Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

[muriel_volestrangler]

A 20-year genetic investigation of the remains of Christopher Columbus has turned conventional historical wisdom on its head by concluding that the explorer whose voyage to the New World changed the course of global history may have been a Spanish Jew rather than a son of Genoa.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire hailed from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from their kingdom in the same year Columbus reached the Americas.
...
“We have very partial, but sufficient, DNA from Christopher Columbus,” he said. “We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and in both the Y [male] chromosome and mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Fernando there are traces compatible with a Jewish origin.”
...
“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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/13/christopher-columbus-was-spanish-and-jewish-documentary-reveals

The documentary has been criticised for not being subject to peer review, however.

[PCIntern]

1. This is nothing new

My dad discussed this back in the 1960’s and he was not an original thinker although extremely well-read.

[GreenWave]

2. Colom

Lived in Barcelona.
Returned from New World to Portugal first on first of 4 voyages.
This will cause the Line of Demarcation.
When in Spain by mere coincidence a delegation from Genoa, Italy was there but did not know him.
Colom wrote in Spanish, not in Italian.
First three ships were Marigalante*, Santa Clara (nicknamed La Nina) and La de Pinto. * Later renamed Santa Maria to obfuscate Colom's penchant for seeking prostitutes and branding his ships as such.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Genetic DNA analysis has come a long way

I kind of got turned off by it when it first arrived through ancestry sites because the categories reported were so broad. Not sure how far they've advanced. I didn't see any reason to investigate my own because I've traced my lineage back to about 1850 for all of them, and some to 1740, and some where previous generations of reputable genealogists wrote books, or archived their research with LDS, to the 1200s or about 800s. We started genealogy in this country with waves of immigration records which gave sparse information prior to about 1850. But in Europe, there was all this genealogy in old dusty records in castles, churches, graveyards. It's release and digitization is very revealing.

Someday plan to test for DNA to compare with my family tree. I think my research pretty airtight.

Sorry if I seem to have hijacked the thread. But old DNA got me started on the subject.

[LiberaBlueDem]

4. What we all know about CC is

He is the most famous pirate, ever