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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

#281

Post by JeremyNT »

dathinab wrote: post #257
slightwinder wrote: post #250

Why are people so obsessed with the ethnic of a slightly relevant guy from 500 years ago? Is there some relevance in this?

idk. USA people seem to be the only ones obsessed with him sometimes to a point as treating him as a hero from their history 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 su…

> 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.

I mean that version of the story is pretty interesting too, right?

One can see a lot of parallels between startup culture, really. You start off with a dumb idea, you pitch it over and over for years till you find a sucker, you get funding because of nepotism / connections, your dumb idea fails but you stumble across something that works on the way, then you move fast and break things (like... the entire indigenous population).

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

#282

Post by golergka »

aguaviva wrote: post #267
golergka wrote: post #263

My jewish sephardic family was compelled by country's authorities to finance the expedition only to have been expelled (with the whole community) right when he embarked, and of course never saw any of the money back. I really doubt that he had any relation to the community at all. He was just an instrument of robbing it.

That's quite a connection. Then again, the ultimate result of that effort was that the Jewish diaspora (as a whole), a fair chunk of it anyway, ended up securing places to settle in North America, infinitely safer than Europe would prove to be centuries hence. So there's that. BTW I finally followed up in regard to that guy with the beard, if it's still of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41794563

A couple of years ago I made a bot to notify me about HN comment replies, but it's kind of abandoned now. I probably should get it up and running again, checking this manually is such a hassle

https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot

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

#283

Post by mightyham »

netdevnet wrote: post #233
mightyham wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP quite literally acknowledged the injustices that happened in the sentence before the one you quoted. Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years. Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), th…

You don't acknowledge continent-scale cultural and human destruction by calling it "injustice" or "inevitable awful consequence". Do you imagine someone saying that about the current situation in Crimea? Millions of people died. It is not just an "injustice". An injustice is a state official forging evidence for nefarious purposes not destroying a country and unaliving its people let alone a whole continent. It reall…

First off, it is factually correct to say 1) Columbus' expeditions connected (for better or worse) groups of people that never had had contact before and 2) the Native Americans specifically killed by disease (which was roughly 80 to 90% of the population) was an inevitable result of travel and trade with the Americas.

You can use whatever moralizing language or comparisons to modern day conflicts you want to analyze these events because that's not what I took issue with. As I stated before, my problem with your comment was that you wrongly tried to label a descriptive statement about history as "culturally insensitive".

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

#284

Post by javajosh »

lazyeye wrote: post #269
javajosh wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that a lot of the recent dirt about Columbus comes from documents involving his (and his decedents) court case to assert ownership of the New World. In particular, I suspect that the most damning accusations come from briefs filed by opposing counsel: "In 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a l…

Yes its interesting reading all the people in this thread trying to align historical facts with contemporary ideological requirements...

But it is always legitimate to wonder about where the culture's attention is cast, and why. The present always holds great sway on how we perceive the past. Consider the example of Karl Marx, who's ideology fed his historical narrative, and vice-versa. I don't think it's coincidence that we never heard of Columbus' villainy prior to ~2005 and we never heard of his Jewishness until 2024.

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

#285

Post by dumbo-octopus »

danans wrote: post #262
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?

> Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring? I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true. I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.

You seem very unaware of how the Jewish tribe works. Genetics and family line tracing are very much a core concept.

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

#286

Post by cryptonector »

WalterBright wrote: post #164
Affric wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true. Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.

Knowledgeable Europeans knew that the Earth was round and they knew its size to within a few percent. Columbus thought that the Earth was much smaller though, and in that belief "he was an idiot". It's quite possible that he was trying to make an impossible voyage seem possible, but then again, he didn't take enough provisions, and it was almost a total loss.

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

#287

Post by dumbo-octopus »

Tor3 wrote: post #217
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?

Even if Abraham _did_ exist, at this point in time it's like trying to distinguish a drop of water from the ocean it's now living in. That's how little would have remained of Abraham's DNA so much later.

If this were true, genetic testing wouldn’t be able to identify folks as Ashkanazi Jewish, for instance. But it can. And many phenotypes do the same.

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

#288

Post by cryptonector »

SapporoChris wrote: post #186
Affric wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people brought the receipts. He fully just wishfully thought the earth was smaller. He continued to refused he hadn’t landed in the indies for the rest of his life. Idiot was a strong word. But not as brief.

Actually, "On the other hand, in a document in the Book of Privileges (1502), Columbus refers to the New World as the Indias Occidentales ('West Indies'), which he says "were unknown to all the world".[284]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Legacy So, it seems at some points he made claims he had a route to the orient and later he referred to it as 'West Indies'. Perhaps he knew the truth all along…

He might have felt the need to understate the journey in order to get it funded at all.

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

#289

Post by dumbo-octopus »

netdevnet wrote: post #207
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you literally saying they all share a single ancestor? Because that is unlikely to be true

It is indefensible to make arguments of likelihoods without and understanding of context and priors. If I listed 1,000 people from around the world at random and claimed we all had a shared great^N grandfather (with N not so large at to be trivially true), I’d need some rather significant proof to back up at that claim, and barring that we could say it was unlikely to be true.

If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.

This case is much closer to the latter than the former.

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

#290

Post by fakedang »

twelve40 wrote: post #149
fakedang wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs. Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and a…

The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.

Discrimination against the Maya happens even today, even in countries where they're part of the majority population (or close to majority).
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