He is the most famous explorer in history, a man so well known that three European countries – Spain, Italy, and Portugal – claim him as their own. The United States has a federal holiday in his honor, including a traffic-inducing parade in Manhattan, and Colombia and the Bahamas also commemorate him annually.
But persistent questions surrounding the identity of Christopher Columbus may finally have been solved, and let’s just say that we may want to start calling him Chaim instead.
In a remarkable DNA study carried out over 22 years, a team of Spanish researchers led by Prof. Jose Antonio Lorente of the University of Granada found genetic evidence indicating that the 15th-century seafarer may have been a Sephardi Jew.
Using small samples of remains found in the Cathedral of Seville in Spain, Lorente and his colleagues compared them with those of people known to have been relatives and descendants of Columbus.
“We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son,” Lorente said in Columbus DNA: The True Origin, a documentary broadcast on Spain’s national RTVE. “And in both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA of Hernando, there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.”
In case you skipped high school biology, the Y chromosome is handed down from father to son, and mitochondrial DNA is inherited solely via the mother.
The outcome, Lorente added, is “almost absolutely reliable.”
Settling the Columbus debate
The findings come after decades of heated debate, filled with countless articles and books, speculating about Columbus’s origins, with some asserting he may even have been Greek or Basque.
But the proof we now have, straight from the Petri dish, that Columbus was Jewish serves as posthumous vindication for Simon Wiesenthal.
Although best known for hunting down Nazi war criminals, Wiesenthal spent five years studying Columbus, traveling to places such as Spain, Portugal, the Vatican, and North Africa.
And in 1973, he published a book titled Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus, in which he argued that Columbus was almost certainly Jewish and that the impulse behind his famous voyage to the New World was to seek out a refuge for Spain’s persecuted Jews.
Columbus, as is well known, departed Spain in 1492, when the country’s rabidly antisemitic Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella, had ordered the hundreds of thousands of Jews in their kingdom to be forcibly expelled.
Countless others had been compelled to convert to Catholicism during the preceding century, after anti-Jewish riots and massacres erupted in Seville in March 1391 and quickly spread across the country. In the ensuing years, leading up to the expulsion in 1492, there were periods of widespread persecution and forcible conversions, resulting in numerous Bnei Anusim, whom historians refer to by the derogatory term “Marranos.”
Columbus’s own family might very well have been among them, and it is reasonable to believe that he hid his Jewish origins from the Iberian monarchs in order to win their approval for his voyages of discovery.
After Wiesenthal’s book was published, many so-called mainstream historians discounted or mocked his theories.
But belief in Columbus’s Jewishness continued to gain adherents over the years.
In 2009, Prof. Estelle Irizarry of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who was an expert on Hispanic literature, concluded as much after conducting an exhaustive study of more than 100 surviving letters, diaries, and documents written by Columbus.
Carefully reviewing his language and syntax, Irizarry found numerous grammatical errors and inconsistencies in Columbus’s spelling which led her to conclude that Catalan, not Spanish, was the native tongue of the Great Navigator, and that he hailed from Aragon in northeastern Spain.
But she also found that his style and punctuation corresponded with that of Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken by Spain’s Jews. That, along with other aspects of his writings, led her to resolve that he was a Jew or one of the Bnei Anusim who sought to conceal his identity.
Other Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, C. Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez, and Nicholas Dias Perez, have also posited that Columbus had Jewish ancestry.
Say what you will, but the evidence is intriguing. Columbus adopted the Spanish surname Colón, which was common among Jews at the time.
Upon his death, he reportedly left a part of his bequest to a converted Jew in Lisbon, and his son Ferdinand asserted in a biography of his father that his forefathers “were of the royal blood of Jerusalem.”
But Columbus himself was famously vague about his heritage, telling those who asked, “Vine de nada” (“I came from nothing”).
Historian Cecil Roth noted in his book The Jewish Contribution to Civilization, “It is incontestable that the great explorer had a penchant for Jewish society and that Jews were intimately associated with his enterprise from the beginning.”
These included Luis de Santangel, a descendant of converted Jews, who provided the bulk of the funds to back Columbus’s journey; and Don Isaac Abrabanel, the famed rabbi and royal financier.
Interestingly, Roth further notes that when Columbus reached the Americas, “land was first sighted by the Marrano sailor, Rodrigo de Triana; and Luis de Torres, the interpreter, who had been baptized only a few days before the expedition sailed, was the first European to set foot in the New World.”
IN CASE you are asking yourself why it matters if Columbus was a secret Jew, just consider the following.
To begin with, it should give us all a sense of pride. Though Columbus failed to discover the passage to Asia that he was seeking, he uncovered a new world and expanded the boundaries of mankind’s thinking and its understanding of the globe.
And the colonization that came in his wake ultimately paved the way for the birth of America, with all the good which that has entailed for Jews and Israel.
At a time of rising antisemitism in America, it would be worth highlighting Columbus’s Jewishness, if only to remind people of this historical truth.
Interestingly, there is yet another Jewish connection to his historic voyage. On October 12, 1492, Columbus completed his transatlantic journey and landed on an island he named San Salvador, which today is part of the Bahamas.
It just so happens that October 12 that year was the holiday of Hoshana Raba, the seventh day of Sukkot.
While Columbus certainly did not overtly bring along a lulav and an etrog for the trip, it’s nonetheless fun to think that perhaps hidden away in the cargo hold of his ship the Nina, there was a set of the Four Species stowed away among his belongings. ■
The writer is founder of Shavei Israel (www.shavei.org), which assists descendants of Jews, including the Bnei Anusim of Spain, Portugal, and South America, to return to the Jewish people.