Today is the “official” recognition of Columbus Day, the actual date of his landing on San Salvador Island (now Waitling Island in the British Bahamas) was October 12, 1492.
Scholarship and archeology related to Columbus has never died, even as his place in history has been attacked by those wishing to replace Columbus Day with “indigenous Peoples Day” to denigrate the heroic achievement of Columbus and his crew in sailing into the unknown to link Europe with the Americas.
On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus’ flagship the Santa Maria grounded off the coast of present-day Haiti. About ten-years ago a wreck was found and tentatively identified as the lost ship, the identification was eventually deemed incorrect and marine archeologists still search for the historic ship’s remains.
Columbus himself has remained almost as illusive as his lost flagship. Although Columbus has long been associated with Genoa and Italians have proudly claimed him as their own, over the centuries it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or even Scottish.
Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were 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, according to reporting by the UK’s Guardian.
Now, a genetic study of the explorer’s DNA gleaned from remains recovered from his elaborate tomb in La Catedral de Sevilla in Spain and those of his son Fernando Colón have yielded some surprising results.
José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada who led the research, 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.”
While Lorente acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth, 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,” said the researcher. “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.”
The Guardian reported Saturday’s revelation came two days after 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 the famous navigator.
The identification of Columbus as having Jewish ancestry prompted some observers to note the hypocrisy of Spain’s rulers who sponsored Columbus’s voyages of exploration while at the same time ordering 300,000 Jews living in Spain to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.
The DNA project began 20 years ago with an excavation of Columbus’ tomb at Seville Cathedral. Even the location of his remains was/is controversial; researchers in 2006 used the excavated DNA samples to confirm Seville’s claim. The project has lasted two decades as researchers waited for forensic technology to improve enough that their results can be irrefutable.
Twenty years ago, as John Sailor observed in an article for Medium, the very idea of renaming Columbus Day in honor of America’s indigenous peoples was still novel. (Indigenous Peoples’ Day was first instituted in Berkeley, California, in 1992 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas).
Today Columbus statues across the Americas are being toppled and replaced. Headlines each week report on statue replacements and monument controversies in places ranging from Chicago, Pittsburg, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, to, with high-profile controversy, Mexico City.
This iconoclastic destruction and attempts to erase the achievements of Columbus and his crew deprives today’s young people of one of the most inspirational figures in human history. Columbus freed Western culture from superstitious fear of the unknown and ushered in an age of exploration that continues to this day among people, such as Elon Musk, who aspire to voyage beyond the known world to reach the stars.
Perhaps the revelation that José Antonio Lorente’s new DNA study of Christopher Columbus demonstrates that he was Jewish will cause scholars and historians to reevaluate how Columbus is treated in the popular media. And it certainly adds another chapter to the myth of the great navigator whose courage and reliance upon science became foundational characteristics of Western culture.
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