Christopher Columbus The Jew, Genetics & You and Me
Christopher Columbus The Jew, Genetics & You and Me
Let's rewrite all of our history with some pipettes
A recent documentary in Spain makes clear what many suspected: Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, according to the DNA.
To say that this Columbus discovery excites me is quite the understatement. You can see the aperture opening beyond the childish cultural fights of the 1619 Project or the Ivy League pose of “reparations,” both of which are meant to divide Americans rather than enrich them. Let’s go do some genetics, baby.
There are so many questions that such a DNA discovery might occasion from serious thinkers. Without further ado here are a few of mine as well as a few musings.
Was the New World project way more complicated than we’ve been led to believe? I’ve long suspected it might be a little bit more nuanced than the poems we’re told to recite as children or the denunciations you’re supposed to yell as young adults.
You’re supposed to believe that Black people were always victims in the process of slavery but there’s curious little attention paid to the fact that there were slave revolts almost immediately once enslaved Africans were brought to the New World. If some of the enslaved peoples were royalty might they have wanted to hide their bloodlines? Might they have wanted to appear to be enslaved rather than to actually be enslaved? Might some of those enslaved peoples have wanted to escape the warfare within the African continent?
These are deeply seditious questions and you’d be right in assuming I’m out of my depth here.
Still there’s a lot of things to account for in a new sort of history. That seems to be implicit suggestion in both David Hackett Fischer’s African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (2022) and from the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
A colleague and I were recently musing about the number of very quiet black billionaires we know. Maybe slavery, like colonization, results in all manner of strange aristocracies forming. Think about it: If you had slaves (or robots) might you be able to dedicate yourself to becoming world class?
If you follow the logic: maybe the banning of the slave trade in 1808 was because Americans were worried about alternate breeding programs and wanted their own domestic slave breeding program instead.
I’m getting ahead of myself here so let’s slow down.
Certainly Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand would have known that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew — they were royal, not blind — and so might the peopling of North America have been a way of ennobling the Sephardic Jews? Or was it — like Adolf Hitler and the Jewish question — a way of getting rid of the Jews? After all, aren’t a lot of Cubans and Dominicans secretly Jewish?
We’re told that Spain had these “Blood Statutes” which checked the lineage of potential migrants to the New World but it seems doubtful that their papers would be so checked. Several of Columbus’s sailors — Roderigo de Triana (who first sighted landed) and Luis De Torres — were “converso” Jews.
Would Christopher Columbus’s kids — like Adolf Hitler’s relatives — qualify for Israeli citizenship?
Are we ready to have a conversation about the Sephardic involvement in the slave trade? Wasn’t Judea Benjamin a Sephardic Jew from Louisiana?
And what about Mike Johnson, our Speaker of the House? Doesn’t he look Sephardic?
And if Johnson is Sephardic how might we consider his efforts to take over the Israeli Defense Forces with that Israeli aid package? Doesn’t it seem as if the NSA, the UAE and the French Jews are taking over Israel’s tech sector?
Is it too gauche to raise the prospect that perhaps the political fight around the Department of Homeland Security is Deseret and the Ashkenazi against the Sephardim and the American deep state?
Will those who topple Columbus’s statues be considered anti-Semitic now? Will the Israeli Defense Forces and the Antidefamation League defend the Knights of Columbus?
And when are we going to do this for Ataturk long rumored to be a Dönme (or a Sephardic Jew)?
Christopher means “Christ in your heart” but apparently it was all a ruse. Maybe a lot of what we know about slavery and the peopling of America is itself something of a misdirection.
How then to break the spell?
I’d like to imagine a world where famous figures were genetically sequenced — and you compare your own genome to theirs.
This would be a relatively fast way of building a genomics database and of cluing people into their own history. Once 23 & Me and Ancestry DNA are brought under deep state control you could even offer it as a service.
I’m sympathetic to people who want to hide their past. After all, my own family hid its Patriotic Mormon and its White Russian aristocratic sides.
I’m still trying to figure out more about that Russian side. Apparently the red hair that I sport comes from the Rurik kingdom. Who knew?
You might even argue that hiding your origins is American as apple pie. Have you read The Great Gatsby lately?
A family member told another family member of mine that we were Norwegian. I had always supposed that I was Swedish. Apparently not. Do my Swedish relatives look Swedish to you? Of course not.
My mother sent me this from one of our relatives but I doubt its authenticity. There’s a little too much legend and a little less information.
I’ll have more to say here about these family questions in a later post but if you’re interested in researching this subject with me let me know.
Christopher Columbus was suspected of being Jewish in his lifetime by the Spanish Inquisition. After his first voyage, he was questioned by the Inquisition because his sailors testified that he was performing Jewish prayers on the ship.