The Sephardic Jew who sailed the ocean blue?

October 14, 2024

I don't recall ever being aware of the controversy surrounding Christoper Columbus, but apparently there's a lot of it.

To ring in both the national holiday and commemorate Columbus' voyage, Spanish national broadcaster RTVE aired a documentary which followed a group of geneticists led by José Antonio Lorente from the University of Granada. For 22 years, Lorente and his colleagues had been trying to determine, once and for all, the elusive identity of the man the Spanish call Cristóbal Colón.
They studied hundreds of documents and forensically examined the remains of the famous explorer. Early in their investigation, they agreed that there were no fewer than 25 different possible origins for Columbus, including Galicia, Valencia, and of course, Genoa. These 25 possibilities were whittled down to 8 plausibilities. Eventually, DNA research led by Fracesc Albardaner from the Centre d'Estudis Colombins de Barcelona narrowed it down to just one.
Now the results are in. According to Lorente, Albardaner and their team, Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew.
[...]
As for the whining and crying about Columbus the genocidal murderer...well, even his contemporaries found some of his actions objectionable. According to the historical record, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel were furious with Columbus when they heard about his treatment of the tribes in the "New World". They deemed it a horrific contradiction of Christian benevolence and peace. Queen Isabel even scuppered Columbus' plans to get rich off of enslaving 1,600 "Indians".
A Jew enriching himself through the slave trade? It's not exactly unheard of, is it.

No, it certainly isn't: Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade