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Happy Indigenous Columbus Day
14 October 2024
This holiday we could use a little help from Dr. Henry Gates, Jr. and the staff at Finding My Roots, the PBS program that researches the genealogy of celebrities.
Death of Columbus. Chromolithograph of Christopher Columbus on his death bed, May 20, 1506..
That's because the long-taught story of Columbus as a Genoese sailor who found funding for his ambitious plan to sail into the sun at the Spanish court of Isabella and Ferdinand got rocked by a team of investigators led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente.
After doing some DNA testing on tiny samples of remains presumed to be the sailor's buried in Seville Cathedral and comparing them with those of known relatives and descendants, the team announced in a documentary titled Columbus DNA: The true origin:
We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son. And both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin."
There were about 300,000 Jews living in Spain when Isabella and Ferdinand ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country. Many left Spain, coming to be know an Sephardic Jews. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.
The researchers weren't so sure about where Columbus was born, though. After analyzing 25 locations, Lorente concluded it was only possible to say Columbus was born in Western Europe.
And that's just the tip of the ambiguity.
DNA evidence can show ancestry but not identify whether someone is Jewish, noted Jonathan Ray, professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University. In this case, it may only suggest he had a Jewish ancestor. Genoa was a melting pot itself and Spain had plenty of ingredients in its stew, too. Apparently no one in Europe is indigenous.
“This is a story that never dies,” Ronnie Perelis, associate professor of Sephardic studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University and the author of the 2016 book Blood and Faith: Family and Identity in the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic, noted recently.
"I encourage people to read his own writings to appreciate his complex identity--he was an autodidact, who took advantage of the explosion of knowledge after the birth of printing to create an eclectic theology that had many Judaic elements -- but in a deeply Christian, mystical vein," Perelis said. "Genetics doesn't make someone Jewish."
Nevertheless Columbus insisted his ships sail before midnight of the day when the edict of expulsion was to go into effect. And he was paid to do it.