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Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

theguardian.com

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Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#101

Post by toyg »

bbor wrote: post #16

...I'm a little suspicious. Spain, Portugal, and Italy have been fighting fiercely to claim cultural credit for Columbus for my whole life (hundreds of years, even?) and some of the quotes in this article display some bias on the sides of the researchers. It's possibly a result of me using Firefox autotranslate out of laziness, but: The theory of the Colombo Cristóforo, born in Genoa, raised in Genoa, educated in Gen…

It's sad because 1) this sort of nationalistic chest-thumping is stuff we should have overcome, after WWII, and 2) why is it so hard to accept that an Italian navigator with a Greek surname and (maybe) Middle-Eastern blood, used Spanish money and skills to reach the edge of the known world? If anything, it should be cause for celebrating how the joint efforts of Mediterranean societies changed history forever.

As I get older, I am more and more convinced that us "Meds" are our own worst enemy.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#102

Post by juunpp »

toyg wrote: post #94
juunpp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing. Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either. It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, thoug…

> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all ne…

Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically.

> The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.

The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round.

[1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#103

Post by kajecounterhack »

Tainnor wrote: post #99
juunpp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing. Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either. It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, thoug…

> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me. Columbus was als…

Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#104

Post by juunpp »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #92
juunpp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the…

You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.

I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#105

Post by xeromal »

juunpp wrote: post #91
LAC-Tech wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the intent of the name was a "re-conquest of Iberia from muslims by christians".

Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings. There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or…

Regardless of the term I'm glad it happened

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#106

Post by WorkerBee28474 »

juunpp wrote: post #104
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.

I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.

What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#107

Post by juunpp »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #103
Tainnor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me. Columbus was als…

Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.

I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.

Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#108

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

juunpp wrote: post #104
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.

I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.

You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#109

Post by anon291 »

juunpp wrote: post #82
shsbdksn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ill named?

Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the…

The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#110

Post by anon291 »

juunpp wrote: post #97
shsbdksn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very strange way to present Spanish history. Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity). We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of…

Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or…

There was no such thing as nations in the way we think about them today back then.
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