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Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

theguardian.com

191–200 of 363 posts

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

#191
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…

There are many claims of discovery of the Americas (even by ice age Frenchmen), but the one that had impact was Columbus'.

Pretty sure France wasn't a thing in the ice age

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

#192
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English and Elizabeth projected their crimes onto Spain. Proof is in the pudding where is the percentage of natives highest? Where Spaniards colonized (Mexico, Bolivia, Peru)? Or the Brits (Virginia, Connecticut, all of Canada except Quebec)? (Disclaimer, I'm... I don't know what I am)

Presumably the population density in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru was much higher. Also Spanish emigration into their colonies was quite low and they were much spread out. e.g. more English/British people emigrated to the Americas in the 1600s than Spanish despite the fact that they controlled many times less territory.

Spanish empire caused a huge impact in the American continent but even so, the focus on seizing wealth and lands competed with the fact that the Spanish doctrine wanted to extend the Christendom. However anglo-saxos have established a more clear separation between colonizers and native population. I would compare what you mention about Mexico and Bolivia with how the decline of the native population in California accelerated after the independence of Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Native_Californi...

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

#194
This certainly smells like a History Channel "documentary" to me! Right up there with Ancient Aliens and the like.

- Analysis that is not shared to review

- Data that is not shared for review

- Broad assumptions that are quickly narrowed down to "facts"

- There is "more evidence but we can't show you because.... reasons"

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

#195
post #161
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…

Why is the ‘reconquista’ “ill named”? Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And becau…

> but he was great

Why was he great? How does that follow as a conclusion? By your own account of the events, his “accomplishment” is the very definition of dumb luck.

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

#196
post #17

Columbus was famously a devout catholic; his DNA suggests that he was of Sephardic Jewish descent, most likely from a family that underwent a forced conversion.

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…

There are quite a few famous converts from Judaism to Christianity. And it's not quite clear-cut, and sometimes has "strange" side-effects.

Take, for instance, Cantor (the father of the set theory), who was a second generation convert, if memory serves. Even though he was a devote Christian, he had some ties to Judaism (eg. choosing Hebrew letters for the infinite sets he worked with). And, in general he was somewhat insane, and religion played a central role in his insanity, where both Christianity and Judaism had some degree of influence.

Me, coming from a family of converts, who later became atheists, I can attest to that neither me, nor my parents ever cared for organized religion or for following tradition. But, some things remained through generation regardless. I never learned enough Hebrew to read Bible comfortably (i.e. I need to look up words in a dictionary sometimes), but I almost teared up when I watched a collection of recordings someone made of people from different national / linguistic backgrounds reading Hebrew Bible, because at that point I realized that even though imperfectly, I'm able to understand someone writing many thousands years ago. The ability to connect over centuries to your ancestors, to get even an approximate idea of what they thought and how they felt -- this is something that's very unlikely to go away with conversion or a change of one's affiliation. This is also probably the reason you find quite a few people with vague Jewish ancestry still coming to Israel. Also, there's a "weird" trend of people wanting to be berried in Israel (because of how important that specific place is in Jewish tradition), even if in life they are nothing like religious Jews.

---

Bottom line: It's just a weird question. It's like trying to calculate the percentage by which any convert has converted. Maybe, even if Columbus' parents were converts, it's still not a question anyone can answer: how much Catholic was he?

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

#197
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.

Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians? I noticed that a lot in anglo-saxon spheres. It seems to function as an othering technique. I wonder if you are aware of you doing it. Other groups don't seem to get that kind of categorisation (just look at this thread)

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

#198
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Jews do not charge interest to other Jews

Even now?

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

#199
post #134
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 don’t understand boners Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation. We admire the Pacific Islanders for s…

> brought humanity together again

This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago

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