Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.

Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.

And we already know for a fact that other members of the expedition were Conversos and they were partially motivated by their desire to get out from under the thumb of the Spanish Crown. Academics have long examined the confluence of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the Columbian Exchange, and Columbus's heritage doesn't really change any of it.

also people often treat it as the beloved kind of "small person who know better even through everyone told them they where wrong and succeeded by not giving up" story

but the funny thing is the more you learn about him the more you might realize how wrong all of this is

firstly he hadn't had success because he knew better (and people didn't believe him) he had success because he insisted that his absurdly wrong calculations where correct and then had a absurd amount of luck. (In educated circles of that time not only was it well know that earth was a globe, it rough size was also known. The reason he believed he could sail to India was because he insisted that earth was _way_ smaller then it actual is (and also was believed to be in general back then). It's just people (including him!) through there was no additional landmass between the west of Portugal and ~east India. Consider sailing that route on a world where America is just more water... pretty much not viable with the tech of that time).

Secondly if anything he was a villain, to a point even the Spanish Inquisition called him out for his bad behavior against native Americans...

So I agree, no reason to give him any more attention then any of the many other half assed villains which lucked out in human history.