I saw a post today maintaining that Christopher Columbus was in fact a Jew ... but this post destroys the flimsy claims that Columbus was Jewish ...
somebody found some “remains” of someone, somewhere, and decided they must be Columbus’ so they did a “dna test” and, voila.
Catholic is a Religon, Jewish is a People group.
His mother’s family is thought to be from Valencia and were conversos, that is, Jews who had converted to Christianity. There were many conversos in Spain, which had had a large Jewish population since the days of the Romans.
The Jews were merchants and traders in the early world and thus there were Jewish communities scattered all over the world, particularly in areas stabilized by the Roman military presence.
The first Apostles scattered throughout the world to preach the Gospel at a time prior to St Paul and the inclusion of Gentiles as a missionary target, so the places the Apostles went at that time were places that had existing Jewish communities.
Saint James (Santiago) went to Spain to preach because there were several Jewish colonies in the Roman cities there. St Paul himself was on his way to Spain at the time of his shipwreck. And a very large percentage of Spaniards have some Jewish DNA.
So yes, Columbus may have been at least partially of Jewish converso descent, but he was a Christian and a very devout one who saw evangelization as the primary goal of his voyages.
well, Chris Columbus may very well have been of Jewish origin, but his religious beliefs are of course, open to speculation despite the fact that he was outwardly a devout Christian.
I think this jockeying over pride is senseless. We can’t take credit for our parents actions, leave alone by co-religionists.