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[A hat tip to my nephew Dustin for sending this article.]
Was Columbus
secretly a Jew?
By Charles Garcia, Special to
CNN
May 20, 2012
Christopher Columbus bids farewell to his son Diego at Palos, Spain, before
embarking on his first voyage on August 3, 1492.
Editor’s
note: Charles Garcia is the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a business focused on the
Hispanic market, and the author of “Leadership
Lessons of the White House Fellows.” A native of Panama, he now lives in Florida. Follow him on Twitter: @charlespgarcia. Lea este artículo en español/Read this article in
Spanish.
(CNN) – Today [May 20, 2012]
marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher
Columbus.
Everybody knows the story of
Columbus, right? He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the
Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient. Not quite.
For too long, scholars have
ignored Columbus’s grand passion: the quest to
liberate Jerusalem
from the Muslims.
During Columbus’s lifetime, Jews became the target
of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The
edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave
them four months to pack up and get out.
The Jews who were forced to
renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as “Conversos,” or
converts. There were also those who feigned conversion, practicing Catholicism
outwardly while covertly practicing Judaism, the so-called “Marranos,” or
swine.
Tens of thousands of Marranos
were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of
friends and family members, who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds,
tied to stakes and burned alive. Their land and personal possessions were then
divvied up by the church and crown.
Recently, a number of Spanish
scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and
Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus
was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of
his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Columbus, who was known in
Spain as Cristóbal Colón and didn’t speak Italian, signed his last will and
testament on May 19, 1506, and made five curious – and revealing – provisions.
Two of his wishes – tithe
one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an anonymous dowry for poor
girls – are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who
lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter.
On those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters
that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He
ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.
According to British
historian Cecil Roth’s “The History of the Marranos,” the anagram was a cryptic
substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after
the death of a close relative. Thus, Columbus’s
subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when
he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support
the crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.
Estelle Irizarry, a
linguistics professor at Georgetown University, has analyzed the language and syntax of
hundreds of handwritten letters, diaries and documents of Columbus and concluded that the explorer’s
primary written and spoken language was Castilian Spanish. Irizarry explains
that 15th-century Castilian Spanish was the “Yiddish” of Spanish Jewry, known
as “Ladino.” At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13 letters
written by Columbus
to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew letters bet-hei, meaning b’ezrat
Hashem (with God’s help). Observant Jews have for centuries customarily added
this blessing to their letters. No letters to outsiders bear this mark, and the
one letter to Diego in which this was omitted was one meant for King Ferdinand.
In Simon Weisenthal’s book, “Sails
of Hope,” he argues that Columbus’s voyage was
motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their
expulsion from Spain.
Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford
University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to
sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews’ holy Temple.
In Columbus’s
day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to
be liberated and the Temple
rebuilt for the Messiah to return.
Scholars point to the date on
which Columbus
set sail as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to
sail on August 2, 1492, a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday
of Tisha B’Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second
Holy Temples
of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this
original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday, which would
have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally
or significantly, the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were, by law,
given the choice of converting, leaving Spain, or being killed.)
Columbus’s voyage was not, as is commonly believed, funded by
the deep pockets of Queen Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos and
another prominent Jew. Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an
interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the
voyage, as did Don Isaac Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.
Indeed, the first two letters
Columbus sent
back from his journey were not to Ferdinand and Isabella, but to Santangel and
Sanchez, thanking them for their support and telling them what he had found.
The evidence seem to bear out
a far more complicated picture of the man for whom our nation now celebrates a
national holiday and has named its capital.
As we witness bloodshed the
world over in the name of religious freedom, it is valuable to take another
look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such freedoms – landing in a
place that would eventually come to hold such an ideal at its very core. [emphasis added]
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