SEVILLE, Spain — Conventional history states Christopher Columbus was from Genoa, Italy, but he may have been, in fact, a Sephardic Jew from the eastern Iberian Peninsula, according to a new documentary by Spain’s national broadcaster that also rekindles questions of religious persecution and the treatment of Indigenous communities.
Broadcast by Spanish national public network RTVE on Oct. 12, the day of Spain’s national holiday marking the arrival of Columbus’ expedition to the Americas, Colón ADN, su verdadero origen, or “Columbus’ DNA, his true origin,” follows forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente as he studies multiple hypotheses regarding the origin of the famed explorer and contrasts the information with scientific and historical evidence.
The documentary concludes that the most plausible theory is one maintained by a Catalan architect who has dedicated many years trying to demonstrate that Cristóbal Colón — Columbus’ name in Spanish — was a Jewish man from the region of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Spain.
Some in the scientific community, however, have expressed skepticism about the methods and scientific rigor that Lorente employs, and highlight the fact that Lorente’s findings have not been presented for peer review yet.
Columbus’ origins come into question
Few things about Christopher Columbus can be stated as facts. Legend has it that at a party with noble Spaniards he demonstrated the possibility of the impossible by making an egg stand on its tip. There is a trick, of course: he flattened the edge of the egg without breaking it.
But there are some details that have not been questioned by most people through the years. Like the fact that Columbus came from Genoa, in Italy. That he persuaded Spain’s Catholic monarchs to sponsor an impossible voyage to the Indies traveling west instead of east from Spain.
Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada, has researched Columbus’ origin for the past 22 years. In the documentary, he considers a number of theories about the origin of Columbus, examining them against DNA evidence and historical records.
Finally, Lorente arrives at the garden of Francesc Albardaner, a Catalan architect who authored the book La catalanitat de Colom. According to Albardaner, Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, part of the that Jewish diaspora associated with the Iberian Peninsula. Columbus would have followed Jewish traditions and customs, although in the public sphere he acted as Christian. He was born into a family of silk weavers from the Spanish city of Valencia, where there was a long tradition within the Jewish community of silk weavers.
But in order to determine Columbus’ ancestry, Lorente has to overcome a first hurdle, to shed light on the question of where the true remains of the sailor are.
Columbus’ disputed resting place
The mausoleum of Christopher Columbus here in Seville features four bronze heralds representing the four Spanish kingdoms before they came under a single rule, in 1469. On the heralds’ shoulders, a massive tomb that the Catholic Church and local authorities assure contains the remains of Columbus.
But Columbus’ resting place has been in dispute for centuries. The Columbus Lighthouse is a huge mausoleum monument to the explorer located in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. The monument was inaugurated in 1992 and, according to Dominican authorities, Columbus’ remains are inside the mausoleum.
There seems to be agreement among historians about the fact that the remains of Columbus, who died in Spain in 1506, were at one point taken back to Hispaniola, the Caribbean island containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But that's where historical agreement ends. Some claim the remains of Columbus made their way back to Spain, while others say the wrong bones were taken from Santo Domingo, and therefore Columbus remains in the Dominican Republic.
In Columbus’ DNA, his true origin, Lorente uses DNA from Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, and distant cousin Diego Colón to verify that the few bones that were housed at the Cathedral of Seville are indeed the true remains of the sailor.
Lorente’s conclusion is unequivocal: Christopher Columbus was of Jewish descent. That led to a process of deduction based on historical evidence. The documentary states that during Columbus’ time there were only an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish people living on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, there were about 200,000 Jewish people living in what is now Spain, an estimate that may be low, since tens of thousands of Jewish people had converted to Catholicism over the previous century, victims of constant persecution.
Also in the documentary, Albardaner, the Catalan architect, says Genoa had expelled its Jewish population in the 12th century. There were virtually no Jewish people living in Genoa in the times of Columbus, who lived from 1451 to 1506, and Jewish people doing business were only allowed to enter the city for three days at a time.
If the DNA evidence studied by Lorente suggests Columbus was a Jewish man, then it becomes highly improbable that he was from Genoa, according to Albardaner.
Why would Columbus lie about his heritage?
On Oct. 19, 1469, a young couple was married in Valladolid, Spain. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand II, the Catholic monarchs, came to be known for a number of historical achievements, such as unifying the kingdoms that now comprise Spain, or the so-called reconquista (reconquering) of Al-Andalus, the vast region of southern Spain that had been under Muslim control for centuries. But during the Catholic monarchs’ rule the Spanish Inquisition also acquired unprecedented powers. A judicial institution linked to the Roman Catholic Church, the Inquisition sought to identify heretics and order Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism, using brutal methods.
But Muslims were not the only people living in the Iberian Peninsula that the Catholic monarchs seemed to want to get rid of. In 1492 the monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, which ordered the expulsion of Jewish people, seeking to eliminate their influence on Spain's large population of converts, and to make sure its members did not revert to Judaism. The monarchs ordered the remaining Jews to convert or face expulsion from Spain.
Devin Naar, Sephardic studies program chair at the University of Washington, told the BBC's Newshour that escaping persecution in the times of the Catholic monarchs and the Spanish Inquisition was not as easy as simply converting to Catholicism:
“What the Spanish Inquisition did was that it targeted, not Jews as Jews and not Muslims as Muslims, but rather initially and specifically those who were of Jewish or Muslim origin, but who had converted to Catholicism. And there was the perception that they had continued to practice Judaism on one hand or Islam on the other hand in secret. The Inquisition used a variety of different means to try to coerce confessions. It used all of the different medieval tools that we might think about, including burning at the stake,” Naar said.
So Columbus may have been hiding his Sephardic origins to avoid stigmatization, persecution, or even death.
Naar adds that the claim that Columbus was of Spanish-Jewish origin or converso origin — conversos is what the Spanish called Jewish converts to Catholicism and their descendants — has been around for more than 100 years.
Disagreement from the scientific community
The release of the documentary on RTVE has sparked criticisms from the scientific community. Most notably, a recent article published by the Spanish newspaper El País has several experts questioning the process Lorente used to reach his conclusions.
"I don't understand how data that the scientific community has not yet endorsed is presented to society, which puts the data itself and the hypotheses proposed at risk," Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences is quoted as saying.
Rodrigo Barquera, an expert in archaeogenetics at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told El País he was surprised that Lorente’s findings had been shared without prior scrutiny from others in the scientific community.
Even the DNA angle is questioned by Antonio Salas, who directs the Population Genetics in Biomedicine group at the Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela, telling El País: “The documentary promised to focus on DNA analysis. However, the genetic information it offers is very limited.”
Lorente, in response, told El País that the documentary is a film, not a scientific publication, and he promises scientific findings will be presented in the near future.
The evolving role of Columbus in history
Columbus’ actions, once regarded as accomplishments, have become a symbol to many as a starting point for a history of abuse. To others, Columbus, 1492, and what came after, are still worth celebrating.
To this day, Spain marks Oct. 12 as a national holiday, also widely known as Hispanic Heritage Day, to commemorate the arrival of Columbus’ expedition in the Americas. And to this day, Spain’s popular culture has not been able to shake up the use of the controversial term “Descubrimiento de América” (the discovery of America) to refer to that moment in history.
In Latin America and to many U.S.-based Latinos and Native Americans, the so-called “discovery of the Americas” was only the beginning of a cruel history of extermination, subjugation and colonization of its native people and lands. This continues to play a role in international diplomacy. Just last month, the recently elected first woman president of Mexico did not invite the Spanish king to her inauguration as part of an ongoing spat between the two countries over the history of Spanish colonization. Spain’s current government, led by the progressive Socialist Party, said that Mexico’s decision was unacceptable.
The United States has recognized Columbus Day as a federal holiday since 1934, when President Roosevelt designated the standing. For many in the Italian American community, the presumed fact that Columbus was originally from Italy has been a reason for pride and celebration. In 2022, however, President Biden issued a proclamation on Indigenous Peoples Day, and both are observed on the second Monday of October, but most government websites continue to list “Columbus Day” as the federal holiday the nation celebrated this week.
Spain did take measures to remediate the harm done to Sephardic Jews. In 2015 the Spanish Parliament approved an act granting Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews with Spanish origins. Spain has not provided reparations to descendants of Spanish Muslims who once lived in the Iberian Peninsula.
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