The woke are going to like this one because they detest both Zionism as a “settler colonial” crime and the European colonization of North America, which they believe was theft from the indigenous natives. Columbus’s goal and the striving for Zion/Jerusalem come together in this true slice of history.

Christopher Columbus was no Jew, though some want to believe that. In 1892, the Spanish government promoted this fiction because, as America celebrated the quadra-centennial year of his historic voyage, Spain thought it might experience a tourist boom if it identified him as a Spaniard (even a Jewish one) rather than an Italian.

And indeed, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest his maternal grandparents were Spanish Jews who fled to Italy following the tsunami of monstrous massacres of Jews in 1391 when pogroms ignited all over Spain. Perhaps half of the Spanish Jewish population over the next decade converted to Catholicism because of these horrors. Others fled the country, and evidence suggests Columbus’s forebears were among those who settled in Italy. Historians have also claimed his Spanish was better than his Italian.

Image: Christopher Columbus. Public domain.

However, there is no evidence that he was anything but a Catholic and a spiritual, religious man. He used this religious side to appeal to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to fund his belief that a voyage westward from Spain would eventually reach the Far East.

Schoolchildren in the 20th century were taught that Columbus wanted to find a new route to the Far East for the spices, although no one explained why the old route—whatever that was—was now no good. The answer only surfaced decades later when I was doing some historical research after being asked to teach a class in American Jewish history to Jewish refugees from Russia. I........

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