New Research Presumes Christopher Columbus Was Jewish

Was Christopher Columbus Jewish?

That was the explosive theory that was put to Spanish viewers on prime-time television on October 12, 2024, Spain’s National Day, which marks Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. Jose Antonio Lorente, a professor of forensic medicine at Granada University, and Marcial Castro, a public school teacher and historian, announced the results of a study that took them over two decades: far from being born into a middle class family of artisans in Genoa, in Italy, as is commonly believed, Columbus is likely to have been born in Spain into a Jewish family.

The search for Columbus’ origins began in the early 2000s when Castro teamed up with another teacher to research the famous explorer.  They approached Prof. Lorente, who headed a prominent team of forensic researchers who tracked criminal cases and identified bodies of those murdered by Latin American tyrants.  What if they exhumed Columbus’ body from its grave in Seville, in Spain, and analyzed the DNA, treating Columbus much as a missing person in a criminal investigation today?  Prof. Lorente took up the challenge, and together he, Castro, and others embarked on a quest to learn more about Spain’s most famous explorer.

José Antonio Lorente holds up a skull said to belong to Christopher Columbus from skeletal remains from Guadalajara. Fermin Rodriguez

They spent years gaining permission from the Roman Catholic Church to exhume Columbus’ body from Seville’s cathedral, then took samples from Columbus’ son Hernando, Columbus’ second cousin Diego, and other relatives.  (The fact that Diego was Columbus’ distant cousin was one of the new findings to come out of the DNA analysis: Columbus always maintained that Diego was his brother.)

DNA analysis shows that Columbus had both Spanish and Jewish ethnicities. “Both in the ‘Y’ chromosome and in the mitochondrial chromosome of Hernando, there are traits compatible with Jewish origins,” Dr. Lorente announced on Spanish TV.

Jewish Genetic Markers

Y chromosome genes, passed down through male ancestors, have been shown to have markers specific to Jewish families. In a recent analysis of Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Kurdish Jews, Muslim Kurds, Bedouin and Arabs from the Palestinian Authority area, scientists found that Jews were very closely related to one another genetically, much more than they were related to their non-Jewish neighbors.  Research has also shown that Ashkenazi Jews’ Y chromosome genetic markers are much more similar to those of Sephardic Jews than they are to non-Jewish Europeans.

Mitochondrial DNA, also called mDNA, is passed down only through female ancestors.  Here, too, researchers have found clear differences between the mDNA of Jews and those of others.  In fact, mDNA testing reveals that about 40% of all Ashkenazi Jewish women are descended from just four women who likely moved from the Middle East to Europe within the last 2,000 years.

Christopher Columbus seems to have had typically Jewish genes both in his Y chromosome and mDNA, indicating that he had Jewish heritage through both his mother’s and his father’s families.  This doesn’t conclusively prove that Columbus was Jewish, but it does change the way we look at his life and the secrets he was forced to keep.  Other findings show that Columbus had DNA associated with Spaniards, most likely in the region of Valencia.

Golden Age of Jews in Spain

The Jewish “Golden Age” in Medieval Spain is sometimes held up as a modern ideal of coexistence, with Muslims, Catholics, and Jews all living in supposed harmony in Spain.  The reality was somewhat different: Spanish Jews faced intense persecution and pogroms at the hands of both Christian and Muslim leaders.  Maimonides, the most famous Jewish figure from Spanish Jewry’s Golden Age, fled Cordoba with his family in 1159 after Almohad forces captured the city and forced all Jews to either convert to Islam or leave.

The mausoleum of Christopher Columbus in the cathedral of Seville, Spain

In 1391, Christian priests in Seville inflamed anti-Jewish passions; a pogrom broke out on June 6 that year which swept from Seville throughout southern Spain and into Portugal; about 50,000 were murdered in the ensuing violence.  Spanish Jews faced overwhelming pressure to convert to Christianity.

Rabbi Berel Wein, in his book Herald of Destiny: The Story of the Jews in the Medieval Era 750-1650, describes what befell these conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity.  “Initially, many, if not most, felt their conversion to be a but a sham, and attempted to retain their Jewishness, customs and traditions.  They saw themselves as Jewish in everything but name.  The Jews called them anusim, ‘those who were forced to convert.’  The Spaniards called them marranos, a pejorative term meaning ‘pig.’  They were under constant scrutiny and lived in a fog of insecurity and self-doubt, steadily becoming more Christian as time passed.  They ultimately suffered the worst barbarities perpetrated by the Inquisition.”

The Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1478 to battle heresy; it lasted until 1834.  Anyone who was suspected of being a secret Jew could be arrested and brutally tortured until they confessed.  Those who were found to be secret Jews faced spending the rest of their life in horrific prisons or being publicly burned to death.  The Inquisition arrested people for cleaning their houses on Friday (supposedly in preparation of Shabbat), fasting on Yom Kippur, cooking traditional Jewish foods, or avoiding pork.

In 1492, to celebrate their unification of Spain as a Catholic country, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed that no non-Christian could remain in their kingdom.  They set the date of August 2, 1492 - which coincided with Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning - as the day after which no Jews could remain.  Close to 200,000 Jews frantically tried to book passages on boats leaving Spain.  Jews fled primarily to Turkey, North Africa, Holland, France, Italy.  About 10% of the fleeing Jews were murdered at sea or sold into slavery by the captains they begged to take them away.  An estimated 50,000 Jews remained in Spain and kept their traditions as secret Jews.

Christopher Columbus and Spanish Jews

In the late 1400s, Spain found itself largely blocked off from eastern trading routes by the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic kingdoms.  Columbus, an admiral in Spain’s fearsome naval fleet, was charged with finding an alternate trade route to the Indies by sailing west.

He set sail on August 3, 1492 from the southern Spanish town of Palos de la Frontera with a crew that contained at least some Jews, particularly Luis de Torres (who, records show, spoke Hebrew), Juan de Cabrera, and Rodrigo de Triana.  As Columbus and the crews of the three ships he commanded across the Atlantic prepared for their voyage, they certainly watched boat after boat depart, taking terrified Spanish Jews with them.  Anyone hiding Jewish heritage, as we now know Columbus and some of his crew were doing, would have known better than to let any clue slip as to their true identity.

Yet despite his wealth and success, it was long suspected that Columbus himself was a Jew.  His chosen last name in Spanish, Colon, was considered a Jewish name, adding to the swirl of intrigue around him.  Yet Columbus never gave any indication of that, living openly as a proud Roman Catholic and filling his ship log with references to Jesus and Catholic holy days.

Suspecting Columbus’ Jewish Roots

Long before the dramatic DNA analysis of this week, academics have wondered if Columbus had Jewish roots.  Prof. Ram Ben-Shalom, the director of Hebrew University’s Center Hispania Judaica, noted that Columbus seems to have purposefully hidden his origins and speculated (correctly, it turns out) that Columbus might have been Spanish and even Jewish.  Though he presented himself as a middle-class Italian, Columbus’ Spanish was more fluent than his Italian.  Prof. Ben-Shalom suggests that by claiming to be Italian, Columbus was seeking to head off the scrutiny that someone from one of Spain’s provinces might face.

Georgetown University linguistics Professor Estelle Irizarry came to a similar conclusion in the early 2000s after analyzing Columbus’ writings.  Columbus’ native language was Catalan, Dr. Irizarry believes, and he hid that fact because he likely had Jewish ties and wanted to create a completely new, foreign identity for himself.  She also believes that Ladino, the Spanish-Judaic language so many Jews spoke at the time, influenced the way Columbus wrote: “Columbus even punctuated marginal notes and he included copious notes around his pages.  In that sense, he followed the punctuation style of the Ladino-speaking scribes.”

Some historians have also pointed to codes that Columbus used in his writing as possible evidence that he was including Hebrew phrases or references in his letters and diary entries.  Columbus often used a distinct encoded, three-line signature:

.S.
.S. A .S.
X M Y
Xpo FERENS

Historian Cecil Roth speculated that this signature was somehow meant to invoke Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Columbus also included a code on the top left corner of some of his letters and diary entries. Many Jews write the Hebrew letters bet-hey or bet-samech-dalet, both of which signify that what we are writing is with the help of God.  Historian Jonathan Sarna has asked “Could this be, as (historian) Maurice David suggested, ‘nothing more nor less than an old Hebrew greeting,’ an abbreviation of baruch Hashem, blessed be the Lord?  Many readers - myself among them - cannot see it, but once again the mystery cries out for explanation.”  (Quoted in Columbus and the Jews by Jonathan Sarna.  Commentary Magazine 94:5, November 1992.)

Finally, some historians point to Columbus’ will as proof that he was not the middle-class Italian from Genoa he claimed to be. Several documents purport to be the last will and testament of Christopher Columbus: the will that scholars believe is most likely to be authentic makes no mention of Genoa.  Though Columbus left his considerable fortune to his family, he never specifies exactly who his relatives were, using instead phrases such as “the closest relative to my family line” and “the woman closest to my family line.”  He asked that his son Diego distribute 10% of his estate to his poorest relatives and in “pious donations,” without specifying to whom those donations should go.

DNA Analysis and Columbus’ Jewish Background

It’s remarkable that the body Prof. Lorente and Mr. Castro dug up in Seville is actually Christopher Columbus. Columbus died in 1506 in Spain, but had left instructions to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, where he first landed in 1492.  He was buried instead in the Spanish city of Valladolid, then moved to Seville.  In 1537, his daughter in law received royal permission to move his body to the Dominican Republic.  His remains were moved to Cuba in 1795, then back to Seville in 1898.

This week’s DNA breakthrough finds - through analysis of his close relatives - that Columbus is indeed buried in Seville, and that his murky history was obscured for a reason.  Having DNA markers that correspond to typically Jewish genes doesn’t mean that Columbus was Jewish.  Judaism is passed down through mothers, and it’s possible that Columbus’ mother was Spanish, not Jewish.  Yet this startling new discovery changes the way we view one of Spain’s greatest heroes.  Christopher Columbus was a remarkable naval admiral; his discovery of America changed history.  Today, we can also celebrate him as a complex man with strong Jewish ties who, tragically, could never tell the world about who he really was.