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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

#291

Post by aksss »

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…

Permanent contact between the Americas and Eurasia was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Europeans coming here, it could have been the Chinese.

Whether it was a Columbus or a Chan, the introduction of diseases which the Eurasians had been swimming in for eons would have still slammed into the Americas like an apocalypse.

Even if you gave it another 300 years (after vaccines were invented) there’s no way a distribution strategy could have effectively blunted the impact. You’d need to give an additional 200 years for that to be conceivable. The odds of the Americas staying isolated for another 500 years after Columbus are nil.

My comment has nothing to do with the cultural expressions of the various groups at that moment in time. A group of Homo sapiens were cut off from the rest for tens of thousands of years for better and worse. The ‘worse’ part is that they were ferociously vulnerable to the viruses in the other population group.

“Brought together” wasn’t a phrase meant to convey happiness or agreement, it was a very literal description of two groups making permanent contact after being separated for so long. There’s not an event like that in memorable history to compare it to, as far as I know. Certainly not at that scale of isolation.

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

#292

Post by WorkerBee28474 »

netdevnet wrote: post #240
dumah wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, I have never heard of that. Which is funny because Catholicism is far older than Protestantism

They were one and the same until some people protested against the Catholic church telling people they could buy their way into Heaven - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses

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

#293

Post by pvaldes »

shsbdksn wrote: post #235
juunpp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spain was always a confederacy of tribes! Even today! The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions). That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side o…

Yup, in the North West of Spain live the "Spaniard Irish", but not everybody there is blond. Eva Longoria or Gloria Stephan descend from Asturian people and are a better example representative of Asturias women. Nobody in USA would call this women celts.

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

#294

Post by jjk166 »

alephnerd wrote: post #66
bitcurious wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492, the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain does suggest he may have not converted yet. This is one of the least compelling pieces of evidence: one doesn’t set out for a cross-oceanic voyage on a whim. He had sponsorship from the Spanish crown and lobbied and prepared for years for the journey. His journey was formally sanctioned by the th…

Conversos and Moriscos were overrepresented among the early Spanish settlers [0]. Same story in Portuguese territories as well. An exodus of Sephardim and Muslims was a win-win for the Spanish crown - they'd lose (in their eyes) a potential 5th column in their competition against the Ottoman Empire as well as have manpower to nominally stake their claim in the New World. [0] - https://www.jewishideas.org/article/betw…

At the time, the Spanish were completely unaware that Columbus would find a land that could be settled. The goal of the expedition was finding a route to East Asia to establish trade with those known-to-be-inhabited areas. Colonization was a pivot after Columbus did not find Asia.

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

#295

Post by aksss »

netdevnet wrote: post #199
aksss wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict?

There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?).

Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic.

I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.

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

#296

Post by Tainnor »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #229
Tainnor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible.

While this does sometimes happen, I do think that the more common situation is that people actually review the existing evidence and prior art and then they make a calculated (!) gamble - in fact, this is e.g. probably why the Wright brothers succeeded as pioneers of aviation as opposed to dozens of other people who would just try stuff more haphazardly and then end up dying in the process.

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

#297

Post by lazyeye »

javajosh wrote: post #284
lazyeye wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well everybody in all of history is a villain by contemporary standards. For example people are now considered villains for thinking biological men shouldnt be allowed in women's change rooms.

Historians like to say the past is a different country. Judging historical events by todays standards makes about as much sense to me as discovering life on Mars and judging their behaviour by our own standards. For me, its just a way of signalling virtue that assigns zero cost on the signaller. It's historical so you dont have to do anything (it doesnt cost you time or money) and the people being judged arent here to defend themselves or provide any nuance. Its lazy and cheap.

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

#298

Post by Tainnor »

netdevnet wrote: post #197
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #92

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)

Saying "catholics" instead of "Christians" is about the same as saying "Visigoths" instead of "Germanic tribes". I don't know why you would resist more precision. In the context of the times, it stands in opposition to e.g. "Eastern orthodox" (after the Great schism) or "Aryan".

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

#299

Post by jjk166 »

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.

If you personally are a direct descendant of Abraham, or any other specific individual who lived approximately 3000 years ago, statistically you do not carry any DNA from that ancestor. While there are some nuances relating to differences in how the different sexes pass on their genes, as a rough approximation you carry half the base pairs of each of your parents, who each carry roughly half from their parents, and so on. So you carry 1/2^n base pairs from an individual n generations before you. The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, meaning in 31 generations the odds of having a single base pair from a specific ancestor is about 50%. 3000 years is about 120 generations, so your odds of having a basepair from a specific ancestor that far back are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The only exceptions that matter on that timescale are the y-chromosome along the male-only line descent and the mitochondrial DNA along the female-only line of descent.

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

#300

Post by Tainnor »

kyleee wrote: post #245
juunpp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Red wine and tapas instead of the religion of peace?

It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition.

We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.

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