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DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821939 - Oct 2024 (66 comments)
Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
51–60 of 363 posts
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
India must've sounded nicer than the Ottoman Empire
I thought sephardim scattered into a lot of places, including elsewhere in Europe (even places like Amsterdam) and North Africa. Not to mention conversos that stayed put.
>even places like Amsterdam
Especially places like Amsterdam.
That's why they built a giant Synagogue there.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#53> “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.” Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece? Being Jewish, and having some Jewi…
All of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish. And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
David Cross has a funny [bit][1] about whether the reverse is true.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#54> “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.” Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece? Being Jewish, and having some Jewi…
> Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing?
Judaism is based on matrilineal descent, so depending on where the DNA comes from, yes.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#55> “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.” Does anyone else think that this is a poorly argued piece? Being Jewish, and having some Jewi…
> Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing? Judaism is based on matrilineal descent, so depending on where the DNA comes from, yes.
I’m really confused by this argument. How does it account for the Apostle Paul?
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already posted below, but since you probably won't scroll down and I hate to see people get tricked: I would take this article with a massive grain of salt. Not "definitely wrong", but perhaps "of very dubious origin, making unusually strong claims based on unpublished, inconsistently-described evidence". For context, the "Columbus was Jewish" assertion is part of a broader "Columbus was secretly Spanish/Catalonian…
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion. Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsio…
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Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#57Interesting that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree to kick the Jews out ot Spain shortly after Christopher Columbus, a Sephardic Jew, reached the Americas.
This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#58Oh brother. I’m sure most of the European world has some Jewish descendants somewhere in there blood line. Hell, even Hilter did! Why is that a big deal? As if having some Jewish descendant makes everything you ever did a Jewish accomplishment.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#59[flagged]
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Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion. Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsio…
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I see what you're saying. I tried feeding this into ChatGPT and it seems like better use of commas would make all the difference.
"While that may have been true in the 1400s, when ex-Jewish Conversos sometimes held significant economic and even political power, by the 1500s things had changed. Antisemitism (and the same applied to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race rather than just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated against, culminating in the expulsion of 1609, which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for about 100 years.
In some cases, the discrimination was pretty extreme, not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the U.S., and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t too different either.
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating to the American colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as severe in the 1490s, but if Columbus’s Jewish origins (assuming they were true) had been known, he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or attracting investment for his expeditions.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre."