Besides the idea that DNA can show from 500 years away that a person came from one or another side of a modern border is just not understanding how any of this works.
And the fact that this pseudo-science was broadcasted on national television is a disgrace for Spain and embarrassing for the Spaniards quoted in the article who are trying to do actual science.
Columbus was famously a devout catholic; his DNA suggests that he was of Sephardic Jewish descent, most likely from a family that underwent a forced conversion.
I already posted below, but since you probably won't scroll down and I hate to see people get tricked: I would take this article with a massive grain of salt. Not "definitely wrong", but perhaps "of very dubious origin, making unusually strong claims based on unpublished, inconsistently-described evidence". For context, the "Columbus was Jewish" assertion is part of a broader "Columbus was secretly Spanish/Catalonian" fight they've been having for a while (which isn't surprising given the region's generally positive recollection of their "glory days" of genocide and slavery), as it's supposed to preclude him from being Italian.
Besides that, as an American who spent a semester in Spain and took a class focused on religious diversity specifically on the peninsula: your analysis is definitely possible, but there was also plenty of Jewish people practicing in secret throughout the reconquista. Thus the inquisition, even! The Reconquista took hundreds of years and saw multiple waves of anti-Jewish laws throughout the various Christian kingdoms, from taxes to restrictions to the famous expulsions, so there was plenty of precedent to learn from.
I'd be curious to hear from any actual experts on how the Spanish viewed national origin, and whether that played a significant role in religious persecution. AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), which makes me even more dubious that Columbus would choose to repeatedly claim to be from Italy just to hide his Jewish ancestry. He was 100% verifiably a practicing Catholic, isn't that all that should have mattered to his peers? But I'm walking pretty blind here.
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones),
While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsion of 1609 (which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for the past ~100 years).
In some cases it was pretty extreme and not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the US (and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t that dissimilar either).
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating into the American Colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as bad yet in the 1490s but had Columbus Jewish origin (assume that’s actually true) been know he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or even attracting investment for his expeditions.
I see what you're saying. I tried feeding this into ChatGPT and it seems like better use of commas would make all the difference.
"While that may have been true in the 1400s, when ex-Jewish Conversos sometimes held significant economic and even political power, by the 1500s things had changed. Antisemitism (and the same applied to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race rather than just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated against, culminating in the expulsion of 1609, which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for about 100 years.
In some cases, the discrimination was pretty extreme, not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the U.S., and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t too different either.
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating to the American colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as severe in the 1490s, but if Columbus’s Jewish origins (assuming they were true) had been known, he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or attracting investment for his expeditions.
There are quite a few famous converts from Judaism to Christianity. And it's not quite clear-cut, and sometimes has "strange" side-effects.
Take, for instance, Cantor (the father of the set theory), who was a second generation convert, if memory serves. Even though he was a devote Christian, he had some ties to Judaism (eg. choosing Hebrew letters for the infinite sets he worked with). And, in general he was somewhat insane, and religion played a central role in his insanity, where both Christianity and Judaism had some degree of influence.
Me, coming from a family of converts, who later became atheists, I can attest to that neither me, nor my parents ever cared for organized religion or for following tradition. But, some things remained through generation regardless. I never learned enough Hebrew to read Bible comfortably (i.e. I need to look up words in a dictionary sometimes), but I almost teared up when I watched a collection of recordings someone made of people from different national / linguistic backgrounds reading Hebrew Bible, because at that point I realized that even though imperfectly, I'm able to understand someone writing many thousands years ago. The ability to connect over centuries to your ancestors, to get even an approximate idea of what they thought and how they felt -- this is something that's very unlikely to go away with conversion or a change of one's affiliation. This is also probably the reason you find quite a few people with vague Jewish ancestry still coming to Israel. Also, there's a "weird" trend of people wanting to be berried in Israel (because of how important that specific place is in Jewish tradition), even if in life they are nothing like religious Jews.
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Bottom line: It's just a weird question. It's like trying to calculate the percentage by which any convert has converted. Maybe, even if Columbus' parents were converts, it's still not a question anyone can answer: how much Catholic was he?
There are indications he may have been raised Jewish, and later converted to Catholicism. Or, converted but still close to Judaism.
His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
Further, It's also known that the family profession was weaving, a traditionally Jewish profession at the time and that Jewish given names like Abraham and Jacob were common in the family of Columbus' mother.
One of the hypothesis from the dna analysis says:
> hypothesis proposes that Columbus was a Jew from the Mediterranean port city of Valencia. His obscure early life, according to this theory, can be explained by the fact that he sought to hide his Jewish background to avoid persecution by the fervently Catholic Spanish monarchs.
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
This is one of the least compelling pieces of evidence: one doesn’t set out for a cross-oceanic voyage on a whim. He had sponsorship from the Spanish crown and lobbied and prepared for years for the journey. His journey was formally sanctioned by the the royal family in April of the year he left.
Conversos and Moriscos were overrepresented among the early Spanish settlers [0].
Same story in Portuguese territories as well.
An exodus of Sephardim and Muslims was a win-win for the Spanish crown - they'd lose (in their eyes) a potential 5th column in their competition against the Ottoman Empire as well as have manpower to nominally stake their claim in the New World.
At the time, the Spanish were completely unaware that Columbus would find a land that could be settled. The goal of the expedition was finding a route to East Asia to establish trade with those known-to-be-inhabited areas. Colonization was a pivot after Columbus did not find Asia.
Also colonization didn't start in earnest until several decades later. For a generation or two the exploitation of the Americas was largely extractive.
> the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain
This came up in another part of the thread, but it wasn't the exact date—the decree gave Jews until the end of July [0], while August 3 (not second) is the date he sailed.
It's still close enough that it may have been related, but it's not the slam dunk that "the exact date" makes it sound like it is.
Why would anyone ever think that it could have been anything but a coincidence?
Who would have sponsored his expedition knowing that Columbus would be legally banned from entering the country if he was successful? That just seems silly…
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492,
He could have just moved to Italy or the Low Countries?
> does suggest he may have not converted yet.
And he did while he was in the Americas? Why would the Castilian crown sponsor an expedition led by a known Jew and even make him governor of the newly discovered territories (note that in a few decades even converted descendants of Jews or Muslims were banned from emigrating to the new world after a few decades)
> “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.”
Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece?
Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing? Is it not possible that many many people in Genoa could have had Jewish ancestors? After all, most of Jesus's disciples were Jewish (please correct me if I'm wrong).
There’s also the phrasing “compatible with Jewish origin”. That doesn’t mean that he definitively has Jewish DNA either, especially given that there are no specifically Jewish haplogroups. This whole thing seems very premature until autosomal analysis is performed.
> And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed?
Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.
Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.
> Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?
I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.
I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.
I'm aware of family line tracing for establishing tribal identity. It's not something unique to Judaism.
DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).
But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.
What is your claim exactly? It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered. I can’t imagine you actually think that, so I’m at a loss for what your point might be.
Even if Abraham _did_ exist, at this point in time it's like trying to distinguish a drop of water from the ocean it's now living in. That's how little would have remained of Abraham's DNA so much later.
If you personally are a direct descendant of Abraham, or any other specific individual who lived approximately 3000 years ago, statistically you do not carry any DNA from that ancestor. While there are some nuances relating to differences in how the different sexes pass on their genes, as a rough approximation you carry half the base pairs of each of your parents, who each carry roughly half from their parents, and so on. So you carry 1/2^n base pairs from an individual n generations before you. The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, meaning in 31 generations the odds of having a single base pair from a specific ancestor is about 50%. 3000 years is about 120 generations, so your odds of having a basepair from a specific ancestor that far back are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The only exceptions that matter on that timescale are the y-chromosome along the male-only line descent and the mitochondrial DNA along the female-only line of descent.
No one has any DNA that can be traced to a specific Neanderthal, no.
Of course people have DNA in common with their ancestors as a group, hell we share a lot in common with fish. But it's because these genes are common that they enter and re-enter your family tree at multiple points.
And your mitochondrial DNA definitely doesn't descend from Abraham, a male incapable of passing on mitochondrial DNA, so there's a reason I gloss over female line descent.
Your pseudoscience above would make it seem nobody has any DNA from any ancestors at all, as there were not your 10^Whatever creatures ever in existence. Once you figure out the bug in your logic there, you will perhaps see the failure of the rest of your argument. Hint: inbreeding.
Aside, Jewish line is determined by matrilineal descent. By your own logic the mitochondrial DNA is shared, which is a rather significant aspect to simply gloss over.
It is indefensible to make arguments of likelihoods without and understanding of context and priors. If I listed 1,000 people from around the world at random and claimed we all had a shared great^N grandfather (with N not so large at to be trivially true), I’d need some rather significant proof to back up at that claim, and barring that we could say it was unlikely to be true.
If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.
This case is much closer to the latter than the former.
Is it? I'd imagine they all share many common ancestors, but that those common ancestors are probably shared by many others as well so it's not very unique.
30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.
Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
Converting to Judaism can be easier than many people assume, sometimes even simpler than earning a high school degree. It's important to note that Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, meaning it doesn't actively seek to convert others. Instead, conversion is a deeply personal choice, and those who pursue it are welcomed after a meaningful process.
Judaism is actually one of the major world religions, though it's much smaller in terms of population compared to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism [1]. Despite its smaller numbers, it has had a significant influence on Western culture, ethics, and religious thought, particularly as the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.
Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process.
Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as you don’t believe you are something else, you are Hindu. Notably, caste can be tricky. There might also be a form you should fill out.[https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/407/is-it-true-...]
Buddhism, you join the Sangha (show up), or follow teachings. There is no test or anything. Many Buddhists don’t directly do those things, and I’ve never heard anything say they ‘weren’t Buddhist’. Maybe a terrible Buddhist, but what else is new?
By those standards, is not Judaism the toughest and most difficult? Personally, I’d take it as a point of pride.
Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.
There is not such thing as "Jewish" DNA. Is a culture and religion, but not a fully different race. Some genes could be in the past more represented, but it was just "Mediterranean dotation". A mix of European, African and Asian. Today is much more mixed fortunately.
If you can't prove family connection with paperwork, you can emigrate to Israel by means of DNA test which proves to the government that you are Jewish.
That doesn't seem to be quite how it works; apparently the DNA test by itself is not sufficient, and one does need some form of paperwork. Per an explanation by a private law office:
A DNA test can be used to obtain Israeli citizenship, but this is reserved to prove that a person is the child of an Israeli citizen. According to Israeli law, if a child is born to an Israeli mother or father abroad, they can be granted Israeli citizenship. The DNA test is used to authorize this, proving this familial link. We discuss more about obtaining a paternity test in Israel in another article.
In some very rare cases, a DNA test can be used to prove their relation to a Jewish parent, sibling or grandparent, even though the applicant doesn’t have documents proving this relationship, but said person has to have documents verifying that they are Jewish.
I would call it barely distinguishable from the genetic information from their close neighbors. Now compare it with DNA from native Australians for example and you will find a much different picture.
Having in mind that we share a majority of our genes with other mammals, and almost all with chimps, so the range of allowed variation among people is in itself small.
To exists is one thing. To be biologically relevant to deserve a new entire category is another very different.
To start, this genes aren't exclusive from the group. And it is not a monofiletic group anymore, because is a religious one and anybody can join it. So from a "taxonomic" point of view is not what we would call a "natural group", speaking genetically.
Is not different than claiming that there is a "Christian DNA". Biologically it does not have any sense.
This argument is very detached from reality. The Jewish tribe is defined as being descended from Israel, with folks independently joining as a rather rare corner case. On the other hand, Christians are defined to be those people who have heard the gospel and chosen to accept Jesus as their Lord.
It’s as if you said my family didn’t share DNA with me because an adoption or two had occurred over the centuries. It’s a bizarre argument that keeps coming up here, I don’t know what the real underlying root of it is.
If he were to be saying that, he’d be terribly misinformed. Slight specific genetic changes can have absolutely massive impacts, hand waving “ninety nine percent of us is a banana!”-type speak is brain-dead.
Nobody questions that the impact of those changes can be large. That still does not take away from the fact that the genetic makeup of humans is by and large nearly identical. My neighbour is still an homo sapiens and genetically near-identical to me even though he's Chinese and I am not. Whether he considers himself a descendant of the emperor Qin and, for that reason, deserves to be in a socially distinct category, is entirely a different matter.
You are wrong on this point. Genetically, Jews are as distinct as any other race (and the world's obsession with Jews mean that you can find plenty of studies on Jewish genetics). Jews take DNA tests and get marked as "Ashekanzi Jewish" (or other Jewish type) on tests like 23andme.
A good point. I don't recall using a single Jewish reference in the things that he discovered. Where is the "Island of Januka"? Everything suggests that he adopted a full Christian lifestyle so, is somebody still a Jewish if he choose not to live as one?.
You can be a secular one, the same way many christians are. But often when people say x person is Y-ish, it just means that they have Y ancestry rather than they living under the cultural norms of Y
I've read the new in spanish, it was not just labeled as jewish but as sefardic jewish line (the one particular from spanish jews). Most of them converted to christianity (the called "new christians") and remained in Spain.
On the other hand, Jewish were expelled from the whole italic peninsula (including Genoa, etc) after very extreme period of persecution 2 centuries earlier.
Jewishness by matrilineal descent was a later Rabbinic innovation, probably around the third century. In Paul’s day it was still patrilineal. Even today your tribe is patrilineal.
I’m confused by your question. Paul was from Tarsus, a Roman citizen, and brought Christianity to the gentiles/goyim, but was himself a Jew, from a Jewish family, and of long Jewish descent. Maybe I’m not understanding the implications in GP that you’re seeing? But I’m interested in seeing what you’re seeing.
There is a theory he was from the Greek island of Chios.
"In 1982, Ruth Durlacher hypothesised that Chios was Christopher Columbus's birthplace.[64] Columbus himself said he was from the Republic of Genoa, which included the island of Chios at the time. Columbus was friendly with a number of Chian Genoese families, referenced Chios in his writings and used the Greek language for some of his notes.[65] 'Columbus' remains a common surname on Chios. Other common Greek spellings are: Kouloumbis and Couloumbis."
"A New Theory Clarifying the Identity OF Christopher Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece. by Ruth G Durlacher-Wolper 1982(Published by The New World Museum, San Salvador, Bahamas"
> “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País.
So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spanish national day?
The funny part is that none of this matters for things other than nationalist talking points.
How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing.
Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.
It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, though, per the same criticism outlined in the article.
I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And because of it the Spanish Empire became one of the richest the world has ever seen, the legacy of which is still felt today.
This is not to Lionise Columbus but you have to acknowledge the context of the time. Greenland and Newfoundland were not well known and are a long way from the latitude Columbus was aiming at. He was an idiot, and cruel by our standards, but he was great.
I seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true.
Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.
Knowledgeable Europeans knew that the Earth was round and they knew its size to within a few percent. Columbus thought that the Earth was much smaller though, and in that belief "he was an idiot". It's quite possible that he was trying to make an impossible voyage seem possible, but then again, he didn't take enough provisions, and it was almost a total loss.
This is not accurate. Everyone knew the Earth was round and had a good knowledge of the Earth's circumference, as this can be determined with geometry and some basic measurements. What was not well known at the time was the size of Asia, and specifically the distance from Asia's eastern coastline to Japan's easternmost islands, due to the lack of surveying data. Columbus grossly overestimated the size of Asia such that Japan would be approximately where North America actually is.
Other people brought the receipts. He fully just wishfully thought the earth was smaller. He continued to refused he hadn’t landed in the indies for the rest of his life.
Actually, "On the other hand, in a document in the Book of Privileges (1502), Columbus refers to the New World as the Indias Occidentales ('West Indies'), which he says "were unknown to all the world".[284]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Legacy
So, it seems at some points he made claims he had a route to the orient and later he referred to it as 'West Indies'. Perhaps he knew the truth all along but had reasons to mislead.
Eh, it would be like insisting the moon was made of cheese and in low earth orbit - and somehow getting someone to sponsor your (literal moonshot) - and then somehow reaching it in it’s real place, finding out it was made of gold instead, and then bringing a ton back.
Which single-handedly started a space race which led to colonizing the moon (and, uh, mostly exterminating the indigenous population which was totally different than the folks who were supposed to be there in the first place).
Oh, except it was also a completely different moon that we somehow weren’t aware was there.
Nothing he was proposing should have worked, and yet somehow not only did it, but it made everyone (who funded it) fabulously rich beyond their wildest imaginings.
He was an explorer who set out to circumnavigate the globe and connect East and West, it wasn't "dumb luck" that in doing so he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated. Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived -- he made the trip to the Americas four times, without loss of life in transit.
> he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated
Finding out you were wrong when everyone doubted you in the first place isn’t particularly impressive. Especially when we already knew the right answer over 1500 years before (Eratosthenes).
I like the Moon analogy someone else shared on the thread:
One doesn’t stop being an idiot because they struck gold under wrong assumptions. They just become a lucky idiot.
> Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived
Highly debatable. We don’t even need to leave the peninsula to find another country (Portugal) with numerous examples of people who could fit that title.
> The moors conquered and the Catholics took it back.
This take only makes sense if you argue the Romans took it back, which would only be a valid claim from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, not war lords from the Iberian Peninsula.
That’s closer to a piece of historical trivia though, the Viking discovery of North America had very limited impact and nobody in Europe was aware of it or understood the significance.
What Columbus did led to dozens of other expeditions almost immediately. Within a few decades the largest the New World states were subjugated by Europeans and some of the worst recorded epidemics in human history swept the continent decimating societies which hadn’t even had any direct contact with Europeans yet.
He also allowed Spain to become the preeminent European power for the next century or so.
> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat
Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all new and exciting to the people of the period, like they'd rediscovered an ancient civilization!
Also by "people" here we are literally talking about the 0.1% - educated people who could read and had access to books, which at the time were very rare and super expensive.
What the vikings did was not common knowledge, because basically they didn't come back regularly and so there was no real knowledge of their actions anywhere in Europe.
The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically.
> The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round.
[1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)
IIRC what Columbus didn't know was Eratosthones calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was <1% off, but believed Ptolemy's ~30% short estimation and figured there was no land in between Europe and the East Indies.
> Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books;
I thought it was mainly the Greek refugees fleeing from the Byzantine empire who “kickstarted” the Renaissance?
Of course all the pillaging the by the Venetians etc. as well. A lot of Greek texts that survived the Sack of Constantinople ended up in Western Europe.
Regardless, most “Greek knowledge” that we know of survived in the Greek half of the Roman Empire which remained a part of the “Christian Civilization”. In fact it was the undisputed center of it until the 800s and in many ways much later.
I’m not entirely downplaying the Arab influence which was very significant as well (especially considering that the Orthodox Church wasn’t really that supportive about the preservation of some philosophical texts).
Also it started much earlier than the 15th century, the translation of various Greek and Arab texts into Latin was well underway in the 1100s and 1200s, following the Reconquista which was effectively over by the 1300s, and the conquest Sicily.
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus.
He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. And America is very big and important, so whatever it cares about, a lot of other people care about.
There's no point sneering that Leif Erikson got there first, Europe as a whole did not particularly know The Americas existed until Columbus confirmed it. Then they rushed to colonise it... which is where most of the Americans (and Canadians) ultimately come from. So that's why it's important to so many of them.
> He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus.
May I ask why you hold this opinion? I grew up with tons of Italian-Americans (NYC) and I can confidently say that I've never heard a single person express pride in the fact that Columbus was Italian. In fact, based on my experience, a lot of Americans—regardless of descent—think/were explicitly taught that Columbus was Spanish.
I looked into it a few years ago when then anti-colonialists were insisting that the US should drop Columbus Day (or replace it with a Columbus' Victims Day) as they see him as a symbol of colonialism, eradication of natives, and support for slavery.
You might ask "if he's so evil and wicked and wrong and everything bad about the world (and not just a convenient famous person to scapegoat for more general ills), why did anyone ask the US to have a Columbus Day anyway?"
> Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself
> For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following lynchings in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration.
> In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day
> in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States
> In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday
> San Francisco claims the nation's oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community's annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868, while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers around 2010
So, while the Italian-Americans you grew up with may not have been one of the 35,000 marchers in NYC, I bet most of those 35,000 marchers considers themselves Italian-American. They, and all other Italian-Americans, get a federal holiday which they can use to celebrate the connection between Italy and America (if they so wish), thanks to Italian-Americans lobbying for Columbus Day since the 1800s.
That is not true though unless you explicitly mean something different. American does not equate to European American.
Most Americans come from Mexico, India and China. In that order. European countries are not even in the top 5. You are probably talking about something else but are unable to phrase it properly likely due to some internal assumptions. You are welcome to share those assumptions :)
You are right. It will be interesting to see how it changes given the fast rising Asian American demographics in the coming decades as Asia becomes host to more powerhouses.
Regarding your confusion, ancestry is the whole point of this thread. This sub-discussion just focused on a specific part of the discussion :)
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.
Also note that around the same time other European expeditions were making similar discoveries: 2 years before Columbus, Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and a decade later Da Gama braved 10,000 km of open ocean and discovered a sea route to India.
Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.
The Portuguese were doing the rational thing and taking the much rational and safer option.
Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents
The Portuguese obviously discovered Brazil before Columbus (or worst case, contemporaneous), because of the dividing line drawn up in the Treaty of Tordesillas:
It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.
I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.
If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.
Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.
Traveling west, reaching land, leaving enough evidence to confirm the story five centuries later, making it back, and finally, convincing other people that it happened? No.
Yeah the Portuguese keeping Brasil secret is seductive conspiracy theory.
I think that America being there at all is super hindsight-y. A priori there were no states in America that had made contact with the people’s across Eurasia and Africa. There were the Vikings, and some northern nomads.
The Pacific is huge. So big that you can’t fit it all in one hemisphere. We have had long periods with single supercontinents and no other major landmasses.
Sailing west into the Atlantic as a European was a massive gamble. Matched only by the navigators of the South Pacific, and even then they were far more competent navigators of open ocean and had techniques that Columbus didn’t have. He just had heaps of money, some great boats, and huge will.
Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible. Clever and level headed people will look at an endeavour, calculate that the risk/reward is terrible and not even try. It takes a special kind of person to do this kind of stuff, and many die trying such that we don't even hear about them. The few who get lucky and succeed push humanity's reach to (literally) new frontiers and get remembered as great explorers.
So while I agree that a "lucky idiot" is often a good description for these efforts, I think it is very important that we do not diminish their importance. It took someone like Columbus to make this trip, and yes he had to get supremely lucky, it doesn't diminish from the fact that he took risks that paid off handsomely.
> Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible.
While this does sometimes happen, I do think that the more common situation is that people actually review the existing evidence and prior art and then they make a calculated (!) gamble - in fact, this is e.g. probably why the Wright brothers succeeded as pioneers of aviation as opposed to dozens of other people who would just try stuff more haphazardly and then end up dying in the process.
To be fair- they all were and are like that, back then and now. It just that the industrialization dividend created a cultural power asymmetry which made those nightmares a permanently one sided affair for a while.
Why do we need "to be fair" about who we celebrate? I don't understand why anyone is arguing the point that we shouldn't celebrate people who did awful things.
They also weren't all the same. Not everyone goes around enslaving people and using their life to seek riches and fame. I don't think anyone complains about historical figures who, flaws and all, fought for higher ideals like personal liberty.
I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.
Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Cortez only had about 500 soldiers. He didn't even had the permission of the Spanish crown, it was a private enterprise. How did he conquered a city of warriors with a population of 300K ?
The Aztecs were tyrants that had abused their neighboring states for decades. Cortez built alliances with Tlaxalans and other tribes. There were battles, a small pox epidemic and a lot of blood. But Cortez was overall a great diplomat that took all the cities under Aztec control one by one until only Tenochtitlan remained.
Calling Cortes genocidal is also quite farfetched, considering that he conquered the Aztec territory, despite being vastly outnumbered, because every native tribe and settlement they found on the way banded together to overthrow the Aztec.
I wouldn't call the Aztecs genocidal either, despite the ritual sacrifices, brutal treatment of other peoples, and everybody in mesoamerica who came to know them hating them so much that they preferred the uncertain fate of joining the white bearded men from the east.
Yeah I think the light use of the word genocide doesn't make justice for the instance where there was actual genocide, which is when you murder people with the explicit intent of destroying a nation/culture/group.
The approach of colonizers from the west in the new world was broadly genocidal though. Like, "we want to live here, so go on git." Killing buffalo to literally starve natives, for example. Allowing natives in occupied lands to be only slaves or dead, for example. Even if it doesn't 100% fit whatever hard definition you're using, it approximates it pretty goddamn well.
> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and assimilated into Spanish society, even though they even had their own divisions in the armed forces. They eventually culturally assimilated the rest of the meso-Americans and gave us what Mexican culture is today.
Now what happened to the Maya is a tragedy. Books burnt, people enslaved and relegated to the lowest rung even today.
The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.
def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.
I don't question that what the Spanish accomplished was a massacre. I just question whether that can be attributed to Columbus himself. He did 3 trips to the Americas, none of which lasted very long:
> How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"?
The question is not whether Columbus was Jewish of not. The question is whether he was actually Spanish. As the article states, that's heavily disputed.
From the article:
> Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish.
The article leads by referring to Columbus as a son of Genoa.
Then a Spanish researcher decides to claim Columbus is Spanish on Spain's national day, supposedly based on an authoritative scientific study but in spite of not presenting any evidence that supports his claim.
The relevant bit is him being Spanish. That's what makes it appealing to the target audience of the article. Him not being catholic is not relevant and gets swept under the rug the same way the gypsy origin of flamenco (now considered spain's most popular form of folk music) get swept under the rug due to its popularity.
Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
That's a very strange way to present Spanish history.
Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity).
We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils.
Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term.
I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions.
Spain was always a confederacy of tribes! Even today!
The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).
That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!
EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.
Yup, in the North West of Spain live the "Spaniard Irish", but not everybody there is blond. Eva Longoria or Gloria Stephan descend from Asturian people and are a better example representative of Asturias women. Nobody in USA would call this women celts.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
I think you're missing the point.
OP's point was that "Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that." The truth of the matter is that it didn't, and to make matters worse even today Spain itself is comprised of regions with distinct national identities which reject the idea of being a part of the castilian-based nation.
I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians? I noticed that a lot in anglo-saxon spheres. It seems to function as an othering technique. I wonder if you are aware of you doing it. Other groups don't seem to get that kind of categorisation (just look at this thread)
Saying "catholics" instead of "Christians" is about the same as saying "Visigoths" instead of "Germanic tribes". I don't know why you would resist more precision. In the context of the times, it stands in opposition to e.g. "Eastern orthodox" (after the Great schism) or "Aryan".
> Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians
Mostly because it's a way to communicate such that the listener knows who you're talking about. Another example is calling Mormons 'Mormon' instead of Christian.
If you say 'Christian' people will think of what is likely in that geographic area the most common type of Christian, probably some form of protestant. If you say 'Catholic' the listener knows that you're talking about the group of people who follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. If you say 'Mormon', they'll also know who you mean.
It's also possible to subdivide the group referred to above as 'Christian' - you can use 'Baptist', 'Pentecostal', etc. Those are also names that aren't "Christian" for groups of Christians.
I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”
> ...
> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”
So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.
I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.
You kind of cherry-picked two paragraphs and butchered the article. The article's point is that Reconquista, with capital R, is not a good designation for the historical events that took place. It does use the term throughout the article, though, which maybe is a bit confusing. But if you read a couple paragraphs past the one you quoted, you'll see it restated that the term Reconquista is a 20th century invention. "The idea of Reconquista" is talking about the idea, specifically, not the term; the term, and mysticism surrounding it (like the originating battle that actually never took place as such), part of which is debunked also in the article, is modern propaganda.
You're ignoring what I actually said about the quotes—I read all of that and I don't care when the term originated, that's pointless pedantry. The medieval kings thought of themselves as reconquering, so reconquista is a decent word to describe what they thought they were doing, regardless of its origins.
If we're going to be pedantic, the capital-R Reconquista name for the process of the -uh- re-conquest of Spain was introduced in the 19th century. And it was used throughout Latin America in elementary schoolbooks at least in the 1980s. Franco might have wanted to do some propagandizing with the term, but it was mainly seen as a non-partisan propaganda because Catholicism was a unifying force in Hispanic cultures rather than a partisan and divisive one.
You keep saying "20th century" when the term was first popularised in the 1840s, and one scholar has traced the term back to 1795. See De la Restauración a la Reconquista: la construcción de un mito nacional (Una revisión historiográfica. Siglos XVI-XIX)https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ELEM/article/viewFile/ELEM... (PDF)
> the first time that the term "reconquista" was used to refer to the fight against the Muslims was in the work of José Ortíz y Sanz entitled Compendio cronológico de la historia de España, published after 1795. The use of the term, however, did not spread until the 1840s thanks to two new editions of Ortiz's work and the publication of the Historia general by Modesto Lafuente.
So the term did not originate in the 20th century, but it was added to the dictionary in 1936.
16th-19th century historians would have used the term "restoration". The northern kingdoms prosecuting this supposed restoration were keen to claim their legitimacy as a continuation of the entire Visigoth Kingdom, and made it their business to recapture it... even if they never held that territory.
It seems like a bit of iconoclasm to deny the Reconquista because it helps (does it?) with the Catalan claim to independence. In LatAm people don't really care about any of Spain's internal politics, and the Reconquista is simply an accepted fact of history.
The capitalization of the word might be a propagandistic act, but it might also just be an application of modern style, or just recognition that the concept requires a bit more dignity, or something.
This entire sub-thread stinks of... anti-Spanish propaganda, heh.
What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
Well.. the people doing the “reconquering” viewed themselves as [Roman] Christians first and foremost, that was the core of their cultural and political identity.
Since they considered that territories were part of the Roman-Christian Empire in the past from their perspective they were certainly taking it back.
Spain being or not being a nation at the time seems entirely irrelevant..
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe.
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back.
The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings.
There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
The point about the naming isn't very interesting. The concept existed since medieval times. In the 18th century it got termed reconquista. Later, in the 19th century it got capitalized. None of that is 20th century Francoist propaganda even if Franco did also push the concept.
In their view they did, the existence of the “Spanish nation” is tangential. From their perspective they were culturally/politically Christians and whatever exact language they happened to speak was secondary to that. So in that it was obviously a “reconquest” from the perspective of the Christians living in Iberia.
> So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Hardly more ridiculous than claiming that the fact that some common Spanish national identity didn’t exist back in the 1100s is somehow relevant.
It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition.
We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
Even when there was a nominal French kingdom, substantial "state" intervention was required to form a cohesive cultural identity, ironing out dramatic regional linguistic differences, systems of measurement, etc. Definitely a "beat it fit, paint it to match" kind of situation.
Still, it's fun to imagine that if you time-machined back to a gallic region in the ice age, you'd come across a guy who'd strike you as remarkably "French". Like, "ohhh.. this guy." HA! I would love him as dearly as all humanity. :D
We've been spoiled, walking over the puddle isn't particularly interesting anymore :)
But in all seriousness, things like electricity or the atom are more interesting discoveries than a guy misjudging the size of the Earth and being lucky enough to not die halfway through his voyage paid for by two monarchs who just so happened to be looking for new enterprises to invest in.
Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation.
We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.
This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago
GP quite literally acknowledged the injustices that happened in the sentence before the one you quoted.
Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years.
Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), then I think you'll find it hard to discuss almost any historical events because cruelty has existed everywhere. This isn't whataboutism btw, my point is that sensitivity should not be a primary concern in a rational discussion about history because history is harsh subject.
You don't acknowledge continent-scale cultural and human destruction by calling it "injustice" or "inevitable awful consequence". Do you imagine someone saying that about the current situation in Crimea? Millions of people died. It is not just an "injustice". An injustice is a state official forging evidence for nefarious purposes not destroying a country and unaliving its people let alone a whole continent. It really downplays the role of the invaders even more than it already is.
Who exactly was brought together? The natives were virtually or/and culturally wiped out (in case you didn't notice) and the consequences can still be seen today. When you look at the US today, do you see two groups together? How so, when the actual natives have virtually no land have been systemically attacked since their world was destroyed.
Thinking about it in positive terms is no different than doing the same with the situation in Crimea or with any of the world wars.
It is fine to discuss stuff but the idea of bringing two groups together when one of them has been virtually wiped out speaks of severe cognitive dissonance.
There is no whataboutism here because no other continent has experienced what the American continent has. There is no equivalent in written history for the scale of suffering and destruction unleashed upon it.
And you having a problem with me criticising the vast destruction (rather than a generic injustice) of a continent by saying that cruelty exists together (tell me what other continent in the last 2 thousand years got culturally destroyed and had millions of deaths as a result of foreign invaders) says a lot about your opinion about the deaths of tens millions of people (at the very least) the descendants of which still suffer all sorts of challenges. Including the continuous dismissal of the scale of their suffering by people like you ever since the invasions began.
First off, it is factually correct to say 1) Columbus' expeditions connected (for better or worse) groups of people that never had had contact before and 2) the Native Americans specifically killed by disease (which was roughly 80 to 90% of the population) was an inevitable result of travel and trade with the Americas.
You can use whatever moralizing language or comparisons to modern day conflicts you want to analyze these events because that's not what I took issue with. As I stated before, my problem with your comment was that you wrongly tried to label a descriptive statement about history as "culturally insensitive".
Permanent contact between the Americas and Eurasia was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Europeans coming here, it could have been the Chinese.
Whether it was a Columbus or a Chan, the introduction of diseases which the Eurasians had been swimming in for eons would have still slammed into the Americas like an apocalypse.
Even if you gave it another 300 years (after vaccines were invented) there’s no way a distribution strategy could have effectively blunted the impact. You’d need to give an additional 200 years for that to be conceivable. The odds of the Americas staying isolated for another 500 years after Columbus are nil.
My comment has nothing to do with the cultural expressions of the various groups at that moment in time. A group of Homo sapiens were cut off from the rest for tens of thousands of years for better and worse. The ‘worse’ part is that they were ferociously vulnerable to the viruses in the other population group.
“Brought together” wasn’t a phrase meant to convey happiness or agreement, it was a very literal description of two groups making permanent contact after being separated for so long. There’s not an event like that in memorable history to compare it to, as far as I know. Certainly not at that scale of isolation.
What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict?
There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?).
Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic.
I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.
technical who-is-a-Jew type question, which is thoroughly intertwingled with European history: the Jewish diaspora were only the diaspora after they were kicked out of Israel by the Romans (in something like 70AD), and even then, only after they maintained their identity in the diaspora (c.f. the majority of other conquered peoples who did not maintain an independent identity)
Before that they were just the Jews, which was more of a nationality than anything else (a nationality that had a covenant with their God, but many nationalities at that time had such).
"Sephardic Jew" is a term most used to describe Jews who were kicked out of the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and Reconquista. The Iberian peninsula had had a thorough conquering by Muslims until the euro-christian reconquering, the Reconquista, wherein the last of the Muslims were kicked out, and then the Jews too for good measure, which kicking out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Other diaspora Jews lived in Muslim lands and are known as Mizrahi Jews (Mizrahi being some form of the word for Egypt which is also the word for East iirc)
Was there some distinction (theological or genetic) between Miszrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews before they were driven out of Spain?
And Columbus was born in Genoa (his house is still there) and so, was he one of these types of Jews or are the different typenames just what we call them today?
A little etymological sidenote: Sephardic is just the Hebrew word for Spain, whereas Ashkenaz was one of the great grandsons of Noah associated with eastern and central Europe.
However, when you see a Jew with the last name Ashkenazi, it's safe to assume they're Sephardi. Why? Because last names for Jews are a more recent historical development and these Jews immigrated to Sephardic territory hundreds of years ago (before the expulsion talked about in this thread) and have fully assimilated into the Sephardic tradition.
> A little etymological sidenote: Sephardic is just the Hebrew word for Spain, whereas Ashkenaz was one of the great grandsons of Noah associated with eastern and central Europe.
Sephardic comes from the name of the land of Sephard. You are correct that in modern Hebrew this name refers to Spain, however it should be noted that Biblical use of the word did not refer to Spain or the Iberian peninsula. It is a modern (in the Jewish sense, e.g. hundreds of years) idea that the word refers to that area - nobody today knows where the area is that the Bible referred to with that name.
Ashkenaz, the descendant of Noah, was from present-day-Syria. Thus the term Ashkenazi literally means "From the area of present-day Syria" or more concisely "From the Levant".
> However, when you see a Jew with the last name Ashkenazi, it's safe to assume they're Sephardi. Why? Because last names for Jews are a more recent historical development and these Jews immigrated to Sephardic territory hundreds of years ago (before the expulsion talked about in this thread) and have fully assimilated into the Sephardic tradition.
Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.
>Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.
It's thought these people were part of the expulsions. Gabbi Ashkenazi, the former IDF chief's father was Bulgarian-- Bulgaria, of course, being Ottoman territory and right next-door to Thessaloniki, a Jewish hotspot of the time would match this model well
> out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Which is notable why exactly? Surely both Columbus and his investors were hoping to return.
Who would give all that money to a descendant of Jewish converts let alone someone who might have been affected by the expulsion decree directly?
Columbus might have had Jewish ancestors a few generations back but I don’t think we can conclude anything else based on these findings. Especially not that he or his parents were actually practicing Jews.
Jewish diaspora existed way before the fall of Jerusalem. Before Jewish-Roman wars, 10% of Roman Empire was Jewish, about 8 million with only 2 million living in Judea.
1 million Jews lived in Persia (probably the ones that stayed when Babylonian captivity ended, since only 50,000 came back with Zerubbabel to build the second temple)
Spain still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous sailors were a portuguese and a genovese. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the magellan voyage as the "magellan-elcano expedition ".
OTOH there's well known and documented anti-Spanish propaganda during the centuries by basically the rest of Europe (Protestants specifically), so I start to doubt claims from both sides (disclaimer: I'm Spaniard):
The English and Elizabeth projected their crimes onto Spain.
Proof is in the pudding where is the percentage of natives highest? Where Spaniards colonized (Mexico, Bolivia, Peru)? Or the Brits (Virginia, Connecticut, all of Canada except Quebec)?
Spanish empire caused a huge impact in the American continent but even so, the focus on seizing wealth and lands competed with the fact that the Spanish doctrine wanted to extend the Christendom. However anglo-saxos have established a more clear separation between colonizers and native population. I would compare what you mention about Mexico and Bolivia with how the decline of the native population in California accelerated after the independence of Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Native_Californi...
Oh I don't dispute that. Despite the documented atrocities, the number of.native deaths by disease are greatly exaggerated, Charles V did write the precursor document of the human rights bill (after getting wind of what went about in Peru), and the Spaniards did promote marriages with natives. Studies of racial superiority the kind of which were prevalent at the end of the 19th century didn't come from Spain either.
History is not a black and white frame that we should either be proud or disgusted about. The fact that the Spanish state promotes such historical wash-ups says more about its current leaders.
FWIW the columbus expedition was considered a great failure at the time. He did fail to reach the indies by the west, and the couple of "indians" he brought to court was little compensation for the lack of lucrative spices. Reaching Lisbon first on the way back was also a disaster, prompting an immediate ultimatum by the portuguese by violation of a treaty, which led ultimately to the tordesilhas treaty which left the kingdom of castille and aragon out of the spice trade. He felt the failure so personally that he sailed back 4 times looking for a passage to the great sea beyond the new world, failing every time and becoming so embittered in the process, that he eventually lost his allies in court. It was only 40 years and lots of failed settlements after the columbus expedition that Spain hit proverbial jackpot and found the gold and silver which made the nation extremely wealthy in Europe, for a time. By then, the new world already had a new name: the Americas. The greatest of the hostorical humiliations, named after an ordinary italian cartographer, rather than the legendary captain which reached it in the first place.
Enshrining him as Spaniard will be of little consolation for his name.
"The United States still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous entrepreneurs were a south african and a scottish. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the musk voyage as the "musk-bezos expedition ".
We are ok with that, really, there is always people who give more importance to this kind of things, but for the vast majority, whatever the results, they would be cool.
Also, italians and portuguese are close friends and cultural brothers and sisters to us.
Nah the new wave of ancient DNA analysis since 2010 has been a game changer. Especially with euroasian history. It showed us how populations migrated and how and when admixture formed. Including identifying the yamnaya admixture in modern populations
If they actually have Columbus’s DNA intact with a good SNP resolution, it will be trivial to find out what % of jewish he is in his autosomal DNA. They can and should release it publicly as part of their paper as well. So people can confirm their hypothesis
.. except that there isn't really a thing such as Jewish DNA. Other than that, yes we're mostly all a mixture of people travelling and migrating and settling down and moving, and they came from all over over the centuries and millennia.
I'm extremely skeptical. A family member studied Columbus's diaries back in grad school and has long suspected he was a Converso, but this is clearly the worst kind of sensationalist journalism.
And we already know for a fact that other members of the expedition were Conversos and they were partially motivated by their desire to get out from under the thumb of the Spanish Crown. Academics have long examined the confluence of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the Columbian Exchange, and Columbus's heritage doesn't really change any of it.
The Spanish inquisition began in the 1470s so it makes sense he would hide his ethnicity.
What's really interesting however, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492, was when the Ottoman Empire accepted 60,000 Jewish refugees from Spain.
Columbus must not have been very religious. It would've probably been a much smarter decision, in terms of self preservation, to move to the Ottoman Empire.
If anything this is just proof that reading too deeply, and especially solely, into anyone’s DNA history is a mistake. Plenty of people have a background unrelated to their lives or the way they perceive themselves.
Agreed that it's important not to read too much into this about Columbus as a person, but if this is true there are plenty of interesting things to draw from it. It would suggest that he probably came from a family that converted to Catholicism (given the time period, probably under duress).
Had his ancestors made a different choice Columbus himself may have been expelled from Spain shortly before he sailed on August 3.
He and his son would have faced severe discrimination, wouldn’t even be allowed to hold public office and technically his descendants wouldn’t even emigrate to the Americans had it been publicly known that he was a descendant of Jewish converts (regardless of his religious views).
Surely that’s something the Spanish Crown would have used in the courtroom, considering that his descendants were engaged in a ~20 year lawsuit against the crown (which they won)?
That's assuming he even knew he was ethnically Jewish. His strong Catholicism and choosing not to immigrate to the Ottoman empire indicates this family history was probably withheld from him.
Possibly as a way to conceal his background? Of course that’s pure speculation and it wasn’t as bad yet until later in the the 1500s but Spain became an extremely racist society, people who couldn’t prove that they weren’t descendants of Jewish or Muslim converts were often barred from holding political office or even testify in court etc.
> r, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492,
How could that be related in any way? Presumably his investors did hope he would return and be allowed to enter the country?
> Columbus must not have been very religious
He was. As far as we can tell he was a very devout Catholic. Even if he had some Jewish origin (e.g. his grand/great grandparents were converts) that must have been a closely concealed secret and certainly not something that was publicly known.
Another indication that Columbus was part of the Jewish community is that the Jewish financiers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez advanced interest-free loans to finance the journey.
You are not logic-ing correctly. The financiers were Jewish. Jews do not charge interest to other Jews; if Columbus were not Jewish they would have charged interest. This is written in Deuteronomy 23:20-21 as well as Leviticus and Exodus and also discussed by Maimonides
Yes. There are many Jewish lending organizations designed around the principle that loaning money to establish a new business is the highest form of charity (see Maimonides 8 levels of giving). For example, there is a 127-year-old organization based in San Francisco that offers loans up to $50,000. The expectation is once someone establishes themselves they will contribute back to the lending organization. The workaround to halachic rules of interest that is applied in Israeli banking is equity co-ownership where the lender is paid back for their ownership shares at an established interest rate; the term for this is called “heter iska.”
This article is also from before the release of any test results:
“Normally, you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the piece and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it’s scientifically valid or not. If it is, it gets published and so the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree with it or not.
Interesting that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree to kick the Jews out ot Spain shortly after Christopher Columbus, a Sephardic Jew, reached the Americas.
This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
> This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
To be fair, it was also after they aided the initial Muslim conquest of Spain and assisted the new Muslim rulers in subjugating the native Christian population.
Your history seems wrong. The Alhambra Decree was issued on 31 March 1492. Columbus sealed his deal in April 1492, and started the first(!) expedition on 3 August 1492. And it seems he only reached the continent of America itself on his fourth expedition.
The purpose was to convert most of population to christianity to achieve cultural unity, and the ones who wouldn't convert had to leave. Usually it is explained only as an expulsion of the jews.
P.D: there are many theories around Gibraltar, specially since it was during succession war and the country was in a civil war.
Makes sense. Now that the Graun's chief enemy is Israel and Colonialism, why not combine two favored targets into one hateful guy? I'm also pretty sure he was cis-gendered.
> acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth
Nit pick.
I don't know it for sure, but if he was able to meet a king and a queen eventually, I assume he came from a wealthy family.
For wealthy families at that time, it wouldn't be an issue to travel. Especially if you turn out to be the most known traveler in human's history.
Thus, I fail to see how come we can even think of establishing the place of birth based on DNA. A likely area where his family came from - sure. But POB?
Agreed that his ethnicity is a silly topic to be discussed, but calling Christopher Columbus a "slightly" relevant guy definitely feels like a stretch.
He was a small gear in a long chain of events. If not Columbus, someone else would likely have found the New World. It was the age of (Europeans) Discovery after all, where many people were sailing the world and finding new routes and lands.
Sure. This is just Great Man theory [1] in action. It's a bit absurd, once you know about it you see it everywhere.
It's especially distasteful when it's about people who 'discovered' places, because the next step was usually the subjugation or genocide of the people already living in the discovered place. But we still celebrate the explorers as heroes.
idk. USA people seem to be the only ones obsessed with him sometimes to a point as treating him as a hero from their history
also people often treat it as the beloved kind of "small person who know better even through everyone told them they where wrong and succeeded by not giving up" story
but the funny thing is the more you learn about him the more you might realize how wrong all of this is
firstly he hadn't had success because he knew better (and people didn't believe him) he had success because he insisted that his absurdly wrong calculations where correct and then had a absurd amount of luck. (In educated circles of that time not only was it well know that earth was a globe, it rough size was also known. The reason he believed he could sail to India was because he insisted that earth was _way_ smaller then it actual is (and also was believed to be in general back then). It's just people (including him!) through there was no additional landmass between the west of Portugal and ~east India. Consider sailing that route on a world where America is just more water... pretty much not viable with the tech of that time).
Secondly if anything he was a villain, to a point even the Spanish Inquisition called him out for his bad behavior against native Americans...
So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.
He is important because he changed the power dynamics of the old world.
And as a result created probably the most powerful country in the world.
I'm not American, and not from colonial power country, but it was significant.
The lionization of Columbus was started by late 19th century Italian immigrants who wanted something to demonstrate their worth to an America that looked down on them. It is somewhat relevant if he wasn't actually Italian.
It hardly matters anymore. Probably at least half of all Americans live in a state or city that celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day. Italians have secured their place in society.
> So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.
I mean that version of the story is pretty interesting too, right?
One can see a lot of parallels between startup culture, really. You start off with a dumb idea, you pitch it over and over for years till you find a sucker, you get funding because of nepotism / connections, your dumb idea fails but you stumble across something that works on the way, then you move fast and break things (like... the entire indigenous population).
I suspect that a lot of the recent dirt about Columbus comes from documents involving his (and his decedents) court case to assert ownership of the New World. In particular, I suspect that the most damning accusations come from briefs filed by opposing counsel:
"In 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a lengthy series of court cases against the Castilian crown, known as the pleitos colombinos, alleging that the Crown had illegally reneged on its contractual obligations to Columbus and his heirs.[93] The Columbus family had some success in their first litigation, as a judgment of 1511 confirmed Diego's position as viceroy but reduced his powers. Diego resumed litigation in 1512, which lasted until 1536, and further disputes initiated by heirs continued until 1790." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
280 years of legal battle is going to be a treasure trove of dirt, if you want to find it.
As for "why now" and "why does it matter what his heritage is" I think it has everything to do with the cultural milieu. Modern white liberals hate their heritage which they characterize as ancestors of colonizers, slave owners, and exploiters. If Columbus was Jewish this gives left-wing anti-Semites extra ammunition against Jews. It aligns the deep hatred for colonizers with deep hatred for Israel for its actions in it's war with Hamas.
But it is always legitimate to wonder about where the culture's attention is cast, and why. The present always holds great sway on how we perceive the past. Consider the example of Karl Marx, who's ideology fed his historical narrative, and vice-versa. I don't think it's coincidence that we never heard of Columbus' villainy prior to ~2005 and we never heard of his Jewishness until 2024.
Well everybody in all of history is a villain by contemporary standards.
For example people are now considered villains for thinking biological men shouldnt be allowed in women's change rooms.
Historians like to say the past is a different country. Judging historical events by todays standards makes about as much sense to me as discovering life on Mars and judging their behaviour by our own standards.
For me, its just a way of signalling virtue that assigns zero cost on the signaller. It's historical so you dont have to do anything (it doesnt cost you time or money) and the people being judged arent here to defend themselves or provide any nuance. Its lazy and cheap.
> The evidence of Columbus's origins in Genoa is overwhelming: almost no other figure of his class or designation has left so clear a paper trail in the archives.
My jewish sephardic family was compelled by country's authorities to finance the expedition only to have been expelled (with the whole community) right when he embarked, and of course never saw any of the money back. I really doubt that he had any relation to the community at all. He was just an instrument of robbing it.
That's quite a connection. Then again, the ultimate result of that effort was that the Jewish diaspora (as a whole), a fair chunk of it anyway, ended up securing places to settle in North America, infinitely safer than Europe would prove to be centuries hence. So there's that.
BTW I finally followed up in regard to that guy with the beard, if it's still of interest:
A couple of years ago I made a bot to notify me about HN comment replies, but it's kind of abandoned now. I probably should get it up and running again, checking this manually is such a hassle
Well, just the best fit for being presented in the Spanish national day but, it's more complicated than that...of course. What was presented was not science.
I thought sephardim scattered into a lot of places, including elsewhere in Europe (even places like Amsterdam) and North Africa. Not to mention conversos that stayed put.
I say "even" because the stereotype is Southern Europe, Turkey, or North Africa. The further north you go in Europe, the more Jewish and Ashkenazi identities get merged and blurred in people's minds. So the history of sephardim in Netherlands goes against the stereotypes.
I'd find it hard to believe all the cities in Spain decided to expel the Jewish people all on the same day. The inquisition began decades earlier so there probably were indications something bad was going to happen
They're probably referring to the Alhambra Decree [0], which did expel all Jews by a set date. That date was the end of July, and Columbus sailed on 3 August, so it's very close but not quite the same date.
...I'm a little suspicious. Spain, Portugal, and Italy have been fighting fiercely to claim cultural credit for Columbus for my whole life (hundreds of years, even?) and some of the quotes in this article display some bias on the sides of the researchers. It's possibly a result of me using Firefox autotranslate out of laziness, but:
The theory of the Colombo Cristóforo, born in Genoa, raised in Genoa, educated in Genoa, is false because all the very important historians of Italy have written black on white that it is impossible for this our Colombo to be Jewish. There is a total incompatibility...
But then,
between 10,000 and 15,000 [Jewish people lived in] the Italian peninsula [at the time].
Obviously it's an interesting point, but the certainty of the first statement set off alarm bells for me. Especially because they're placing his origin in Aragon, specifically; the Spanish are very nationalist, but the Catalonians are even more nationalist as a way to fight back. Very, very far from damning, but certainly makes these surprising claims a little suspicious.
It's pointed out that although the professor that did this DNA study is indeed an academic[1] specializing in the relevant field--which cannot be said of the main proponent, who appears to be a super biased enthusiast [2][3][4]--he hasn't actually published any of these findings yet, instead choosing to announce them via his own "thriller" TV show. Right off the bat, that's the absolute opposite of what a typical scientist would do with absurdly controversial findings -- and apparently this is the same pattern he's followed since 2005 on this topic, publishing no data of any kind in actual journals, just "announcing" various findings.
He does say "The scientific results, he says, will be presented at a press conference probably at the end of November", but... that's sus af, as the kids say.
Beyond that, the DNA analysis itself seems to be in doubt:
After the 2003 exhumation, no DNA could be extracted from the bones, Bottle says. The anthropologist says he stopped collaborating with the research team after those first analyses and has not wanted to participate anymore.
Carracedo recalls that the DNA that came to him was tremendously degraded and later disassociated from the project. He says he won't give his opinion on Lorente's new results until there is a serious scientific study published in a specialized journal.
The most damning evidence is non-circumstancial/character-based, of course, and it's what originally had me scratching my head in doubt:
In any case, possessing a gene, haplogroup, or haplotype associated with Jewish or Sephardic ancestry does not challenge the historical sources that support Columbus' birthplace in Genoa. Furthermore, it provides no information about the religious beliefs held by Columbus' close relatives (parents, grandparents, etc.), the researcher emphasizes... there is no Y chromosome that can be defined exclusively as Jewish-sephary, Chambers argues. Even if the total DNA of an individual was recovered, it would still be impossible to reach definitive conclusions about its exact geographical origin.
In other words: that's not really how genetics works...
Thanks for sharing OP, this was a fascinating little dive. I, for one, will stick with the consensus view that this idiotic monster of a person was from Italy, until this researcher publishes some peer-reviewed results!
It's sad because 1) this sort of nationalistic chest-thumping is stuff we should have overcome, after WWII, and 2) why is it so hard to accept that an Italian navigator with a Greek surname and (maybe) Middle-Eastern blood, used Spanish money and skills to reach the edge of the known world? If anything, it should be cause for celebrating how the joint efforts of Mediterranean societies changed history forever.
As I get older, I am more and more convinced that us "Meds" are our own worst enemy.
The fact that he was Italian and Catholic is beyond dispute.
The possibility that he might have had some Jewish blood, doesn't really change anything except for the most tribal-inclined people (who typically make for terrible historians anyway). Hell, the Mediterranean had been a big melting pot for almost 2000 years at that point, practically anyone would have had some Jewish blood, some Greek blood, some Italian blood, some Spanish blood, some North-African blood...
Oh brother. I’m sure most of the European world has some Jewish descendants somewhere in there blood line. Hell, even Hilter did! Why is that a big deal? As if having some Jewish descendant makes everything you ever did a Jewish accomplishment.
I don’t think anyone besides a few Spanish and Italian ultranationalists are interested in claiming Columbus’s “accomplishments.” Any evidence of Columbus being Jewish is mostly interesting for anthropological and historical reasons, not chest-beating ones.
> Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula
Wait, so the name „ghetto“ wasn’t contrived there?
Snark aside, is there any proof or qualification delivered with that quite important yet ambiguous side node, that there supposedly wasn’t any significant jewish presence in Italy?
Depends on how you define a “big population,” no? Prior to 1492 a lot of Jews had been driven out of Italy, and the remaining communities were quite small.
Italian city states took in a lot of Jewish refugees from Spain after the 1492 expulsion. The first ghetto was in 1516. But that doesn’t line up with Columbus’ chronology.
This certainly smells like a History Channel "documentary" to me! Right up there with Ancient Aliens and the like.
- Analysis that is not shared to review
- Data that is not shared for review
- Broad assumptions that are quickly narrowed down to "facts"
- There is "more evidence but we can't show you because.... reasons"
Besides the idea that DNA can show from 500 years away that a person came from one or another side of a modern border is just not understanding how any of this works.
And the fact that this pseudo-science was broadcasted on national television is a disgrace for Spain and embarrassing for the Spaniards quoted in the article who are trying to do actual science.
Columbus was famously a devout catholic; his DNA suggests that he was of Sephardic Jewish descent, most likely from a family that underwent a forced conversion.
I already posted below, but since you probably won't scroll down and I hate to see people get tricked: I would take this article with a massive grain of salt. Not "definitely wrong", but perhaps "of very dubious origin, making unusually strong claims based on unpublished, inconsistently-described evidence". For context, the "Columbus was Jewish" assertion is part of a broader "Columbus was secretly Spanish/Catalonian" fight they've been having for a while (which isn't surprising given the region's generally positive recollection of their "glory days" of genocide and slavery), as it's supposed to preclude him from being Italian.
Besides that, as an American who spent a semester in Spain and took a class focused on religious diversity specifically on the peninsula: your analysis is definitely possible, but there was also plenty of Jewish people practicing in secret throughout the reconquista. Thus the inquisition, even! The Reconquista took hundreds of years and saw multiple waves of anti-Jewish laws throughout the various Christian kingdoms, from taxes to restrictions to the famous expulsions, so there was plenty of precedent to learn from.
I'd be curious to hear from any actual experts on how the Spanish viewed national origin, and whether that played a significant role in religious persecution. AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), which makes me even more dubious that Columbus would choose to repeatedly claim to be from Italy just to hide his Jewish ancestry. He was 100% verifiably a practicing Catholic, isn't that all that should have mattered to his peers? But I'm walking pretty blind here.
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones),
While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsion of 1609 (which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for the past ~100 years).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre
In some cases it was pretty extreme and not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the US (and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t that dissimilar either).
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating into the American Colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as bad yet in the 1490s but had Columbus Jewish origin (assume that’s actually true) been know he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or even attracting investment for his expeditions.
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I see what you're saying. I tried feeding this into ChatGPT and it seems like better use of commas would make all the difference.
"While that may have been true in the 1400s, when ex-Jewish Conversos sometimes held significant economic and even political power, by the 1500s things had changed. Antisemitism (and the same applied to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race rather than just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated against, culminating in the expulsion of 1609, which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for about 100 years.
In some cases, the discrimination was pretty extreme, not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the U.S., and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t too different either.
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating to the American colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as severe in the 1490s, but if Columbus’s Jewish origins (assuming they were true) had been known, he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or attracting investment for his expeditions.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre."
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There are quite a few famous converts from Judaism to Christianity. And it's not quite clear-cut, and sometimes has "strange" side-effects.
Take, for instance, Cantor (the father of the set theory), who was a second generation convert, if memory serves. Even though he was a devote Christian, he had some ties to Judaism (eg. choosing Hebrew letters for the infinite sets he worked with). And, in general he was somewhat insane, and religion played a central role in his insanity, where both Christianity and Judaism had some degree of influence.
Me, coming from a family of converts, who later became atheists, I can attest to that neither me, nor my parents ever cared for organized religion or for following tradition. But, some things remained through generation regardless. I never learned enough Hebrew to read Bible comfortably (i.e. I need to look up words in a dictionary sometimes), but I almost teared up when I watched a collection of recordings someone made of people from different national / linguistic backgrounds reading Hebrew Bible, because at that point I realized that even though imperfectly, I'm able to understand someone writing many thousands years ago. The ability to connect over centuries to your ancestors, to get even an approximate idea of what they thought and how they felt -- this is something that's very unlikely to go away with conversion or a change of one's affiliation. This is also probably the reason you find quite a few people with vague Jewish ancestry still coming to Israel. Also, there's a "weird" trend of people wanting to be berried in Israel (because of how important that specific place is in Jewish tradition), even if in life they are nothing like religious Jews.
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Bottom line: It's just a weird question. It's like trying to calculate the percentage by which any convert has converted. Maybe, even if Columbus' parents were converts, it's still not a question anyone can answer: how much Catholic was he?
There are indications he may have been raised Jewish, and later converted to Catholicism. Or, converted but still close to Judaism.
His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
Further, It's also known that the family profession was weaving, a traditionally Jewish profession at the time and that Jewish given names like Abraham and Jacob were common in the family of Columbus' mother.
One of the hypothesis from the dna analysis says:
> hypothesis proposes that Columbus was a Jew from the Mediterranean port city of Valencia. His obscure early life, according to this theory, can be explained by the fact that he sought to hide his Jewish background to avoid persecution by the fervently Catholic Spanish monarchs.
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet.
This is one of the least compelling pieces of evidence: one doesn’t set out for a cross-oceanic voyage on a whim. He had sponsorship from the Spanish crown and lobbied and prepared for years for the journey. His journey was formally sanctioned by the the royal family in April of the year he left.
Conversos and Moriscos were overrepresented among the early Spanish settlers [0].
Same story in Portuguese territories as well.
An exodus of Sephardim and Muslims was a win-win for the Spanish crown - they'd lose (in their eyes) a potential 5th column in their competition against the Ottoman Empire as well as have manpower to nominally stake their claim in the New World.
[0] - https://www.jewishideas.org/article/between-toleration-and-p...
At the time, the Spanish were completely unaware that Columbus would find a land that could be settled. The goal of the expedition was finding a route to East Asia to establish trade with those known-to-be-inhabited areas. Colonization was a pivot after Columbus did not find Asia.
Also colonization didn't start in earnest until several decades later. For a generation or two the exploitation of the Americas was largely extractive.
> the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain
This came up in another part of the thread, but it wasn't the exact date—the decree gave Jews until the end of July [0], while August 3 (not second) is the date he sailed.
It's still close enough that it may have been related, but it's not the slam dunk that "the exact date" makes it sound like it is.
[0] https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/pjhr/chhre/pdf/hh-alhambr...
Why would anyone ever think that it could have been anything but a coincidence?
Who would have sponsored his expedition knowing that Columbus would be legally banned from entering the country if he was successful? That just seems silly…
I think the argument goes that Columbus was a closet Jew who scheduled the expedition with symbolic meaning that only he would know.
It's definitely a Dan Brown plot, but it's not entirely inconceivable.
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492,
He could have just moved to Italy or the Low Countries?
> does suggest he may have not converted yet.
And he did while he was in the Americas? Why would the Castilian crown sponsor an expedition led by a known Jew and even make him governor of the newly discovered territories (note that in a few decades even converted descendants of Jews or Muslims were banned from emigrating to the new world after a few decades)
He set sail August 3rd, not August 2nd.
> “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.”
Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece?
Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing? Is it not possible that many many people in Genoa could have had Jewish ancestors? After all, most of Jesus's disciples were Jewish (please correct me if I'm wrong).
There’s also the phrasing “compatible with Jewish origin”. That doesn’t mean that he definitively has Jewish DNA either, especially given that there are no specifically Jewish haplogroups. This whole thing seems very premature until autosomal analysis is performed.
All of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish.
And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
> And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J-M267
Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed?
Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.
Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.
Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?
> Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?
I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.
I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.
You seem very unaware of how the Jewish tribe works. Genetics and family line tracing are very much a core concept.
I'm aware of family line tracing for establishing tribal identity. It's not something unique to Judaism.
DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).
But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.
What is your claim exactly? It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered. I can’t imagine you actually think that, so I’m at a loss for what your point might be.
Even if Abraham _did_ exist, at this point in time it's like trying to distinguish a drop of water from the ocean it's now living in. That's how little would have remained of Abraham's DNA so much later.
If this were true, genetic testing wouldn’t be able to identify folks as Ashkanazi Jewish, for instance. But it can. And many phenotypes do the same.
There is no common ancestor. Abraham is a mythological character.
If you personally are a direct descendant of Abraham, or any other specific individual who lived approximately 3000 years ago, statistically you do not carry any DNA from that ancestor. While there are some nuances relating to differences in how the different sexes pass on their genes, as a rough approximation you carry half the base pairs of each of your parents, who each carry roughly half from their parents, and so on. So you carry 1/2^n base pairs from an individual n generations before you. The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, meaning in 31 generations the odds of having a single base pair from a specific ancestor is about 50%. 3000 years is about 120 generations, so your odds of having a basepair from a specific ancestor that far back are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The only exceptions that matter on that timescale are the y-chromosome along the male-only line descent and the mitochondrial DNA along the female-only line of descent.
So by that logic nobody has any DNA in common with neanderthals, right? Try again. You’re missing a big, big, gotcha.
No one has any DNA that can be traced to a specific Neanderthal, no.
Of course people have DNA in common with their ancestors as a group, hell we share a lot in common with fish. But it's because these genes are common that they enter and re-enter your family tree at multiple points.
And your mitochondrial DNA definitely doesn't descend from Abraham, a male incapable of passing on mitochondrial DNA, so there's a reason I gloss over female line descent.
Your pseudoscience above would make it seem nobody has any DNA from any ancestors at all, as there were not your 10^Whatever creatures ever in existence. Once you figure out the bug in your logic there, you will perhaps see the failure of the rest of your argument. Hint: inbreeding.
Aside, Jewish line is determined by matrilineal descent. By your own logic the mitochondrial DNA is shared, which is a rather significant aspect to simply gloss over.
Are you literally saying they all share a single ancestor? Because that is unlikely to be true
It is indefensible to make arguments of likelihoods without and understanding of context and priors. If I listed 1,000 people from around the world at random and claimed we all had a shared great^N grandfather (with N not so large at to be trivially true), I’d need some rather significant proof to back up at that claim, and barring that we could say it was unlikely to be true.
If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.
This case is much closer to the latter than the former.
Is it? I'd imagine they all share many common ancestors, but that those common ancestors are probably shared by many others as well so it's not very unique.
30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.
Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
According to Jewish law, it is, in the case of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, the child is not a Jew.
According to Jewish law, almost anyone can convert to Judaism.
It is really not an easy or straightforward process. Of the major world religions, it’s probably the hardest to convert into.
Being born into it is the most common and ‘supported’ way.
Converting to Judaism can be easier than many people assume, sometimes even simpler than earning a high school degree. It's important to note that Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, meaning it doesn't actively seek to convert others. Instead, conversion is a deeply personal choice, and those who pursue it are welcomed after a meaningful process.
Judaism is actually one of the major world religions, though it's much smaller in terms of population compared to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism [1]. Despite its smaller numbers, it has had a significant influence on Western culture, ethics, and religious thought, particularly as the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups
Islam requires reciting a short sentence with conviction.[https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~msa/tour/ch3-6.htm].
Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process.
Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as you don’t believe you are something else, you are Hindu. Notably, caste can be tricky. There might also be a form you should fill out.[https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/407/is-it-true-...]
Buddhism, you join the Sangha (show up), or follow teachings. There is no test or anything. Many Buddhists don’t directly do those things, and I’ve never heard anything say they ‘weren’t Buddhist’. Maybe a terrible Buddhist, but what else is new?
By those standards, is not Judaism the toughest and most difficult? Personally, I’d take it as a point of pride.
> depending on who you ask
> Generally not an arduous process.
Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.
Oh and accepting Him as your Lord, not savior. Lord is the predicate, Savior is the consequence.
Do you have his number? Everyone I call tries to tell me I’m crazy in Spanish.
Fortunately, He took the time to document His work prior to leaving the company.
Not to take from your earlier point, but the evangelisms were not written by him. His teaching was oral and experiential, not written.
Yes. Still, His work is documented.
Like Siddhartha Gautama, and Muhammad, not by themselves however.
Religion is a very sensitive topic. Full stop.
There is not such thing as "Jewish" DNA. Is a culture and religion, but not a fully different race. Some genes could be in the past more represented, but it was just "Mediterranean dotation". A mix of European, African and Asian. Today is much more mixed fortunately.
If you can't prove family connection with paperwork, you can emigrate to Israel by means of DNA test which proves to the government that you are Jewish.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034383/
Couldn't find a page on the government website, but I remember reading about it there in the not too distant past.
That doesn't seem to be quite how it works; apparently the DNA test by itself is not sufficient, and one does need some form of paperwork. Per an explanation by a private law office:
https://lawoffice.org.il/en/israeli-citizenship-dna-test/What would you call that genetic information which was passed down from Israel to his twelve children’s tribes?
I would call it barely distinguishable from the genetic information from their close neighbors. Now compare it with DNA from native Australians for example and you will find a much different picture.
Having in mind that we share a majority of our genes with other mammals, and almost all with chimps, so the range of allowed variation among people is in itself small.
The idea being that since you believe it is “barely distinguishable”, it actually does not exist? Odd argument.
To exists is one thing. To be biologically relevant to deserve a new entire category is another very different.
To start, this genes aren't exclusive from the group. And it is not a monofiletic group anymore, because is a religious one and anybody can join it. So from a "taxonomic" point of view is not what we would call a "natural group", speaking genetically.
Is not different than claiming that there is a "Christian DNA". Biologically it does not have any sense.
This argument is very detached from reality. The Jewish tribe is defined as being descended from Israel, with folks independently joining as a rather rare corner case. On the other hand, Christians are defined to be those people who have heard the gospel and chosen to accept Jesus as their Lord.
It’s as if you said my family didn’t share DNA with me because an adoption or two had occurred over the centuries. It’s a bizarre argument that keeps coming up here, I don’t know what the real underlying root of it is.
pvaldes is saying that biologically/genetically, the difference is irrelevant. And it is because we're >99% identical.
https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/15-ways/human-genomic-variati...
If he were to be saying that, he’d be terribly misinformed. Slight specific genetic changes can have absolutely massive impacts, hand waving “ninety nine percent of us is a banana!”-type speak is brain-dead.
I’ll let him speak for himself.
Nobody questions that the impact of those changes can be large. That still does not take away from the fact that the genetic makeup of humans is by and large nearly identical. My neighbour is still an homo sapiens and genetically near-identical to me even though he's Chinese and I am not. Whether he considers himself a descendant of the emperor Qin and, for that reason, deserves to be in a socially distinct category, is entirely a different matter.
You are wrong on this point. Genetically, Jews are as distinct as any other race (and the world's obsession with Jews mean that you can find plenty of studies on Jewish genetics). Jews take DNA tests and get marked as "Ashekanzi Jewish" (or other Jewish type) on tests like 23andme.
David Cross has a funny [bit][1] about whether the reverse is true.
[1]: https://youtu.be/z09So1j4kpk?t=378
Is he not aware of the concept of ethnicity? Native Americans, Romani, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, and Sikhs tie religion and ethnicity.
His is a very American perspective.
Also, a comedian spinning his experience into material.
I like his work, but his bits on religion and Jewish identity in particular really miss the mark. He comes off as quite ignorant.
A good point. I don't recall using a single Jewish reference in the things that he discovered. Where is the "Island of Januka"? Everything suggests that he adopted a full Christian lifestyle so, is somebody still a Jewish if he choose not to live as one?.
You can be a secular one, the same way many christians are. But often when people say x person is Y-ish, it just means that they have Y ancestry rather than they living under the cultural norms of Y
As a person with Jewish ancestry from the Italian peninsula in the 15th Century, I can say there are some other issues with this.
I've read the new in spanish, it was not just labeled as jewish but as sefardic jewish line (the one particular from spanish jews). Most of them converted to christianity (the called "new christians") and remained in Spain.
On the other hand, Jewish were expelled from the whole italic peninsula (including Genoa, etc) after very extreme period of persecution 2 centuries earlier.
> Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing?
Judaism is based on matrilineal descent, so depending on where the DNA comes from, yes.
I’m really confused by this argument. How does it account for the Apostle Paul?
Jewishness by matrilineal descent was a later Rabbinic innovation, probably around the third century. In Paul’s day it was still patrilineal. Even today your tribe is patrilineal.
I’m confused by your question. Paul was from Tarsus, a Roman citizen, and brought Christianity to the gentiles/goyim, but was himself a Jew, from a Jewish family, and of long Jewish descent. Maybe I’m not understanding the implications in GP that you’re seeing? But I’m interested in seeing what you’re seeing.
What exactly do you mean by "where there DNA comes from"? I smell some kind of biology oversimplification here but I will hear you first
Almost anyone could convert to Judaism but Judaism is not a proselitist religion.
There is a theory he was from the Greek island of Chios.
"In 1982, Ruth Durlacher hypothesised that Chios was Christopher Columbus's birthplace.[64] Columbus himself said he was from the Republic of Genoa, which included the island of Chios at the time. Columbus was friendly with a number of Chian Genoese families, referenced Chios in his writings and used the Greek language for some of his notes.[65] 'Columbus' remains a common surname on Chios. Other common Greek spellings are: Kouloumbis and Couloumbis."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chios
"A New Theory Clarifying the Identity OF Christopher Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece. by Ruth G Durlacher-Wolper 1982(Published by The New World Museum, San Salvador, Bahamas"
https://www.geraceresearchcentre.com/pdfs/1stColumbus/13_Dur...
From the article:
> “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País.
So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spanish national day?
The funny part is that none of this matters for things other than nationalist talking points.
How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing.
Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.
It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, though, per the same criticism outlined in the article.
I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Why is the ‘reconquista’ “ill named”?
Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And because of it the Spanish Empire became one of the richest the world has ever seen, the legacy of which is still felt today.
This is not to Lionise Columbus but you have to acknowledge the context of the time. Greenland and Newfoundland were not well known and are a long way from the latitude Columbus was aiming at. He was an idiot, and cruel by our standards, but he was great.
I seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true.
Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.
Knowledgeable Europeans knew that the Earth was round and they knew its size to within a few percent. Columbus thought that the Earth was much smaller though, and in that belief "he was an idiot". It's quite possible that he was trying to make an impossible voyage seem possible, but then again, he didn't take enough provisions, and it was almost a total loss.
This is not accurate. Everyone knew the Earth was round and had a good knowledge of the Earth's circumference, as this can be determined with geometry and some basic measurements. What was not well known at the time was the size of Asia, and specifically the distance from Asia's eastern coastline to Japan's easternmost islands, due to the lack of surveying data. Columbus grossly overestimated the size of Asia such that Japan would be approximately where North America actually is.
Other people brought the receipts. He fully just wishfully thought the earth was smaller. He continued to refused he hadn’t landed in the indies for the rest of his life.
Idiot was a strong word. But not as brief.
Actually, "On the other hand, in a document in the Book of Privileges (1502), Columbus refers to the New World as the Indias Occidentales ('West Indies'), which he says "were unknown to all the world".[284]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Legacy
So, it seems at some points he made claims he had a route to the orient and later he referred to it as 'West Indies'. Perhaps he knew the truth all along but had reasons to mislead.
He might have felt the need to understate the journey in order to get it funded at all.
I don't think it will take 500 years.
Eh, it would be like insisting the moon was made of cheese and in low earth orbit - and somehow getting someone to sponsor your (literal moonshot) - and then somehow reaching it in it’s real place, finding out it was made of gold instead, and then bringing a ton back.
Which single-handedly started a space race which led to colonizing the moon (and, uh, mostly exterminating the indigenous population which was totally different than the folks who were supposed to be there in the first place).
Oh, except it was also a completely different moon that we somehow weren’t aware was there.
Nothing he was proposing should have worked, and yet somehow not only did it, but it made everyone (who funded it) fabulously rich beyond their wildest imaginings.
Idiot savant?
Yes! I started typing up a moon comparison and half way through gave up because it just sounded so insane. Thanks for this.
Many otherwise intelligent people hold on to an idiotic idea, especially when it's to their advantage to hold on to it.
In fact, probably all of us do this.
Notably, he would have died out there if it hadn’t, somehow, worked out.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
> but he was great
Why was he great? How does that follow as a conclusion? By your own account of the events, his “accomplishment” is the very definition of dumb luck.
He was an explorer who set out to circumnavigate the globe and connect East and West, it wasn't "dumb luck" that in doing so he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated. Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived -- he made the trip to the Americas four times, without loss of life in transit.
> he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated
Finding out you were wrong when everyone doubted you in the first place isn’t particularly impressive. Especially when we already knew the right answer over 1500 years before (Eratosthenes).
I like the Moon analogy someone else shared on the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41835857
One doesn’t stop being an idiot because they struck gold under wrong assumptions. They just become a lucky idiot.
> Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived
Highly debatable. We don’t even need to leave the peninsula to find another country (Portugal) with numerous examples of people who could fit that title.
I also don’t think it’s ill named. The moors conquered and the Catholics took it back. It doesn’t defy logic.
> The moors conquered and the Catholics took it back.
This take only makes sense if you argue the Romans took it back, which would only be a valid claim from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, not war lords from the Iberian Peninsula.
> and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson)
That’s closer to a piece of historical trivia though, the Viking discovery of North America had very limited impact and nobody in Europe was aware of it or understood the significance.
What Columbus did led to dozens of other expeditions almost immediately. Within a few decades the largest the New World states were subjugated by Europeans and some of the worst recorded epidemics in human history swept the continent decimating societies which hadn’t even had any direct contact with Europeans yet.
He also allowed Spain to become the preeminent European power for the next century or so.
How is that not extremely significant?
> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat
Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all new and exciting to the people of the period, like they'd rediscovered an ancient civilization!
Also by "people" here we are literally talking about the 0.1% - educated people who could read and had access to books, which at the time were very rare and super expensive.
What the vikings did was not common knowledge, because basically they didn't come back regularly and so there was no real knowledge of their actions anywhere in Europe.
The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically.
> The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round.
[1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)
It was well known also before Aquinas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_sphaera_mundi
IIRC what Columbus didn't know was Eratosthones calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was <1% off, but believed Ptolemy's ~30% short estimation and figured there was no land in between Europe and the East Indies.
> Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books;
I thought it was mainly the Greek refugees fleeing from the Byzantine empire who “kickstarted” the Renaissance?
Of course all the pillaging the by the Venetians etc. as well. A lot of Greek texts that survived the Sack of Constantinople ended up in Western Europe.
Regardless, most “Greek knowledge” that we know of survived in the Greek half of the Roman Empire which remained a part of the “Christian Civilization”. In fact it was the undisputed center of it until the 800s and in many ways much later.
I’m not entirely downplaying the Arab influence which was very significant as well (especially considering that the Orthodox Church wasn’t really that supportive about the preservation of some philosophical texts).
Also it started much earlier than the 15th century, the translation of various Greek and Arab texts into Latin was well underway in the 1100s and 1200s, following the Reconquista which was effectively over by the 1300s, and the conquest Sicily.
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus.
He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. And America is very big and important, so whatever it cares about, a lot of other people care about.
If you were Canadian instead, you'd probably be genned up on John Cabot (also Genovese) and Newfoundland and CODFISH! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w]
There's no point sneering that Leif Erikson got there first, Europe as a whole did not particularly know The Americas existed until Columbus confirmed it. Then they rushed to colonise it... which is where most of the Americans (and Canadians) ultimately come from. So that's why it's important to so many of them.
> He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus.
May I ask why you hold this opinion? I grew up with tons of Italian-Americans (NYC) and I can confidently say that I've never heard a single person express pride in the fact that Columbus was Italian. In fact, based on my experience, a lot of Americans—regardless of descent—think/were explicitly taught that Columbus was Spanish.
I looked into it a few years ago when then anti-colonialists were insisting that the US should drop Columbus Day (or replace it with a Columbus' Victims Day) as they see him as a symbol of colonialism, eradication of natives, and support for slavery.
You might ask "if he's so evil and wicked and wrong and everything bad about the world (and not just a convenient famous person to scapegoat for more general ills), why did anyone ask the US to have a Columbus Day anyway?"
And the answer to that is Italian-Americans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day
> Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself
> For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following lynchings in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration.
> In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day
> in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States
> In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday
> San Francisco claims the nation's oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community's annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868, while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers around 2010
So, while the Italian-Americans you grew up with may not have been one of the 35,000 marchers in NYC, I bet most of those 35,000 marchers considers themselves Italian-American. They, and all other Italian-Americans, get a federal holiday which they can use to celebrate the connection between Italy and America (if they so wish), thanks to Italian-Americans lobbying for Columbus Day since the 1800s.
Can‘t speak for the others, but I learned that from the Sopranos episode “Christopher”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_(The_Sopranos)
> which is where most of the European Americans (and European Canadians) ultimately come from
Just a minor correction. People seem to miss it so often not sure why.
They are saying most Americans come from Europe, which is why Columbus's origin is interesting to them.
Your correction would be like saying "most European Americans come from Europe"
That is not true though unless you explicitly mean something different. American does not equate to European American.
Most Americans come from Mexico, India and China. In that order. European countries are not even in the top 5. You are probably talking about something else but are unable to phrase it properly likely due to some internal assumptions. You are welcome to share those assumptions :)
Most Americans (62%) have European ancestry.
You are listing the most frequent origins of immigrants to America as of 2024.
I’m not sure how this is relevant to the prior discussion.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-d...
You are right. It will be interesting to see how it changes given the fast rising Asian American demographics in the coming decades as Asia becomes host to more powerhouses.
Regarding your confusion, ancestry is the whole point of this thread. This sub-discussion just focused on a specific part of the discussion :)
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.
Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.
Also note that around the same time other European expeditions were making similar discoveries: 2 years before Columbus, Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and a decade later Da Gama braved 10,000 km of open ocean and discovered a sea route to India.
Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.
The Portuguese were doing the rational thing and taking the much rational and safer option.
Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents
The Portuguese obviously discovered Brazil before Columbus (or worst case, contemporaneous), because of the dividing line drawn up in the Treaty of Tordesillas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.
I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.
If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.
Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.
Traveling west? Yes.
Traveling west, reaching land, leaving enough evidence to confirm the story five centuries later, making it back, and finally, convincing other people that it happened? No.
Yeah the Portuguese keeping Brasil secret is seductive conspiracy theory.
I think that America being there at all is super hindsight-y. A priori there were no states in America that had made contact with the people’s across Eurasia and Africa. There were the Vikings, and some northern nomads.
The Pacific is huge. So big that you can’t fit it all in one hemisphere. We have had long periods with single supercontinents and no other major landmasses.
Sailing west into the Atlantic as a European was a massive gamble. Matched only by the navigators of the South Pacific, and even then they were far more competent navigators of open ocean and had techniques that Columbus didn’t have. He just had heaps of money, some great boats, and huge will.
Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible. Clever and level headed people will look at an endeavour, calculate that the risk/reward is terrible and not even try. It takes a special kind of person to do this kind of stuff, and many die trying such that we don't even hear about them. The few who get lucky and succeed push humanity's reach to (literally) new frontiers and get remembered as great explorers.
So while I agree that a "lucky idiot" is often a good description for these efforts, I think it is very important that we do not diminish their importance. It took someone like Columbus to make this trip, and yes he had to get supremely lucky, it doesn't diminish from the fact that he took risks that paid off handsomely.
> Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible.
While this does sometimes happen, I do think that the more common situation is that people actually review the existing evidence and prior art and then they make a calculated (!) gamble - in fact, this is e.g. probably why the Wright brothers succeeded as pioneers of aviation as opposed to dozens of other people who would just try stuff more haphazardly and then end up dying in the process.
Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.
Are we ready to change the name to "United States of Cyndi" then?
Or you think that Americo Vespucci was a saint?
I don't see anybody lobbying for that. Maybe this recent revisionist movements are formed by a bunch of hypocrites?
To be fair- they all were and are like that, back then and now. It just that the industrialization dividend created a cultural power asymmetry which made those nightmares a permanently one sided affair for a while.
Why do we need "to be fair" about who we celebrate? I don't understand why anyone is arguing the point that we shouldn't celebrate people who did awful things.
They also weren't all the same. Not everyone goes around enslaving people and using their life to seek riches and fame. I don't think anyone complains about historical figures who, flaws and all, fought for higher ideals like personal liberty.
I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.
Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Cortez only had about 500 soldiers. He didn't even had the permission of the Spanish crown, it was a private enterprise. How did he conquered a city of warriors with a population of 300K ? The Aztecs were tyrants that had abused their neighboring states for decades. Cortez built alliances with Tlaxalans and other tribes. There were battles, a small pox epidemic and a lot of blood. But Cortez was overall a great diplomat that took all the cities under Aztec control one by one until only Tenochtitlan remained.
Thanks for adding.
Calling Cortes genocidal is also quite farfetched, considering that he conquered the Aztec territory, despite being vastly outnumbered, because every native tribe and settlement they found on the way banded together to overthrow the Aztec.
I wouldn't call the Aztecs genocidal either, despite the ritual sacrifices, brutal treatment of other peoples, and everybody in mesoamerica who came to know them hating them so much that they preferred the uncertain fate of joining the white bearded men from the east.
Yeah I think the light use of the word genocide doesn't make justice for the instance where there was actual genocide, which is when you murder people with the explicit intent of destroying a nation/culture/group.
The approach of colonizers from the west in the new world was broadly genocidal though. Like, "we want to live here, so go on git." Killing buffalo to literally starve natives, for example. Allowing natives in occupied lands to be only slaves or dead, for example. Even if it doesn't 100% fit whatever hard definition you're using, it approximates it pretty goddamn well.
The cheapening of the word genocide by applying it loosely is indeed ugly and dangerous.
> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and assimilated into Spanish society, even though they even had their own divisions in the armed forces. They eventually culturally assimilated the rest of the meso-Americans and gave us what Mexican culture is today.
Now what happened to the Maya is a tragedy. Books burnt, people enslaved and relegated to the lowest rung even today.
The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.
But not their history, literature, wealth, or power. They were reduced from an empire to a group of often landless peasant farmers.
Discrimination against the Maya happens even today, even in countries where they're part of the majority population (or close to majority).
def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.
7M tainos by the hand of Columbus and his crew?
I don't question that what the Spanish accomplished was a massacre. I just question whether that can be attributed to Columbus himself. He did 3 trips to the Americas, none of which lasted very long:
1st Voyage - 1492-1493
2nd Voyage - 1493-1496
3rd Voyage - 1498-1500
> How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"?
The question is not whether Columbus was Jewish of not. The question is whether he was actually Spanish. As the article states, that's heavily disputed.
From the article:
> Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish.
The article leads by referring to Columbus as a son of Genoa.
Then a Spanish researcher decides to claim Columbus is Spanish on Spain's national day, supposedly based on an authoritative scientific study but in spite of not presenting any evidence that supports his claim.
The relevant bit is him being Spanish. That's what makes it appealing to the target audience of the article. Him not being catholic is not relevant and gets swept under the rug the same way the gypsy origin of flamenco (now considered spain's most popular form of folk music) get swept under the rug due to its popularity.
And the edict for expulsion of practicing Jews was issued in 1492, same year of Columbus's first voyage.
Ill named?
Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
That's a very strange way to present Spanish history.
Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity).
We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils.
Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term.
I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania
> formed the Diocese of Hispania
That was an administrative region that existed only for slightly over a century. The caliphate of Cordoba existed for longer than that.
And Christian Spain hass run longer than the Caliphate.
There was no such thing as nations in the way we think about them today back then.
Spain was always a confederacy of tribes! Even today!
The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).
That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!
EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.
Yup, in the North West of Spain live the "Spaniard Irish", but not everybody there is blond. Eva Longoria or Gloria Stephan descend from Asturian people and are a better example representative of Asturias women. Nobody in USA would call this women celts.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
I think you're missing the point.
OP's point was that "Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that." The truth of the matter is that it didn't, and to make matters worse even today Spain itself is comprised of regions with distinct national identities which reject the idea of being a part of the castilian-based nation.
I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians? I noticed that a lot in anglo-saxon spheres. It seems to function as an othering technique. I wonder if you are aware of you doing it. Other groups don't seem to get that kind of categorisation (just look at this thread)
Saying "catholics" instead of "Christians" is about the same as saying "Visigoths" instead of "Germanic tribes". I don't know why you would resist more precision. In the context of the times, it stands in opposition to e.g. "Eastern orthodox" (after the Great schism) or "Aryan".
> Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians
Mostly because it's a way to communicate such that the listener knows who you're talking about. Another example is calling Mormons 'Mormon' instead of Christian.
If you say 'Christian' people will think of what is likely in that geographic area the most common type of Christian, probably some form of protestant. If you say 'Catholic' the listener knows that you're talking about the group of people who follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. If you say 'Mormon', they'll also know who you mean.
It's also possible to subdivide the group referred to above as 'Christian' - you can use 'Baptist', 'Pentecostal', etc. Those are also names that aren't "Christian" for groups of Christians.
To emphasis that we, like the Orthodox, Copts, Syriacs, etc. have apostolic succession while the protestants do not.
Some Protestants hold that Catholicism is not a sect of Christianity due to a number of beliefs, such as the different requirements for salvation.
I don’t know how common this belief is in the US but I personally have encountered a number of people that believe this.
Interesting, I have never heard of that. Which is funny because Catholicism is far older than Protestantism
They were one and the same until some people protested against the Catholic church telling people they could buy their way into Heaven - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses
I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
This is begging the question.
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
I did provide the evidence, but it was in a different sub-thread:
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
From the Google translate of that article:
> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”
> ...
> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”
So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.
I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.
You kind of cherry-picked two paragraphs and butchered the article. The article's point is that Reconquista, with capital R, is not a good designation for the historical events that took place. It does use the term throughout the article, though, which maybe is a bit confusing. But if you read a couple paragraphs past the one you quoted, you'll see it restated that the term Reconquista is a 20th century invention. "The idea of Reconquista" is talking about the idea, specifically, not the term; the term, and mysticism surrounding it (like the originating battle that actually never took place as such), part of which is debunked also in the article, is modern propaganda.
You're ignoring what I actually said about the quotes—I read all of that and I don't care when the term originated, that's pointless pedantry. The medieval kings thought of themselves as reconquering, so reconquista is a decent word to describe what they thought they were doing, regardless of its origins.
And you're disregarding the entire point of the article and the historians that contradict what you just said.
If we're going to be pedantic, the capital-R Reconquista name for the process of the -uh- re-conquest of Spain was introduced in the 19th century. And it was used throughout Latin America in elementary schoolbooks at least in the 1980s. Franco might have wanted to do some propagandizing with the term, but it was mainly seen as a non-partisan propaganda because Catholicism was a unifying force in Hispanic cultures rather than a partisan and divisive one.
You keep saying "20th century" when the term was first popularised in the 1840s, and one scholar has traced the term back to 1795. See De la Restauración a la Reconquista: la construcción de un mito nacional (Una revisión historiográfica. Siglos XVI-XIX) https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ELEM/article/viewFile/ELEM... (PDF)
> the first time that the term "reconquista" was used to refer to the fight against the Muslims was in the work of José Ortíz y Sanz entitled Compendio cronológico de la historia de España, published after 1795. The use of the term, however, did not spread until the 1840s thanks to two new editions of Ortiz's work and the publication of the Historia general by Modesto Lafuente.
So the term did not originate in the 20th century, but it was added to the dictionary in 1936.
16th-19th century historians would have used the term "restoration". The northern kingdoms prosecuting this supposed restoration were keen to claim their legitimacy as a continuation of the entire Visigoth Kingdom, and made it their business to recapture it... even if they never held that territory.
Let me guess. You are Catalonian, right?
La Vanguardia certainly is.
It seems like a bit of iconoclasm to deny the Reconquista because it helps (does it?) with the Catalan claim to independence. In LatAm people don't really care about any of Spain's internal politics, and the Reconquista is simply an accepted fact of history.
The capitalization of the word might be a propagandistic act, but it might also just be an application of modern style, or just recognition that the concept requires a bit more dignity, or something.
This entire sub-thread stinks of... anti-Spanish propaganda, heh.
What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
Well.. the people doing the “reconquering” viewed themselves as [Roman] Christians first and foremost, that was the core of their cultural and political identity.
Since they considered that territories were part of the Roman-Christian Empire in the past from their perspective they were certainly taking it back.
Spain being or not being a nation at the time seems entirely irrelevant..
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe.
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back.
The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
Surely the intent of the name was a "re-conquest of Iberia from muslims by christians".
Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings.
There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-cov...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ovuao/la_re...
This just confirms the point I made above about naming. What's your point exactly?
The point about the naming isn't very interesting. The concept existed since medieval times. In the 18th century it got termed reconquista. Later, in the 19th century it got capitalized. None of that is 20th century Francoist propaganda even if Franco did also push the concept.
It seems to directly contradict a lot of what you've said in this thread about the idea of a reconquest being a modern historiographic invention.
> It's not like those christians
In their view they did, the existence of the “Spanish nation” is tangential. From their perspective they were culturally/politically Christians and whatever exact language they happened to speak was secondary to that. So in that it was obviously a “reconquest” from the perspective of the Christians living in Iberia.
> So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Hardly more ridiculous than claiming that the fact that some common Spanish national identity didn’t exist back in the 1100s is somehow relevant.
Regardless of the term I'm glad it happened
Why?
Red wine and tapas instead of the religion of peace?
It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition.
We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
> Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.
Presumably, if he had more evidence, he would be displaying it in order to make his case better.
There are many claims of discovery of the Americas (even by ice age Frenchmen), but the one that had impact was Columbus'.
Pretty sure France wasn't a thing in the ice age
They were people living in what is now called France. Nova did an episode on it.
Yes and they weren't "Frenchmen".
Even when there was a nominal French kingdom, substantial "state" intervention was required to form a cohesive cultural identity, ironing out dramatic regional linguistic differences, systems of measurement, etc. Definitely a "beat it fit, paint it to match" kind of situation.
Still, it's fun to imagine that if you time-machined back to a gallic region in the ice age, you'd come across a guy who'd strike you as remarkably "French". Like, "ohhh.. this guy." HA! I would love him as dearly as all humanity. :D
Somebody: changes history forever.
People: "booh, he is not important at all, even my cousin could have discovered a new continent"...
LOL, what happened with the new generations?
We've been spoiled, walking over the puddle isn't particularly interesting anymore :)
But in all seriousness, things like electricity or the atom are more interesting discoveries than a guy misjudging the size of the Earth and being lucky enough to not die halfway through his voyage paid for by two monarchs who just so happened to be looking for new enterprises to invest in.
> I don’t understand boners
Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation.
We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.
> brought humanity together again
This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago
GP quite literally acknowledged the injustices that happened in the sentence before the one you quoted.
Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years.
Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), then I think you'll find it hard to discuss almost any historical events because cruelty has existed everywhere. This isn't whataboutism btw, my point is that sensitivity should not be a primary concern in a rational discussion about history because history is harsh subject.
You don't acknowledge continent-scale cultural and human destruction by calling it "injustice" or "inevitable awful consequence". Do you imagine someone saying that about the current situation in Crimea? Millions of people died. It is not just an "injustice". An injustice is a state official forging evidence for nefarious purposes not destroying a country and unaliving its people let alone a whole continent. It really downplays the role of the invaders even more than it already is.
Who exactly was brought together? The natives were virtually or/and culturally wiped out (in case you didn't notice) and the consequences can still be seen today. When you look at the US today, do you see two groups together? How so, when the actual natives have virtually no land have been systemically attacked since their world was destroyed.
Thinking about it in positive terms is no different than doing the same with the situation in Crimea or with any of the world wars.
It is fine to discuss stuff but the idea of bringing two groups together when one of them has been virtually wiped out speaks of severe cognitive dissonance.
There is no whataboutism here because no other continent has experienced what the American continent has. There is no equivalent in written history for the scale of suffering and destruction unleashed upon it.
And you having a problem with me criticising the vast destruction (rather than a generic injustice) of a continent by saying that cruelty exists together (tell me what other continent in the last 2 thousand years got culturally destroyed and had millions of deaths as a result of foreign invaders) says a lot about your opinion about the deaths of tens millions of people (at the very least) the descendants of which still suffer all sorts of challenges. Including the continuous dismissal of the scale of their suffering by people like you ever since the invasions began.
First off, it is factually correct to say 1) Columbus' expeditions connected (for better or worse) groups of people that never had had contact before and 2) the Native Americans specifically killed by disease (which was roughly 80 to 90% of the population) was an inevitable result of travel and trade with the Americas.
You can use whatever moralizing language or comparisons to modern day conflicts you want to analyze these events because that's not what I took issue with. As I stated before, my problem with your comment was that you wrongly tried to label a descriptive statement about history as "culturally insensitive".
Permanent contact between the Americas and Eurasia was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Europeans coming here, it could have been the Chinese.
Whether it was a Columbus or a Chan, the introduction of diseases which the Eurasians had been swimming in for eons would have still slammed into the Americas like an apocalypse.
Even if you gave it another 300 years (after vaccines were invented) there’s no way a distribution strategy could have effectively blunted the impact. You’d need to give an additional 200 years for that to be conceivable. The odds of the Americas staying isolated for another 500 years after Columbus are nil.
My comment has nothing to do with the cultural expressions of the various groups at that moment in time. A group of Homo sapiens were cut off from the rest for tens of thousands of years for better and worse. The ‘worse’ part is that they were ferociously vulnerable to the viruses in the other population group.
“Brought together” wasn’t a phrase meant to convey happiness or agreement, it was a very literal description of two groups making permanent contact after being separated for so long. There’s not an event like that in memorable history to compare it to, as far as I know. Certainly not at that scale of isolation.
What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict?
There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?).
Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic.
I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.
You have to question why such a baseless claim merited an article promoting it.
Recent and related:
DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821939 - Oct 2024 (66 comments)
technical who-is-a-Jew type question, which is thoroughly intertwingled with European history: the Jewish diaspora were only the diaspora after they were kicked out of Israel by the Romans (in something like 70AD), and even then, only after they maintained their identity in the diaspora (c.f. the majority of other conquered peoples who did not maintain an independent identity)
Before that they were just the Jews, which was more of a nationality than anything else (a nationality that had a covenant with their God, but many nationalities at that time had such).
"Sephardic Jew" is a term most used to describe Jews who were kicked out of the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and Reconquista. The Iberian peninsula had had a thorough conquering by Muslims until the euro-christian reconquering, the Reconquista, wherein the last of the Muslims were kicked out, and then the Jews too for good measure, which kicking out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Other diaspora Jews lived in Muslim lands and are known as Mizrahi Jews (Mizrahi being some form of the word for Egypt which is also the word for East iirc)
Was there some distinction (theological or genetic) between Miszrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews before they were driven out of Spain?
And Columbus was born in Genoa (his house is still there) and so, was he one of these types of Jews or are the different typenames just what we call them today?
A little etymological sidenote: Sephardic is just the Hebrew word for Spain, whereas Ashkenaz was one of the great grandsons of Noah associated with eastern and central Europe.
However, when you see a Jew with the last name Ashkenazi, it's safe to assume they're Sephardi. Why? Because last names for Jews are a more recent historical development and these Jews immigrated to Sephardic territory hundreds of years ago (before the expulsion talked about in this thread) and have fully assimilated into the Sephardic tradition.
Ashkenaz, the descendant of Noah, was from present-day-Syria. Thus the term Ashkenazi literally means "From the area of present-day Syria" or more concisely "From the Levant".
Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.>Counter anecdote, none of the people named Ashkenazi that I know are Sephardic. One's family is from Turkey, I'm not sure during which period they immigrated to the holy land. It is possible that they came to Turkey from Spain, though the family today does not consider themselves Sephardic. The IDF chief Gabbi Ashkenazi's father is Syrian I believe.
It's thought these people were part of the expulsions. Gabbi Ashkenazi, the former IDF chief's father was Bulgarian-- Bulgaria, of course, being Ottoman territory and right next-door to Thessaloniki, a Jewish hotspot of the time would match this model well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_(surname)#cite_note-...
I haven't been to Hebrew school in a long time but still remember a few things :)
> out occurred at exactly the same time that Columbus sailed for the East (by going west).
Which is notable why exactly? Surely both Columbus and his investors were hoping to return.
Who would give all that money to a descendant of Jewish converts let alone someone who might have been affected by the expulsion decree directly?
Columbus might have had Jewish ancestors a few generations back but I don’t think we can conclude anything else based on these findings. Especially not that he or his parents were actually practicing Jews.
Jewish diaspora existed way before the fall of Jerusalem. Before Jewish-Roman wars, 10% of Roman Empire was Jewish, about 8 million with only 2 million living in Judea. 1 million Jews lived in Persia (probably the ones that stayed when Babylonian captivity ended, since only 50,000 came back with Zerubbabel to build the second temple)
Spain still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous sailors were a portuguese and a genovese. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the magellan voyage as the "magellan-elcano expedition ".
OTOH there's well known and documented anti-Spanish propaganda during the centuries by basically the rest of Europe (Protestants specifically), so I start to doubt claims from both sides (disclaimer: I'm Spaniard):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend
The English and Elizabeth projected their crimes onto Spain.
Proof is in the pudding where is the percentage of natives highest? Where Spaniards colonized (Mexico, Bolivia, Peru)? Or the Brits (Virginia, Connecticut, all of Canada except Quebec)?
(Disclaimer, I'm... I don't know what I am)
Presumably the population density in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru was much higher.
Also Spanish emigration into their colonies was quite low and they were much spread out.
e.g. more English/British people emigrated to the Americas in the 1600s than Spanish despite the fact that they controlled many times less territory.
Spanish empire caused a huge impact in the American continent but even so, the focus on seizing wealth and lands competed with the fact that the Spanish doctrine wanted to extend the Christendom. However anglo-saxos have established a more clear separation between colonizers and native population. I would compare what you mention about Mexico and Bolivia with how the decline of the native population in California accelerated after the independence of Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Native_Californi...
Oh I don't dispute that. Despite the documented atrocities, the number of.native deaths by disease are greatly exaggerated, Charles V did write the precursor document of the human rights bill (after getting wind of what went about in Peru), and the Spaniards did promote marriages with natives. Studies of racial superiority the kind of which were prevalent at the end of the 19th century didn't come from Spain either.
History is not a black and white frame that we should either be proud or disgusted about. The fact that the Spanish state promotes such historical wash-ups says more about its current leaders.
FWIW the columbus expedition was considered a great failure at the time. He did fail to reach the indies by the west, and the couple of "indians" he brought to court was little compensation for the lack of lucrative spices. Reaching Lisbon first on the way back was also a disaster, prompting an immediate ultimatum by the portuguese by violation of a treaty, which led ultimately to the tordesilhas treaty which left the kingdom of castille and aragon out of the spice trade. He felt the failure so personally that he sailed back 4 times looking for a passage to the great sea beyond the new world, failing every time and becoming so embittered in the process, that he eventually lost his allies in court. It was only 40 years and lots of failed settlements after the columbus expedition that Spain hit proverbial jackpot and found the gold and silver which made the nation extremely wealthy in Europe, for a time. By then, the new world already had a new name: the Americas. The greatest of the hostorical humiliations, named after an ordinary italian cartographer, rather than the legendary captain which reached it in the first place.
Enshrining him as Spaniard will be of little consolation for his name.
You fail to understand that this is not about him (he's not alive to care about it) but about Spain, he is a proxy
Fast forward 500 years:
"The United States still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous entrepreneurs were a south african and a scottish. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the musk voyage as the "musk-bezos expedition ".
We are ok with that, really, there is always people who give more importance to this kind of things, but for the vast majority, whatever the results, they would be cool.
Also, italians and portuguese are close friends and cultural brothers and sisters to us.
Spanish scholars have speculated that Columbus was a crypto-Jew. The DNA analysis could have potentially ruled out that theory.
https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewis...
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hahaha what good joke
Someday people will be having debates about the ethnicity of every prominent person in the current era. That's a depressing thought.
Nah the new wave of ancient DNA analysis since 2010 has been a game changer. Especially with euroasian history. It showed us how populations migrated and how and when admixture formed. Including identifying the yamnaya admixture in modern populations
If they actually have Columbus’s DNA intact with a good SNP resolution, it will be trivial to find out what % of jewish he is in his autosomal DNA. They can and should release it publicly as part of their paper as well. So people can confirm their hypothesis
.. except that there isn't really a thing such as Jewish DNA. Other than that, yes we're mostly all a mixture of people travelling and migrating and settling down and moving, and they came from all over over the centuries and millennia.
I'm extremely skeptical. A family member studied Columbus's diaries back in grad school and has long suspected he was a Converso, but this is clearly the worst kind of sensationalist journalism.
And we already know for a fact that other members of the expedition were Conversos and they were partially motivated by their desire to get out from under the thumb of the Spanish Crown. Academics have long examined the confluence of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the Columbian Exchange, and Columbus's heritage doesn't really change any of it.
The Spanish inquisition began in the 1470s so it makes sense he would hide his ethnicity.
What's really interesting however, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492, was when the Ottoman Empire accepted 60,000 Jewish refugees from Spain.
Columbus must not have been very religious. It would've probably been a much smarter decision, in terms of self preservation, to move to the Ottoman Empire.
> Columbus must not have been very religious.
He was incredibly religious. In his Catholicism.
If anything this is just proof that reading too deeply, and especially solely, into anyone’s DNA history is a mistake. Plenty of people have a background unrelated to their lives or the way they perceive themselves.
Agreed that it's important not to read too much into this about Columbus as a person, but if this is true there are plenty of interesting things to draw from it. It would suggest that he probably came from a family that converted to Catholicism (given the time period, probably under duress).
Had his ancestors made a different choice Columbus himself may have been expelled from Spain shortly before he sailed on August 3.
is it so rare to think that maybe he did it himself rather it being passed down?
It adds a wild irony to the story considering he's responsible for the expansion of the Spanish and introduced Catholicism to an entire continent.
Someone who was punished by the Spanish and forced to convert a generation or two ago turns into its champion and spreads it elsewhere?
He and his son would have faced severe discrimination, wouldn’t even be allowed to hold public office and technically his descendants wouldn’t even emigrate to the Americans had it been publicly known that he was a descendant of Jewish converts (regardless of his religious views).
Surely that’s something the Spanish Crown would have used in the courtroom, considering that his descendants were engaged in a ~20 year lawsuit against the crown (which they won)?
That's assuming he even knew he was ethnically Jewish. His strong Catholicism and choosing not to immigrate to the Ottoman empire indicates this family history was probably withheld from him.
> He was incredibly religious. In his Catholicism
Possibly as a way to conceal his background? Of course that’s pure speculation and it wasn’t as bad yet until later in the the 1500s but Spain became an extremely racist society, people who couldn’t prove that they weren’t descendants of Jewish or Muslim converts were often barred from holding political office or even testify in court etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre#:~:text=O....
The attacks began earlier[0] and many Jews began converting en masse. He might not have even known his parents or grandparents were Jewish.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_1391
> r, is how the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492,
How could that be related in any way? Presumably his investors did hope he would return and be allowed to enter the country?
> Columbus must not have been very religious
He was. As far as we can tell he was a very devout Catholic. Even if he had some Jewish origin (e.g. his grand/great grandparents were converts) that must have been a closely concealed secret and certainly not something that was publicly known.
Another indication that Columbus was part of the Jewish community is that the Jewish financiers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez advanced interest-free loans to finance the journey.
That's actually a point against: Jewish financiers would have expected interest, surely. It's Catholic ones who had to loan without interest.
You are not logic-ing correctly. The financiers were Jewish. Jews do not charge interest to other Jews; if Columbus were not Jewish they would have charged interest. This is written in Deuteronomy 23:20-21 as well as Leviticus and Exodus and also discussed by Maimonides
> Jews do not charge interest to other Jews
Even now?
Yes. There are many Jewish lending organizations designed around the principle that loaning money to establish a new business is the highest form of charity (see Maimonides 8 levels of giving). For example, there is a 127-year-old organization based in San Francisco that offers loans up to $50,000. The expectation is once someone establishes themselves they will contribute back to the lending organization. The workaround to halachic rules of interest that is applied in Israeli banking is equity co-ownership where the lender is paid back for their ownership shares at an established interest rate; the term for this is called “heter iska.”
Yes. Similarly with Muslims too. It makes getting financing for things that need loans (e.g. houses) trickier and sometimes open to exploitation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riba
The "subtitle" / honest headline sums it up so well, I'm not sure what all the text below it is for:
> Claim raises idea [...] but experts view it with caution
Discussion (50 points, 22 hours ago, 46 conments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821939
The previous discussion was from before the full tests results were released.
This article is also from before the release of any test results:
And then again he may not have been Spanish and Jewish.
Interesting that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree to kick the Jews out ot Spain shortly after Christopher Columbus, a Sephardic Jew, reached the Americas.
This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra_Decree
> This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
To be fair, it was also after they aided the initial Muslim conquest of Spain and assisted the new Muslim rulers in subjugating the native Christian population.
Your history seems wrong. The Alhambra Decree was issued on 31 March 1492. Columbus sealed his deal in April 1492, and started the first(!) expedition on 3 August 1492. And it seems he only reached the continent of America itself on his fourth expedition.
The purpose was to convert most of population to christianity to achieve cultural unity, and the ones who wouldn't convert had to leave. Usually it is explained only as an expulsion of the jews.
P.D: there are many theories around Gibraltar, specially since it was during succession war and the country was in a civil war.
I think it would have been more polite if they all converted to Judaism is cultural unity was the goal.
Smells very much of the villains of history anti-semitic narratives of the left in the past.
Makes sense. Now that the Graun's chief enemy is Israel and Colonialism, why not combine two favored targets into one hateful guy? I'm also pretty sure he was cis-gendered.
What's "Graun" -- wikipedia says a composer. What's the connection?
I like the sound of the word.
It’s a nickname of the Guardian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graun
TIL
yes, I was just seeing some initial whisper that Columbus was a Zionist and jews to blame for the slave trade and genocide of Americas natives.
> acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth
Nit pick.
I don't know it for sure, but if he was able to meet a king and a queen eventually, I assume he came from a wealthy family.
For wealthy families at that time, it wouldn't be an issue to travel. Especially if you turn out to be the most known traveler in human's history.
Thus, I fail to see how come we can even think of establishing the place of birth based on DNA. A likely area where his family came from - sure. But POB?
Why are people so obsessed with the ethnic of a slightly relevant guy from 500 years ago? Is there some relevance in this?
Agreed that his ethnicity is a silly topic to be discussed, but calling Christopher Columbus a "slightly" relevant guy definitely feels like a stretch.
Apparently discovering new islands isn't what it used to be.
He was a small gear in a long chain of events. If not Columbus, someone else would likely have found the New World. It was the age of (Europeans) Discovery after all, where many people were sailing the world and finding new routes and lands.
IIRC Cabot was trying to raise money for an expedition at the same time as Columbus and did reach continental America before him.
Indeed. Next thing somebody will be making a fuss about Isaac Newton.
Sure. But it wasn’t someone else; it was Columbus.
If it were someone else, I’m certain we’d be talking about them instead.
This same logic applies to every discovery in all of human history.
Sure. This is just Great Man theory [1] in action. It's a bit absurd, once you know about it you see it everywhere.
It's especially distasteful when it's about people who 'discovered' places, because the next step was usually the subjugation or genocide of the people already living in the discovered place. But we still celebrate the explorers as heroes.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
idk. USA people seem to be the only ones obsessed with him sometimes to a point as treating him as a hero from their history
also people often treat it as the beloved kind of "small person who know better even through everyone told them they where wrong and succeeded by not giving up" story
but the funny thing is the more you learn about him the more you might realize how wrong all of this is
firstly he hadn't had success because he knew better (and people didn't believe him) he had success because he insisted that his absurdly wrong calculations where correct and then had a absurd amount of luck. (In educated circles of that time not only was it well know that earth was a globe, it rough size was also known. The reason he believed he could sail to India was because he insisted that earth was _way_ smaller then it actual is (and also was believed to be in general back then). It's just people (including him!) through there was no additional landmass between the west of Portugal and ~east India. Consider sailing that route on a world where America is just more water... pretty much not viable with the tech of that time).
Secondly if anything he was a villain, to a point even the Spanish Inquisition called him out for his bad behavior against native Americans...
So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.
He is important because he changed the power dynamics of the old world. And as a result created probably the most powerful country in the world. I'm not American, and not from colonial power country, but it was significant.
The lionization of Columbus was started by late 19th century Italian immigrants who wanted something to demonstrate their worth to an America that looked down on them. It is somewhat relevant if he wasn't actually Italian.
It hardly matters anymore. Probably at least half of all Americans live in a state or city that celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day. Italians have secured their place in society.
> it rough size was also known
And it had been known for 1600 years already!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
> So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.
I mean that version of the story is pretty interesting too, right?
One can see a lot of parallels between startup culture, really. You start off with a dumb idea, you pitch it over and over for years till you find a sucker, you get funding because of nepotism / connections, your dumb idea fails but you stumble across something that works on the way, then you move fast and break things (like... the entire indigenous population).
I suspect that a lot of the recent dirt about Columbus comes from documents involving his (and his decedents) court case to assert ownership of the New World. In particular, I suspect that the most damning accusations come from briefs filed by opposing counsel:
"In 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a lengthy series of court cases against the Castilian crown, known as the pleitos colombinos, alleging that the Crown had illegally reneged on its contractual obligations to Columbus and his heirs.[93] The Columbus family had some success in their first litigation, as a judgment of 1511 confirmed Diego's position as viceroy but reduced his powers. Diego resumed litigation in 1512, which lasted until 1536, and further disputes initiated by heirs continued until 1790." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
280 years of legal battle is going to be a treasure trove of dirt, if you want to find it.
As for "why now" and "why does it matter what his heritage is" I think it has everything to do with the cultural milieu. Modern white liberals hate their heritage which they characterize as ancestors of colonizers, slave owners, and exploiters. If Columbus was Jewish this gives left-wing anti-Semites extra ammunition against Jews. It aligns the deep hatred for colonizers with deep hatred for Israel for its actions in it's war with Hamas.
Yes its interesting reading all the people in this thread trying to align historical facts with contemporary ideological requirements...
But it is always legitimate to wonder about where the culture's attention is cast, and why. The present always holds great sway on how we perceive the past. Consider the example of Karl Marx, who's ideology fed his historical narrative, and vice-versa. I don't think it's coincidence that we never heard of Columbus' villainy prior to ~2005 and we never heard of his Jewishness until 2024.
Well everybody in all of history is a villain by contemporary standards. For example people are now considered villains for thinking biological men shouldnt be allowed in women's change rooms.
Historians like to say the past is a different country. Judging historical events by todays standards makes about as much sense to me as discovering life on Mars and judging their behaviour by our own standards. For me, its just a way of signalling virtue that assigns zero cost on the signaller. It's historical so you dont have to do anything (it doesnt cost you time or money) and the people being judged arent here to defend themselves or provide any nuance. Its lazy and cheap.
Today is Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples Day.
Oh, that makes sense. Thank you.
Just wanted to drop the fact that there seems to be a historical consensus that isn't represented in these comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_theories_of_Christopher...
> The evidence of Columbus's origins in Genoa is overwhelming: almost no other figure of his class or designation has left so clear a paper trail in the archives.
My jewish sephardic family was compelled by country's authorities to finance the expedition only to have been expelled (with the whole community) right when he embarked, and of course never saw any of the money back. I really doubt that he had any relation to the community at all. He was just an instrument of robbing it.
That's quite a connection. Then again, the ultimate result of that effort was that the Jewish diaspora (as a whole), a fair chunk of it anyway, ended up securing places to settle in North America, infinitely safer than Europe would prove to be centuries hence. So there's that.
BTW I finally followed up in regard to that guy with the beard, if it's still of interest:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41794563
A couple of years ago I made a bot to notify me about HN comment replies, but it's kind of abandoned now. I probably should get it up and running again, checking this manually is such a hassle
https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot
Well, just the best fit for being presented in the Spanish national day but, it's more complicated than that...of course. What was presented was not science.
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2024-10-12/el-show-del-adn-de-cri...
Interestingly Columbus set sail on the day the Jews were expelled from Spain.
India must've sounded nicer than the Ottoman Empire
I thought sephardim scattered into a lot of places, including elsewhere in Europe (even places like Amsterdam) and North Africa. Not to mention conversos that stayed put.
>even places like Amsterdam
Especially places like Amsterdam.
That's why they built a giant Synagogue there.
I say "even" because the stereotype is Southern Europe, Turkey, or North Africa. The further north you go in Europe, the more Jewish and Ashkenazi identities get merged and blurred in people's minds. So the history of sephardim in Netherlands goes against the stereotypes.
The same year, sure. But the same day?
I'd find it hard to believe all the cities in Spain decided to expel the Jewish people all on the same day. The inquisition began decades earlier so there probably were indications something bad was going to happen
They're probably referring to the Alhambra Decree [0], which did expel all Jews by a set date. That date was the end of July, and Columbus sailed on 3 August, so it's very close but not quite the same date.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra_Decree
This is stupid and here is why, you are Jewish from the blood of your mother, or his mother is Corsican. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Fontanarossa
...I'm a little suspicious. Spain, Portugal, and Italy have been fighting fiercely to claim cultural credit for Columbus for my whole life (hundreds of years, even?) and some of the quotes in this article display some bias on the sides of the researchers. It's possibly a result of me using Firefox autotranslate out of laziness, but:
But then, Obviously it's an interesting point, but the certainty of the first statement set off alarm bells for me. Especially because they're placing his origin in Aragon, specifically; the Spanish are very nationalist, but the Catalonians are even more nationalist as a way to fight back. Very, very far from damning, but certainly makes these surprising claims a little suspicious.In terms of critical commentary, seemingly there is some: https://elpais.com/ciencia/2024-10-12/el-show-del-adn-de-cri...
It's pointed out that although the professor that did this DNA study is indeed an academic[1] specializing in the relevant field--which cannot be said of the main proponent, who appears to be a super biased enthusiast [2][3][4]--he hasn't actually published any of these findings yet, instead choosing to announce them via his own "thriller" TV show. Right off the bat, that's the absolute opposite of what a typical scientist would do with absurdly controversial findings -- and apparently this is the same pattern he's followed since 2005 on this topic, publishing no data of any kind in actual journals, just "announcing" various findings.
He does say "The scientific results, he says, will be presented at a press conference probably at the end of November", but... that's sus af, as the kids say.
Beyond that, the DNA analysis itself seems to be in doubt:
The most damning evidence is non-circumstancial/character-based, of course, and it's what originally had me scratching my head in doubt: In other words: that's not really how genetics works...Thanks for sharing OP, this was a fascinating little dive. I, for one, will stick with the consensus view that this idiotic monster of a person was from Italy, until this researcher publishes some peer-reviewed results!
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=uZXz5-sAAAAJ...
[2] He hasn't published basically anything: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=1462143920...
[3] Here's some of his (English!) writing, which IMO speaks for itself: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364304815_COLUMBUS_...
[4] ...and this book title gives away the game, which is probably why it isn't mentioned in the linked article: https://www.casadellibro.com/libro-la-catalanitat-de-colom/9...
It's sad because 1) this sort of nationalistic chest-thumping is stuff we should have overcome, after WWII, and 2) why is it so hard to accept that an Italian navigator with a Greek surname and (maybe) Middle-Eastern blood, used Spanish money and skills to reach the edge of the known world? If anything, it should be cause for celebrating how the joint efforts of Mediterranean societies changed history forever.
As I get older, I am more and more convinced that us "Meds" are our own worst enemy.
The thing is that as our number of ancestors expands going back, the gene pool gets ever smaller. Historically we are all related in the end.
Oops.
There go the big Columbus Day celebrations, sponsored by Italian-American societies.
The fact that he was Italian and Catholic is beyond dispute.
The possibility that he might have had some Jewish blood, doesn't really change anything except for the most tribal-inclined people (who typically make for terrible historians anyway). Hell, the Mediterranean had been a big melting pot for almost 2000 years at that point, practically anyone would have had some Jewish blood, some Greek blood, some Italian blood, some Spanish blood, some North-African blood...
a.k.a an Italian
Unpublished, not peer reviewed. Some skeptik academics.
Oh brother. I’m sure most of the European world has some Jewish descendants somewhere in there blood line. Hell, even Hilter did! Why is that a big deal? As if having some Jewish descendant makes everything you ever did a Jewish accomplishment.
I don’t think anyone besides a few Spanish and Italian ultranationalists are interested in claiming Columbus’s “accomplishments.” Any evidence of Columbus being Jewish is mostly interesting for anthropological and historical reasons, not chest-beating ones.
He was probably a portuguese jew or nobleman.
This place is a a good hint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba,_Portugal
A place called Cuba in Portugal that predates the arrival to the new world by centuries.
These ideas have been floating around for a long time:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/01/19/dn...
> Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula
Wait, so the name „ghetto“ wasn’t contrived there?
Snark aside, is there any proof or qualification delivered with that quite important yet ambiguous side node, that there supposedly wasn’t any significant jewish presence in Italy?
Depends on how you define a “big population,” no? Prior to 1492 a lot of Jews had been driven out of Italy, and the remaining communities were quite small.
Italian city states took in a lot of Jewish refugees from Spain after the 1492 expulsion. The first ghetto was in 1516. But that doesn’t line up with Columbus’ chronology.
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