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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

#121

Post by juunpp »

lolinder wrote: post #118
juunpp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I did provide the evidence, but it was in a different sub-thread:

https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...

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

#122

Post by lolinder »

juunpp wrote: post #121
lolinder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I did provide the evidence, but it was in a different sub-thread: https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...

From the Google translate of that article:

> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”

> ...

> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”

So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.

I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by chucke »

franciscop wrote: post #79
chucke wrote: post #63

Spain still working on the national identity while not reconciling that its two most famous sailors were a portuguese and a genovese. You can see it in claims like these or the internal reframing of the magellan voyage as the "magellan-elcano expedition ".

OTOH there's well known and documented anti-Spanish propaganda during the centuries by basically the rest of Europe (Protestants specifically), so I start to doubt claims from both sides (disclaimer: I'm Spaniard): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend

Oh I don't dispute that. Despite the documented atrocities, the number of.native deaths by disease are greatly exaggerated, Charles V did write the precursor document of the human rights bill (after getting wind of what went about in Peru), and the Spaniards did promote marriages with natives. Studies of racial superiority the kind of which were prevalent at the end of the 19th century didn't come from Spain either.

History is not a black and white frame that we should either be proud or disgusted about. The fact that the Spanish state promotes such historical wash-ups says more about its current leaders.

FWIW the columbus expedition was considered a great failure at the time. He did fail to reach the indies by the west, and the couple of "indians" he brought to court was little compensation for the lack of lucrative spices. Reaching Lisbon first on the way back was also a disaster, prompting an immediate ultimatum by the portuguese by violation of a treaty, which led ultimately to the tordesilhas treaty which left the kingdom of castille and aragon out of the spice trade. He felt the failure so personally that he sailed back 4 times looking for a passage to the great sea beyond the new world, failing every time and becoming so embittered in the process, that he eventually lost his allies in court. It was only 40 years and lots of failed settlements after the columbus expedition that Spain hit proverbial jackpot and found the gold and silver which made the nation extremely wealthy in Europe, for a time. By then, the new world already had a new name: the Americas. The greatest of the hostorical humiliations, named after an ordinary italian cartographer, rather than the legendary captain which reached it in the first place.

Enshrining him as Spaniard will be of little consolation for his name.

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

#125

Post by lamontcg »

juunpp wrote: post #73
chipdart wrote: post #35

From the article: > “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País. So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spani…

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…

> Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.

Presumably, if he had more evidence, he would be displaying it in order to make his case better.

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

#126

Post by dumbo-octopus »

danans wrote: post #113
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 freque…

Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed?

Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.

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

#127

Post by eddiewithzato »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #69

Someday people will be having debates about the ethnicity of every prominent person in the current era. That's a depressing thought.

Nah the new wave of ancient DNA analysis since 2010 has been a game changer. Especially with euroasian history. It showed us how populations migrated and how and when admixture formed. Including identifying the yamnaya admixture in modern populations

If they actually have Columbus’s DNA intact with a good SNP resolution, it will be trivial to find out what % of jewish he is in his autosomal DNA. They can and should release it publicly as part of their paper as well. So people can confirm their hypothesis

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

#128

Post by imjonse »

juunpp wrote: post #73
chipdart wrote: post #35

From the article: > “Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País. So, baseless speculation used by the Spanish regime to claim Christopher Columbus as Spanish during the Spani…

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…

And the edict for expulsion of practicing Jews was issued in 1492, same year of Columbus's first voyage.

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

#129

Post by juunpp »

lolinder wrote: post #122
juunpp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did provide the evidence, but it was in a different sub-thread: https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...

From the Google translate of that article: > The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,” > ... > the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part o…

You kind of cherry-picked two paragraphs and butchered the article. The article's point is that Reconquista, with capital R, is not a good designation for the historical events that took place. It does use the term throughout the article, though, which maybe is a bit confusing. But if you read a couple paragraphs past the one you quoted, you'll see it restated that the term Reconquista is a 20th century invention. "The idea of Reconquista" is talking about the idea, specifically, not the term; the term, and mysticism surrounding it (like the originating battle that actually never took place as such), part of which is debunked also in the article, is modern propaganda.

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

#130

Post by danans »

dumbo-octopus wrote: post #126
danans wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 freque…

Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed? Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.

> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.

Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.

Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.

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