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…
Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
111–120 of 363 posts
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#112Earlier 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…
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe.
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#113> “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.
> And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#114Another indication that Columbus was part of the Jewish community is that the Jewish financiers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez advanced interest-free loans to finance the journey.
That's actually a point against: Jewish financiers would have expected interest, surely. It's Catholic ones who had to loan without interest.
You are not logic-ing correctly. The financiers were Jewish. Jews do not charge interest to other Jews; if Columbus were not Jewish they would have charged interest. This is written in Deuteronomy 23:20-21 as well as Leviticus and Exodus and also discussed by Maimonides
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#116Earlier 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…
The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Why?
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
This is begging the question.
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#119Earlier 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…
I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ovuao/la_re...
This just confirms the point I made above about naming. What's your point exactly?