Hypothèse très intéressante et instrutive!……

The question: Was Columbus secretly a   Jew?

Today marks the 508th anniversary of the death of   Christopher Columbus.

Everybody knows the story of Columbus, right?  He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient.  Not quite.

For too long, scholars have ignored Columbus’ grand passion: the quest to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims.

During Columbus’ lifetime, Jews became the target of   fanatical religious persecution.  On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen   Isabella  proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain.  The edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave them   four months to pack up and get out.

The Jews who were forced to renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as “Conversos,” or   converts.  There were also those who feigned conversion, practicing Catholicism   outwardly while covertly practicing Judaism, the so-called “Marranos,” or swine.

Tens of thousands of Marranos were tortured by the Spanish   Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of friends and family members,   who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds, tied to stakes and burned   alive. Their land and personal possessions were then divvied up by the church and crown.

Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo,   Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have   concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the   suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal,   systematic ethnic cleansing.

Columbus, who was known in Spain as Crist   bal Col n and didn’t speak Italian, signed his last will and testament on May   19, 1506, and made five curious — and revealing — provisions.

Two of   his wishes — tithe one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an   anonymous dowry for poor girls — are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter.

On those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of   dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.

According to British historian Cecil Roth’s “The History of   the Marranos,” the anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer   recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative.   Thus, Columbus’ subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support the   crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.

Estelle Irizarry, a linguistics professor at Georgetown   University, has analyzed the language and syntax of hundreds of handwritten   letters, diaries and documents of Columbus and concluded that the explorer’s   primary written and spoken language was Castilian Spanish. Irizarry   explains that 15th-century Castilian Spanish was the “Yiddish” of Spanish Jewry, known as “Ladino.” At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13   letters written by Columbus to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew   letters bet-hei, meaning b’ezrat Hashem (with God’s help). Observant Jews have   for centuries customarily added this blessing to their letters.  No letters to   outsiders bear this mark, and the one letter to Diego in which this was   omitted was one meant for King Ferdinand.

In Simon Weisenthal’s book,   “Sails of Hope,” he argues that Columbus’ voyage was motivated by a desire   to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their expulsion from Spain.   Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University,   concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail   to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews’ holy Temple.

In Columbus’ day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the   Messiah to come.

Scholars point to the date on which Columbus set sail as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to sail on   August 2, 1492, a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday of   Tisha B’Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples of   Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this original sail date by one day to avoid   embarking on the holiday, which would have been considered by Jews to be an   unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally or significantly, the day he set   forth was the very day that Jews were, by law, given the choice of converting,   leaving Spain, or being killed.)

Columbus’ voyage was not, as is   commonly believed, funded by the deep pockets of Queen Isabella, but rather by   two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew.  Louis de Santangel and Gabriel  Sanchez advanced an interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets   to help pay for the voyage, as did Don Isaac Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish  statesman.

Indeed, the first two letters Columbus sent back from his   journey were not to Ferdinand and Isabella, but to Santangel and Sanchez,   thanking them for their support and telling them what he had found.

The   evidence seem to bear out a far more complicated picture of the man for whom   our nation now celebrates a national holiday and has named its capital.

As we witness bloodshed the world over in the name of   religious freedom, it is valuable to take another look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such freedoms — landing in a place that would   eventually come to hold such an ideal at its very core.

This entire discussion was on CNN Opinion.  I thought others would find it interesting

David Bancroft