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Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

theguardian.com

221–230 of 363 posts

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

#221
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Islam requires reciting a short sentence with conviction.[ https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~msa/tour/ch3-6.htm ]. Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process. Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as…

> depending on who you ask > Generally not an arduous process. Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.

Oh and accepting Him as your Lord, not savior. Lord is the predicate, Savior is the consequence.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are saying most Americans come from Europe, which is why Columbus's origin is interesting to them. Your correction would be like saying "most European Americans come from Europe"

That is not true though unless you explicitly mean something different. American does not equate to European American. Most Americans come from Mexico, India and China. In that order. European countries are not even in the top 5. You are probably talking about something else but are unable to phrase it properly likely due to some internal assumptions. You are welcome to share those assumptions :)

Most Americans (62%) have European ancestry.

You are listing the most frequent origins of immigrants to America as of 2024.

I’m not sure how this is relevant to the prior discussion.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-d...

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

#223

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 r…

.. except that there isn't really a thing such as Jewish DNA. Other than that, yes we're mostly all a mixture of people travelling and migrating and settling down and moving, and they came from all over over the centuries and millennia.

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

#224

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.

There is not such thing as "Jewish" DNA. Is a culture and religion, but not a fully different race. Some genes could be in the past more represented, but it was just "Mediterranean dotation". A mix of European, African and Asian. Today is much more mixed fortunately.

If you can't prove family connection with paperwork, you can emigrate to Israel by means of DNA test which proves to the government that you are Jewish.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034383/

Couldn't find a page on the government website, but I remember reading about it there in the not too distant past.

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

#225
post #211

Spanish scholars have speculated that Columbus was a crypto-Jew. The DNA analysis could have potentially ruled out that theory. https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewis...

[flagged]

hahaha what good joke

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

#226
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…

I also don’t think it’s ill named. The moors conquered and the Catholics took it back. It doesn’t defy logic.

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

#227

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.

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)

Some Protestants hold that Catholicism is not a sect of Christianity due to a number of beliefs, such as the different requirements for salvation.

I don’t know how common this belief is in the US but I personally have encountered a number of people that believe this.

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

#229
post #99
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…

Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible. Clever and level headed people will look at an endeavour, calculate that the risk/reward is terrible and not even try. It takes a special kind of person to do this kind of stuff, and many die trying such that we don't even hear about them. The few who get lucky and succeed push humanity's reach to (literally) new frontiers and get remembered as great explorers.

So while I agree that a "lucky idiot" is often a good description for these efforts, I think it is very important that we do not diminish their importance. It took someone like Columbus to make this trip, and yes he had to get supremely lucky, it doesn't diminish from the fact that he took risks that paid off handsomely.

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