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 Not "definitely wrong", but perhaps "of very dubious origin, making unusually strong claims based on unpublished, inconsistently-described evidence".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" fight they've been having for a while (which isn't surprising given the region's generally positive recollection of their "glory days" of genocide and slavery), as it's supposed to preclude him from being Italian.
Besides that, as an American who spent a semester in Spain and took a class focused on religious diversity specifically on the peninsula: your analysis is definitely possible, but there was also plenty of Jewish people practicing in secret throughout the reconquista. Thus the inquisition, even! The Reconquista took hundreds of years and saw multiple waves of anti-Jewish laws throughout the various Christian kingdoms, from taxes to restrictions to the famous expulsions, so there was plenty of precedent to learn from.
I'd be curious to hear from any actual experts on how the Spanish viewed national origin, and whether that played a significant role in religious persecution. AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones), which makes me even more dubious that Columbus would choose to repeatedly claim to be from Italy just to hide his Jewish ancestry. He was 100% verifiably a practicing Catholic, isn't that all that should have mattered to his peers? But I'm walking pretty blind here.
> AFAIK they welcomed converts with open arms (especially Muslim ones),
While that was seemingly true in the 1400s when ex-Jewish Conversos had sometimes significant economic and even political power. That had changed by the 1500s, antisemitism (same applying to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race and not just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated culminating in the expulsion of 1609 (which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for the past ~100 years).
In some cases it was pretty extreme and not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the US (and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t that dissimilar either).
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating into the American Colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as bad yet in the 1490s but had Columbus Jewish origin (assume that’s actually true) been know he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or even attracting investment for his expeditions.
I see what you're saying. I tried feeding this into ChatGPT and it seems like better use of commas would make all the difference.
"While that may have been true in the 1400s, when ex-Jewish Conversos sometimes held significant economic and even political power, by the 1500s things had changed. Antisemitism (and the same applied to Muslim converts) became much more focused on race rather than just religion.
Conversos and Moriscos were persecuted and discriminated against, culminating in the expulsion of 1609, which targeted hundreds of thousands of people who had technically been Christians for about 100 years.
In some cases, the discrimination was pretty extreme, not that dissimilar to the one-drop rule in the U.S., and the decentralized pseudo-segregation wasn’t too different either.
Descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts were even banned from emigrating to the American colonies a few decades after Columbus.
It likely wasn’t as severe in the 1490s, but if Columbus’s Jewish origins (assuming they were true) had been known, he probably would have faced significant barriers in holding political office or attracting investment for his expeditions.
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.
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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?
There are indications he may have been raised Jewish, and later converted to Catholicism. Or, converted but still close to Judaism.
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.
Further, It's also known that the family profession was weaving, a traditionally Jewish profession at the time and that Jewish given names like Abraham and Jacob were common in the family of Columbus' mother.
One of the hypothesis from the dna analysis says:
> hypothesis proposes that Columbus was a Jew from the Mediterranean port city of Valencia. His obscure early life, according to this theory, can be explained by the fact that he sought to hide his Jewish background to avoid persecution by the fervently Catholic Spanish monarchs.
> 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 the royal family in April of the year he left.
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.
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.
Also colonization didn't start in earnest until several decades later. For a generation or two the exploitation of the Americas was largely extractive.
> the exact date ordained for the expulsion of Jews from Spain
This came up in another part of the thread, but it wasn't the exact date—the decree gave Jews until the end of July [0], while August 3 (not second) is the date he sailed.
It's still close enough that it may have been related, but it's not the slam dunk that "the exact date" makes it sound like it is.
Why would anyone ever think that it could have been anything but a coincidence?
Who would have sponsored his expedition knowing that Columbus would be legally banned from entering the country if he was successful? That just seems silly…
> His choice to set sail for the New World on August 2, 1492,
He could have just moved to Italy or the Low Countries?
> does suggest he may have not converted yet.
And he did while he was in the Americas? Why would the Castilian crown sponsor an expedition led by a known Jew and even make him governor of the newly discovered territories (note that in a few decades even converted descendants of Jews or Muslims were banned from emigrating to the new world after a few decades)
