18 October 2024

New claims that
Christopher Columbus
was a Sephardic Jew
create historical irony

The tomb of Christopher Columbus in Seville cathedral … was a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

So it turns out that Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa.

The conclusion was reached last week after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville, and the claims seem to have turned the conventional historical narrative on its head.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire came from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from Spain in 1492 – the same year Columbus reached the Americas.

The findings were announced last Saturday night (12 October 2024) in a special television programme shown on the Spanish national broadcaster, RTVE, to mark Spain’s national day, which commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World on 12 October 1492.

Dr José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada, led the research. He said his analysis had revealed that Columbus’s DNA was ‘compatible’ with a Jewish origin.

‘We have very partial, but sufficient, DNA from Christopher Columbus,’ he said. ‘We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and in both the Y [male] chromosome and mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Fernando there are traces compatible with a Jewish origin.’

Dr Lorente acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth. But he said the likelihood was that he had come from the Spanish Mediterranean region.

‘The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origin lay in the western Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘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.’

Given that there were no solid theories nor clear indications that Columbus could have been French, Lorente added, the search area narrowed still further.

‘We’re left with the Spanish Mediterranean area, the Balearic islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange because then Christopher Columbus would have been written with some trace of Italian or the Sicilian language. That all means that his most likely origin is in the Spanish Mediterranean area or the Balearic islands which belonged to the crown of Aragón at the time.’

RTVE said Dr Lorente’s findings have put an end to 500 years of speculation over Columbus’s birthplace and nationality. Other suggestions in the past have included Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or even Scottish origns. After analysing 25 possible places, then focusing on a shortlist of eight, Lorente plumped on western Europe.

However, his conclusions have been met with caution by his peers, who point out that it is not possible to evaluate the claims because they no data from the analysis has been offered, the documentary did not show Columbus’s DNA and the findings were shared without prior peer scrutiny within the scientific community.

The revelations on Spanish television last Saturday came two days after Dr Lorente and his team said that DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego ‘definitively confirmed’ that the partial skeleton kept in a tomb in Seville Cathedral was that of Columbus.

Columbus died in Valladolid in 1506, but he asked to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, shard today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His body was taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

Columbus and his son Diego are now buried in Seville cathedral, as are Cardinal Juan de Cervantes and Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza Quiñones. The royal chapel in the cathedral holds the tomb of the city’s conqueror, King Ferdinand III of Castile, his son and heir Alfonso the Wise, and their descendant, King Peter the Cruel.

The Columbus Monument (Monument a Colom) – a 60 metre high seafront monument at the lower end of La Rambla – was erected in 1888. It is a reminder that after his first journey to the new continent in 1492, Christopher Columbus reported to Queen Isabel of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon in Barcelona on 15 March 1493.

If Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, his identity would be a major historical irony. His arrival in the Americas paved the way for the rise of Spain’s rich and powerful American empire. But Ferdinand and Isabella, who sponsored his voyages, expelled Jews from in 1492, when the Jews of Spain was offered the choice of being forced into exile, forcibly converted to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

Spain sought to atone for the expulsion in 2015, offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Jews who were expelled at the end of the 15th century. About 132,000 people of Sephardic descent applied for Spanish citizenship before the offer elapsed in 2019. More than half of those who applied were from Latin American countries including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Chile and Ecuador.

The year 1492 was regarded as the annus mirabilis by many in power in Spain, who associated the year with four events: the introduction of the Inquisition, the conquest of Granada; the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabel; the expulsion or forced conversion of Spain’s large Jewish population; and Christopher Columbus sailing west to the New World.

Columbus himself, in the prologue to his diary dedicated to Ferdinand and Isabel, links his voyage to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Yet there were many conversos on the expedition, and many found safer climes in the New World. Although the Inquisition arrived in Lima and Mexico in the 1570s, many could escape forced baptisms and form communities that were cohesive for generations. In this New World, these peregrino could sow the seeds that would lead to a rebirth of Sephardic Judaism in the decades and centuries that followed.

During a webinar lecture in 2020, organised by the Sephardi Academia programme at Bevis Marks Synagogue, Professor Ronnie Perelis of Yeshiva University, New York, spoke about ‘Early Modern Crypto-Judaism in its Transatlantic Context.’

He spoke, in particular, of the Carvajal family of Portuguese and Spanish origin, and how these conversos had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition in Mexico at the end of the 16th century. The new claims in the past week about the Sephardic identity of Christopher Columbus seem to compound so many historical ironies.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום

The Columbus Monument in Barcelona … Christopher Columbus was welcomed back to Spain by Ferdinand and Isabel in Barcelona (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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