Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus (born about 1446, died 1506) - Sebastiano del Piombo. (Credit: Wiki Commons/Public Domain)
Posted on 10/14/2024 3:49:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I need to start this piece with a confession: I have made — on more than one occasion — decisions that, in hindsight, were rather unwise. But I suppose that's why they call it hindsight, no? I'm not certain, had I fully comprehended the scope and implications of a surveillance state at the time, that I would have so willingly spit into a test tube and sent my DNA off to some lab for testing, but indeed, I did. And the reason I did is rather petty.
Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus (born about 1446, died 1506) - Sebastiano del Piombo. (Credit: Wiki Commons/Public Domain)
I blame Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Actually, I blame myself and my ego and pride and pettiness, but it was her repeated assertions regarding her purported Cherokee ancestry and the subsequent revelation that DNA testing showed her to be 1/1024th Native American that set everything in motion. (Note: Currently available information now says she's between six and 10 generations removed — six generations would be 1/64th, while 10 would be 1/1024th. I am not sure why that has changed since the initial announcement in 2018, but I'm quite certain the 1/1024th was emphasized at that time because that is what prompted what I did in response.)
Upon hearing this revelation, I indignantly thought, "That's dumb — I'm probably more Native American than she is." So, I took a DNA test and discovered that, in fact, I may well be — I'm 1/256th Native American, which I suppose would put my indigenous ancestor eight generations back. Take that, Elizabeth!
In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have so willingly offered up my DNA "to a random website that now has full copyright and unregulated access to my genetic code for the rest of time."
But what's done is done — as I said, hindsight. I will say there was a silver lining to this foolhardy endeavor: Because of it, I discovered that I have two "bonus aunts," I otherwise would never have known — both of whom are lovely people. So there's that.
And since I'm one of the not-so-subtly-alluded-to dumbasses from the above video, I'll also share that, unsurprisingly, I learned that I'm 97 percent Northwestern European (72 percent British/Irish; 24 percent French/German; with a smattering of "Broadly Northwestern European) — your standard Euro-mutt. The other roughly three percent? A dollop of Spanish/Portugese — Tapas! — a dash of West African, and a smidgen of Ashkenazi Jew, Indigenous American, and North African.
What does any of this have to do with Christopher Columbus other than the fact that he's been given the heave-ho for "Indigenous Peoples Day" in some quarters? Well, I'll tell you. I'm not the only one whose DNA has been lab-tested. Columbus' has, too. Of course, he's been dead and gone for half a millennia, so he's probably not terribly worried about the surveillance state or some nefarious plot to use his genetic code for ill.
Nevertheless, the results of said testing show that Columbus may not even be the Italian he's long been thought to be, but one thing he is definitively...is Jewish.
Spanish scientists announced in a new documentary that first aired on Saturday that DNA analysis shows the 15th-century explorer Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe.
The documentary titled, "Columbus DNA: The true origin," which aired on Spain's national broadcaster TVE, showcases the research of a 22-year investigation led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente, Reuters reported.
...
"We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son," Lorente said in the documentary. "And both in the Y chromosome [male] and in the mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin."
...
Columbus was traditionally believed to have come from Genoa, Italy, though historians also had theorized him as being a Spanish Jew or perhaps Greek, Basque, Portuguese or British. Lorente's study analyzed 25 possible locations, but ultimately could only conclude that Columbus was born in Western Europe, Reuters said.
I feel like this revelation is bound to disappoint my Italian friends. You think you know a guy...
RE: I was going to ask, is it a religion or is it a race?
We can make it clearer by saying, Jews are a race and Judaism is generally their religion but not necessarily.
You can also say that a person could be a gentile ( non-Jewish ), and convert to Judaism ( see Ivanka Trump as an example ).
OMG!! For 500 YEARS he’s been an ITALIAN CATHOLIC....PERIOD!
Ashkenazi Jews are one group whose heritage is obvious in DNA, due to a long period of inmarriage in Europe.
https://isogg.org/wiki/Endogamy
But there are black and Adian Jews too. Jews are a People group. And Israel means THE PEOPLE of Israel.
Am Israel.
“PSTUPID!! He was CATHOLIC!!”
haha. So he wanted us to believe.
LOL. Me too.
doubt it
Fine ... but beside the point.
As per your post no. 2 and worth pointing out again,
“ Lorente and his team tested samples of remains buried at Seville Cathedral, long believed to be Columbus’ final resting place, though the claim had been contested”.
This is asinine. Unless one is a Nazi, having geneology that may extend back to Jews doesn’t mean you are a Jew. It means you had ancestors who were Jews.
Columbus was a Catholic, not a Jew. He was tight with the Franciscans, left his son at one of the monasteries, and spent a lot of time at those himself.
When they survived their first of three voyages after encountering a terrible storm on the way home that they thought would be the end of them, they ALL (including Columbus) vowed to make a pilgrimage to pay homage to “Our Lady” which is Catholic. They made it to Santa Maria in the Azores, and all of them, dressed in shirts only and nothing else, fulfilled their vow.
On top of that, the Catholic Church (the Franciscans) played a major role in getting Columbus in front of the King and Queen of Spain to pitch his voyage.
I think a lot of posters on this thread have it right. The people behind this are simply trying to muddy the legacy of Columbus, and slander him as a gay, transsexual cross-dresser to boot.
Columbus wasn’t perfect but he was a great man, and it is said there is nobody alive today who could have done what he did with the knowledge he had in 1492.
They said he never swore, and his deepest curse when he was angry at someone was “May God take you.”
Much of what I know about Columbus is from the works of the famous Naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, and he knew of what he spoke.
In 1939-1940, he put together the Harvard Columbus Expedition which retraced the voyages of Columbus in sailing ships, barkentine Capitana and ketch Mary Otis. After crossing the Atlantic under sail to Spain and back, and examining all the shores visited by Columbus in the Caribbean, he wrote “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, an outstanding biography of Columbus, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943.
Back in the 1930s and early forties he sailed the same waters Columbus did so he could see what Columbus saw, and where he went. He did it on a vessel simlilar in size to the Nina, which if I recall correctly, was his favorite.
Remarkable reading. “Admiral of The Ocean Sea” (Two volumes) and “The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America”, which I found extraordinarily entertaining and informative.
In “The Great Explorers”, he discusses the discovery and exploration of both North and South America by people like Giovanni da Verrazzano, Magellan, and Sir Francis Drake, just to name a few. Verrazano was butchered and eaten by natives within sight of his men on the ship, likely Caribes, who had enticed him to come ashore alone, which he did. They pounced on him and cut him up into pieces and ate him, and none of his crew could do anything about it as they were too far away. This is also a favorite thing the Left likes to “debunk” because they can’t have the Rousseauean Noble Savages doing such a thing, the white explorers have to be the evil ones. But Morison researched this, delving deep into the original documents still available in various places throughout Europe. I trust him over dipshits who want to change the day to “Indigenous People’s Day”, whatever the hell that signifies.
Some of the best and most memorable reading I have ever done.
Moses was next in line to be Pharaoh. The jews have gotten around a lot.
Indeed, Europeans are generally incredulous about Americans' ethnic tribalism, i.e., identifying oneself by one's ancestry. Where many Americans would say "I'm Italian" or "I'm Irish," a European would look at him and say you are an American of Italian or Irish heritage. I knew an officer in the French army who had an Italian family name (his grandfather had moved to France from Italy) but if you were to ask him, he would say that he was French, not Italian.
23 and me and ancestry can’t even differentiate between portuguese people and Spanish people. So, this, about Columbus doesn’t mean a thing. Both of my results were different...It’s not dna found in a crime where it identifies only one person...nationality is vague.
Perhaps instead of arguing over whether it’s a race as well as religion, how about we use the term Hebrew or is there a better term? I am not Jewish, but I do have ancestral descent from Israel. Lots of Levant genes in me and I resemble many others of original Israel descent. So, it can be both. One can be a descendant of the original Israelites but not be Jewish by faith, while some living in Israel now may not have a single drop of those who left Egypt with Moses.
This article was a horrid waste of time!
The content of Columbus' personal letters and diary entries prove most revealing. One telling difference between Columbus' personal writings and those of his contemporaries was the language it was written in, namely one unrecognizable to most native Spaniards. Linguistics professor Estelle Irizarry, after analyzing the language of hundreds of similar letters concluded that it was written in Castilan Spanish or Ladino, a Jewish version of the Spanish language, analogous to what the Yiddish language is to German.
Another revelation is in the mysterious monogram found on his the letters, written right to left. To quote Semitic linguist Maurice David, who discovered the meaning of the symbols, "On all of these... intimate letters the attentive reader can plainly see at the left top corner a little monogram which is... in fact, nothing more.... than an old Hebrew greeting....frequently used among religious Jews all over the world even to this day". The symbol he was referring to were the Hebrew letters bet and heh, which we know to stand for b'ezrat Hashem, or with God's help. Not surprisingly, Columbus' letter to the King and Queen was the only one of his 13 letters studied that did not contain this symbol.Christopher Columbus, Secret Jew by Bluma Gordon [Aish.com]
There has been a lot of speculation about both his language he used (Castilian) and his use of the “mysterious monogram” which Morison covered to a significant degree in his book “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” back in 1943 for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Castilian was the language of many seafarers of that day, somewhat of a Lingua Francas for a profession in which many men of different origins and languages were thrown together, and given Columbus’ upbringing and origins, his use of it is not only unsurprising, but expected.
As for the monogram, nobody knows, and didn’t back in 1943, though it did indeed contain an element (of the multiple elements of that “mysterious monogram”) that could be interpreted as referring to Christ.
I think the assertion is thin gruel, IMO, from a book that has a point to make to garner sales.
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