Columbus Day News

Apparently he was Jewish. Who knew?

This Sioux chief, on the other hand, is only a Jewish joke

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Genetic evidence has now established that Christopher Columbus was likely a Sephardi Jew—or, more precisely, someone of Sephardi Jewish ancestry who converted or whose ancestors converted to Catholicism. He may still have been from Genoa—both Sephardim and conversos migrated or fled there—but a Sephardi origin would explain why he wrote in Spanish, as well as some other oddities in his writing.

Once upon a time, such a finding would have been a cause for celebration among Jewish Americans—indeed, I remember as a kid relatives declaring that Columbus was probably Jewish, and saying it with pride. Italian Americans—for whom Columbus Day was originally created—might once have grumbled about “losing” their hero, even though he may still have been born in Italy and nobody disputes that he was Catholic. Today, though, I doubt anyone is terribly eager to claim Columbus for their tribe, blamed as he is for the wholesale destruction of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and, by extension, the whole of the Americas. Jews, meanwhile, are more likely to be made anxious by any reference to genetics in conjunction with Judaism, to say nothing of the possibility that they will now be blamed for a 500-year-old genocide.

I have no desire to carry water for Columbus, who was a lousy navigator (he badly miscalculated how far the Indies were from Spain, which is why multiple other prospective patrons refused to bankroll his voyage), and a horrifically cruel governor (indeed, he was removed from office by the Spanish crown for his abuses). Nonetheless I find this kind of dispiriting. Columbus did not single-handedly colonize the New World, and if he had never lived Europeans would eventually have made their way across the Atlantic with their guns, germs and steel. He was once a symbol of European dynamism and is now a symbol of European perfidy, but he’s not terribly interesting as a symbol. He is interesting as a historically important figure. We don’t need to celebrate him, but it’s worth trying to understand him.

And he was a weird enough guy that understanding him is not so simple. He believed he was an agent of providence, that his own life was prefigured in prophecy, that the end of the world was nigh, that the earth was not spherical but rather shaped like a woman’s breast, with the Garden of Eden at the nipple (somewhere around Venezuela)—the list goes on. Needless to say none of these beliefs were mainstream to either Catholicism or Judaism. Knowing more about Columbus’s background might yield insights into the source of these mystical ideas. Speaking not as a historian but as a screenwriter, if I were writing a script about Columbus, his converso background would definitely figure into my take—how could it not?

Nor do I have much patience for Jewish anxiety about testing genes for Jewish ancestry. The Jewish people are just that: a people—an extended, substantially endogamous family with many discrete branches separated by centuries of time and genetic admixture from different populations. That’s just a historical fact. Yes, someone Chinese or Nigerian or Scottish can convert to Judaism, and if they do they become exactly equal in their Jewishness to someone who traces their Jewish lineage back to the Baal Shem Tov. That’s certainly how I look at it, and how most mainstream Jewish sources look at it—but even if we elevate that normative claim to the status of a fact (which we probably shouldn’t), that wouldn’t negate any other facts, including historical ones. There can be and are Ashkenazi genetic diseases because “Ashkenazi” means something, genetically. And by the way, are those tut-tutting about how genes don’t make you Jewish ready to disown Benjamin Disraeli and Felix Mendelssohn on account of their baptisms? We’re all better off if we live in the world as it actually is rather than demanding it conform to notions we have about how we wish it were.

It’s also a fact, and a depressing one, that for a variety of historically contingent reasons the Jewish people have long been and remain a magnet for conspiratorial thinking. If you’re inclined to believe that a group of people is secretly manipulating events, the chances are you’re going to wind up concluding that those secret manipulators are Jews. So I can imagine that the news about Columbus is going to be grist for some ugly mills. But I can’t see what there is to do about that except continually reiterate the simple humanity of Jewish people. If Columbus was Jewish, that’s interesting. It doesn’t make “the Jews” responsible for the destruction of the Taíno people any more than it means “the Jews” deserve the credit for the rise of Spain to world-girdling empire or the spread of Catholicism to heretofore unknown continents. Columbus is still singly responsible for the actions of Columbus.

Similarly, if they dig up the bones of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Lavrentiy Beria and use genetic testing to determine that they, too, were Jewish—as both have been rumored at various points in time to have been—that won’t make “the Jews” responsible for the rise of secularist modern Turkey or for the horrific crimes of the NKVD. Those individual people, again, would deserve the credit and the blame for their actions. We can hope to learn more about them and what made them tick by learning about their ancestry, but they are still them, and someone else with certain similar characteristics would be someone else. Unless you find the characteristic in question suspicious to begin with, learning that this or that person had Jewish ancestry is just an interesting and hopefully illuminating fact.

I do hope that the existence of technology that enables us to examine Christopher Columbus’s genes will ultimately make it more likely that my preferred attitude takes hold. Some myths will be confirmed, others debunked; the possibility of getting actual evidence should encourage us to wait for the evidence before coming to a conclusion, and then to limit our conclusions to what is supported by evidence. That’s the promise of science generally: Columbus might believe that he could get to India by sailing west, or that the earth was breast-shaped, but reality refuted him on both counts.

But I can’t be terribly optimistic. Human beings are exceptionally good at refusing to believe things they don’t want to believe, and continuing to believe falsehoods that they cherish as true.