardly more ridiculous than claiming that the fact that some common Spanish national identity didn’t exist back in the 1100s is somehow relevant.
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.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
> 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.
> 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.
It seems like a bit of iconoclasm to deny the Reconquista because it helps (does it?) with the Catalan claim to independence. In LatAm people don't really care about any of Spain's internal politics, and the Reconquista is simply an accepted fact of history.
The capitalization of the word might be a propagandistic act, but it might also just be an application of modern style, or just recognition that the concept requires a bit more dignity, or something.
This entire sub-thread stinks of... anti-Spanish propaganda, heh.
Since they considered that territories were part of the Roman-Christian Empire in the past from their perspective they were certainly taking it back.
Spain being or not being a nation at the time seems entirely irrelevant..
I don’t know how common this belief is in the US but I personally have encountered a number of people that believe this.
The sale of indulgences was a charitable donation done to mitigate the penalties of Purgatory.
Abuses were committed, but the telling of the protestants is quite fantastic. It was not, for example, a get-of-Hell sale
Mostly because it's a way to communicate such that the listener knows who you're talking about. Another example is calling Mormons 'Mormon' instead of Christian.
If you say 'Christian' people will think of what is likely in that geographic area the most common type of Christian, probably some form of protestant. If you say 'Catholic' the listener knows that you're talking about the group of people who follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. If you say 'Mormon', they'll also know who you mean.
It's also possible to subdivide the group referred to above as 'Christian' - you can use 'Baptist', 'Pentecostal', etc. Those are also names that aren't "Christian" for groups of Christians.
"Probably some kind protestant" surely, it would be Catholic as that's the largest denomination.
But my point is why you need to specify what kind of Christians are you talking about? Or why would you assume that you are talking about a subset of Christians only? Imagine talking about the weather in the western world in terms of city neighbourhoods. Sure, it helps knowing what specific area you are talking about but it seems oddly meticulous. I don't know if this is an anglo-saxon thing as I have seen Brits and North Americans talking in this way. But I haven't seen anyone from Germany, Italy or Spain talking in this way.
I suspect it might be a thing that people raised in non-Catholic countries say because in my experience, Catholics will see all Christians as Christians and not with some othering kind of word (see us-vs-them group dynamics in psychology). That othering emphasises the differences (often used by people that seek to distance themselves from them all despite the commonalities) while using the same word highlights the commonalities (often used by people that embraces them all despite the differences) I notice this non-Catholic pattern of us-vs-them othering in the context of Catalonia and Taiwan too so I suspect it might be an us-vs-them group dynamics thing.
But we don't because additional precision is not always necessary and in a context of several sub-groups, you would seem to emphasise a difference between them (by referring to the sub-group name) rather than their common name (Christians).
It's just something that I notice a lot in anglo-saxon (see non-Catholics) contexts and almost never outside the anglosphere.
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.
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.
That was an administrative region that existed only for slightly over a century. The caliphate of Cordoba existed for longer than that.
The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).
That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!
EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.
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.
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.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.
I don't question that what the Spanish accomplished was a massacre. I just question whether that can be attributed to Columbus himself. He did 3 trips to the Americas, none of which lasted very long:
1st Voyage - 1492-1493
2nd Voyage - 1493-1496
3rd Voyage - 1498-1500
Or you think that Americo Vespucci was a saint?
I don't see anybody lobbying for that. Maybe this recent revisionist movements are formed by a bunch of hypocrites?
They also weren't all the same. Not everyone goes around enslaving people and using their life to seek riches and fame. I don't think anyone complains about historical figures who, flaws and all, fought for higher ideals like personal liberty.
They are just characters, surfing the waves of technological change and resulting cultural power asymmetries. They are surprisingly irrelevant and replaceable. But they are the representatives of cultural deficiencies, propelled onwards by geography and circumstances into moments of clarity, where one party is thrown into a "catchup" race at all costs to prevent the other from overtaking it now or later.
Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.
Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents
Traveling west, reaching land, leaving enough evidence to confirm the story five centuries later, making it back, and finally, convincing other people that it happened? No.
I think that America being there at all is super hindsight-y. A priori there were no states in America that had made contact with the people’s across Eurasia and Africa. There were the Vikings, and some northern nomads.
The Pacific is huge. So big that you can’t fit it all in one hemisphere. We have had long periods with single supercontinents and no other major landmasses.
Sailing west into the Atlantic as a European was a massive gamble. Matched only by the navigators of the South Pacific, and even then they were far more competent navigators of open ocean and had techniques that Columbus didn’t have. He just had heaps of money, some great boats, and huge will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.
I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.
If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.
Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.
If they made it to the Azores, it would only take one storm, or a bold adventurer (not in short supply), to take one or more boats to the central Americas. There are legends of white bearded men in central American myths.
So while I agree that a "lucky idiot" is often a good description for these efforts, I think it is very important that we do not diminish their importance. It took someone like Columbus to make this trip, and yes he had to get supremely lucky, it doesn't diminish from the fact that he took risks that paid off handsomely.
While this does sometimes happen, I do think that the more common situation is that people actually review the existing evidence and prior art and then they make a calculated (!) gamble - in fact, this is e.g. probably why the Wright brothers succeeded as pioneers of aviation as opposed to dozens of other people who would just try stuff more haphazardly and then end up dying in the process.
Presumably, if he had more evidence, he would be displaying it in order to make his case better.
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.
If you were Canadian instead, you'd probably be genned up on John Cabot (also Genovese) and Newfoundland and CODFISH! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w]
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.
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.
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?"
And the answer to that is Italian-Americans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day
> 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.
Just a minor correction. People seem to miss it so often not sure why.
Your correction would be like saying "most European Americans come from Europe"
Most Americans come from Mexico, India and China. In that order. European countries are not even in the top 5. You are probably talking about something else but are unable to phrase it properly likely due to some internal assumptions. You are welcome to share those assumptions :)
You are listing the most frequent origins of immigrants to America as of 2024.
I’m not sure how this is relevant to the prior discussion.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-d...
Regarding your confusion, ancestry is the whole point of this thread. This sub-discussion just focused on a specific part of the discussion :)
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.
This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago
Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years.
Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), then I think you'll find it hard to discuss almost any historical events because cruelty has existed everywhere. This isn't whataboutism btw, my point is that sensitivity should not be a primary concern in a rational discussion about history because history is harsh subject.
Who exactly was brought together? The natives were virtually or/and culturally wiped out (in case you didn't notice) and the consequences can still be seen today. When you look at the US today, do you see two groups together? How so, when the actual natives have virtually no land have been systemically attacked since their world was destroyed.
Thinking about it in positive terms is no different than doing the same with the situation in Crimea or with any of the world wars.
It is fine to discuss stuff but the idea of bringing two groups together when one of them has been virtually wiped out speaks of severe cognitive dissonance.
There is no whataboutism here because no other continent has experienced what the American continent has. There is no equivalent in written history for the scale of suffering and destruction unleashed upon it.
And you having a problem with me criticising the vast destruction (rather than a generic injustice) of a continent by saying that cruelty exists together (tell me what other continent in the last 2 thousand years got culturally destroyed and had millions of deaths as a result of foreign invaders) says a lot about your opinion about the deaths of tens millions of people (at the very least) the descendants of which still suffer all sorts of challenges. Including the continuous dismissal of the scale of their suffering by people like you ever since the invasions began.
You can use whatever moralizing language or comparisons to modern day conflicts you want to analyze these events because that's not what I took issue with. As I stated before, my problem with your comment was that you wrongly tried to label a descriptive statement about history as "culturally insensitive".
2. You are purposely ignoring that: A) lots of them were unalived by the invaders and this has been going on on a more quieter manner until about 40-30 years ago which is not that long ago B)Columbus himself had to be arrested because even his resource-loving managers were horrified of the things he did there C) whole nations, tribes and cultures were wiped by the invaders D) the remaining natives in the northern bits lost of most of their lands and autonomy
None of this can be considered to be an inevitable result of trade. You can trade with a country without doing any of the above as can be seen by all the other countries that engaged in trade at that time. There is a moral element to all this that you are accidentally or purposefully ignoring. There is no need to compare it to any modern day conflict because even by today standards it was really evil and not all "inevitable".
Whether it was a Columbus or a Chan, the introduction of diseases which the Eurasians had been swimming in for eons would have still slammed into the Americas like an apocalypse.
Even if you gave it another 300 years (after vaccines were invented) there’s no way a distribution strategy could have effectively blunted the impact. You’d need to give an additional 200 years for that to be conceivable. The odds of the Americas staying isolated for another 500 years after Columbus are nil.
My comment has nothing to do with the cultural expressions of the various groups at that moment in time. A group of Homo sapiens were cut off from the rest for tens of thousands of years for better and worse. The ‘worse’ part is that they were ferociously vulnerable to the viruses in the other population group.
“Brought together” wasn’t a phrase meant to convey happiness or agreement, it was a very literal description of two groups making permanent contact after being separated for so long. There’s not an event like that in memorable history to compare it to, as far as I know. Certainly not at that scale of isolation.
My point was that your use of "bringing together" in the context of putting it as Columbus achievement when we all know what happened and what he did when he got there was insensitive. You realise that there are people still living under the consequences of that? People have been still been dying because of it in the 90s. It is not some small event that happened a while ago but a huge continent scale massive event that is still reverberating nowadays. In deference to people who are still alive and affected by it, "Connecting" is a neutral term that better conveys what happened without having to add your own moral viewpoint on whether what he did was good.
It was horrific and it would be nice if you acknowledged that the same way you acknowledge the systematic horrors that certain countries did in a certain large scale war the previous century even if science and lots of countries progressed socially, ethical and technologically as a result of it.
This is the migration of Homo sapiens, their separation and their ultimate reunion. It is difficult to fathom the planetary conditions and durations involved in ever recreating it. For all intents and purposes, it’s not happening again, and its closure happened less than 1000 years ago.
The observation that Columbus is part of that profound story is undoubtedly one thing that makes him very, very remarkable.
There is a difference between observations made irrespective of culture (such as this one), and being disrespectful or insensitive to culture. That’s an important distinction you should take away from this exchange. It is possible to reflect on certain dimensions of an issue without being obligated to repeat safe harbor statements about unrelated dimensions, as we are not children, or repeating acknowledgements of unrelated dimensions like mantras to ward off bad vibes as if we were superstitious. I think we/you are better than that. Read words carefully and take them as they are given without projecting some bad faith meaning into them. And don’t be anxious about what may or may not be in other peoples’ heads. You’ll drive yourself nuts and be seen as very annoying to others.
There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?).
Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic.
I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.
"humanity coming together" is definitely a positive expression. The cambridge dictionary says "to help people or groups to become friendly or to do something together, especially when they would not usually do this".
And if you look at the user's text the act of "bringing people together" is framed as something morally good/worthy. In this context, our explorer faced many challenges but achieved something good (i.e. bringing people together).
Imagine if we used that term for other horrifying events in history where a group of people unalived a country's worth of another group of people
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.
People: "booh, he is not important at all, even my cousin could have discovered a new continent"...
LOL, what happened with the new generations?
But in all seriousness, things like electricity or the atom are more interesting discoveries than a guy misjudging the size of the Earth and being lucky enough to not die halfway through his voyage paid for by two monarchs who just so happened to be looking for new enterprises to invest in.
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.
How is that not extremely significant?
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.
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.
Idiot was a strong word. But not as brief.
So, it seems at some points he made claims he had a route to the orient and later he referred to it as 'West Indies'. Perhaps he knew the truth all along but had reasons to mislead.
Which single-handedly started a space race which led to colonizing the moon (and, uh, mostly exterminating the indigenous population which was totally different than the folks who were supposed to be there in the first place).
Oh, except it was also a completely different moon that we somehow weren’t aware was there.
Nothing he was proposing should have worked, and yet somehow not only did it, but it made everyone (who funded it) fabulously rich beyond their wildest imaginings.
Idiot savant?
In fact, probably all of us do this.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Why was he great? How does that follow as a conclusion? By your own account of the events, his “accomplishment” is the very definition of dumb luck.
Finding out you were wrong when everyone doubted you in the first place isn’t particularly impressive. Especially when we already knew the right answer over 1500 years before (Eratosthenes).
I like the Moon analogy someone else shared on the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41835857
One doesn’t stop being an idiot because they struck gold under wrong assumptions. They just become a lucky idiot.
> Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived
Highly debatable. We don’t even need to leave the peninsula to find another country (Portugal) with numerous examples of people who could fit that title.
This take only makes sense if you argue the Romans took it back, which would only be a valid claim from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, not war lords from the Iberian Peninsula.
Still, it's fun to imagine that if you time-machined back to a gallic region in the ice age, you'd come across a guy who'd strike you as remarkably "French". Like, "ohhh.. this guy." HA! I would love him as dearly as all humanity. :D
DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821939 - Oct 2024 (66 comments)
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)?
(Disclaimer, I'm... I don't know what I am)
Also Spanish emigration into their colonies was quite low and they were much spread out.
e.g. more English/British people emigrated to the Americas in the 1600s than Spanish despite the fact that they controlled many times less territory.
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.
Also, italians and portuguese are close friends and cultural brothers and sisters to us.
"The United States still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous entrepreneurs were a south african and a scottish. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the musk voyage as the "musk-bezos expedition ".
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.
He was incredibly religious. In his Catholicism.
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.
Had his ancestors made a different choice Columbus himself may have been expelled from Spain shortly before he sailed on August 3.
Someone who was punished by the Spanish and forced to convert a generation or two ago turns into its champion and spreads it elsewhere?
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)?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre#:~:text=O....
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.
Even now?
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
“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.This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
P.D: there are many theories around Gibraltar, specially since it was during succession war and the country was in a civil war.
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewis...
BTW I finally followed up in regard to that guy with the beard, if it's still of interest:
And we already know for a fact that other members of the expedition were Conversos and they were partially motivated by their desire to get out from under the thumb of the Spanish Crown. Academics have long examined the confluence of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the Columbian Exchange, and Columbus's heritage doesn't really change any of it.
> Claim raises idea [...] but experts view it with caution
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?
I like the sound of the word.
This place is a a good hint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba,_Portugal
A place called Cuba in Portugal that predates the arrival to the new world by centuries.
These ideas have been floating around for a long time:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/01/19/dn...
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2024-10-12/el-show-del-adn-de-cri...
It's especially distasteful when it's about people who 'discovered' places, because the next step was usually the subjugation or genocide of the people already living in the discovered place. But we still celebrate the explorers as heroes.
If it were someone else, I’m certain we’d be talking about them instead.
also people often treat it as the beloved kind of "small person who know better even through everyone told them they where wrong and succeeded by not giving up" story
but the funny thing is the more you learn about him the more you might realize how wrong all of this is
firstly he hadn't had success because he knew better (and people didn't believe him) he had success because he insisted that his absurdly wrong calculations where correct and then had a absurd amount of luck. (In educated circles of that time not only was it well know that earth was a globe, it rough size was also known. The reason he believed he could sail to India was because he insisted that earth was _way_ smaller then it actual is (and also was believed to be in general back then). It's just people (including him!) through there was no additional landmass between the west of Portugal and ~east India. Consider sailing that route on a world where America is just more water... pretty much not viable with the tech of that time).
Secondly if anything he was a villain, to a point even the Spanish Inquisition called him out for his bad behavior against native Americans...
So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.
And it had been known for 1600 years already!
"In 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a lengthy series of court cases against the Castilian crown, known as the pleitos colombinos, alleging that the Crown had illegally reneged on its contractual obligations to Columbus and his heirs.[93] The Columbus family had some success in their first litigation, as a judgment of 1511 confirmed Diego's position as viceroy but reduced his powers. Diego resumed litigation in 1512, which lasted until 1536, and further disputes initiated by heirs continued until 1790." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
280 years of legal battle is going to be a treasure trove of dirt, if you want to find it.
As for "why now" and "why does it matter what his heritage is" I think it has everything to do with the cultural milieu. Modern white liberals hate their heritage which they characterize as ancestors of colonizers, slave owners, and exploiters. If Columbus was Jewish this gives left-wing anti-Semites extra ammunition against Jews. It aligns the deep hatred for colonizers with deep hatred for Israel for its actions in it's war with Hamas.
Historians like to say the past is a different country. Judging historical events by todays standards makes about as much sense to me as discovering life on Mars and judging their behaviour by our own standards. For me, its just a way of signalling virtue that assigns zero cost on the signaller. It's historical so you dont have to do anything (it doesnt cost you time or money) and the people being judged arent here to defend themselves or provide any nuance. Its lazy and cheap.
You will also find that a lot of people had their reservations about his treatment of the people he found.
I mean that version of the story is pretty interesting too, right?
One can see a lot of parallels between startup culture, really. You start off with a dumb idea, you pitch it over and over for years till you find a sucker, you get funding because of nepotism / connections, your dumb idea fails but you stumble across something that works on the way, then you move fast and break things (like... the entire indigenous population).
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?
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.
Especially places like Amsterdam.
That's why they built a giant Synagogue there.
Also what's the India connection?
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...
between 10,000 and 15,000 [Jewish people lived in] the Italian peninsula [at the time].
In terms of critical commentary, seemingly there is some: https://elpais.com/ciencia/2024-10-12/el-show-del-adn-de-cri...
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.
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.
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!
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=uZXz5-sAAAAJ...
[2] He hasn't published basically anything: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=1462143920...
[3] Here's some of his (English!) writing, which IMO speaks for itself: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364304815_COLUMBUS_...
[4] ...and this book title gives away the game, which is probably why it isn't mentioned in the linked article: https://www.casadellibro.com/libro-la-catalanitat-de-colom/9...
As I get older, I am more and more convinced that us "Meds" are our own worst enemy.
There go the big Columbus Day celebrations, sponsored by Italian-American societies.
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...