In connection to Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day, media from the BBC and Fox to Reuters and Haaretz reported on new DNA evidence about the holiday’s original namesake. According to research revealed in a recent Spanish documentary, Christopher Columbus was not Italian, as widely assumed, but Sephardic: of Spanish Jewish lineage.

About 1 in 5 people in Spain and Portugal today may indeed be of “converso” origin: descendants of Jews or Muslims who converted to Catholicism, often under threat of death or expulsion. Regardless of whether Columbus was genealogically Jewish, though, there is scant evidence that he considered himself to be Jewish in any meaningful way. After all, he wrote approvingly of the Spanish king and queen’s decision to expel Jews from Spain in 1492.

The claim that Columbus may have been of Spanish Jewish descent is by no means certain; the “new” research has not yet been published in any academic journals. What’s more, it’s far from new.

The debate over the origins of the New World’s “discoverer” stretch back more than a century, to a time when Columbus was more routinely hailed as a hero – whereas today, he is remembered as the man who initiated European settler colonialism in the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. For decades, some Spanish and American Jewish activists claimed that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew.

At the turn of the 20th century, new immigrant groups in the U.S. were seeking acceptance as part of dominant white American society. Spaniards, Jews, Italians and Greeks seized claims that Columbus was one of their own, hoping to combat prejudice that they faced. By linking themselves to the progenitor of white “civilization” in the Americas, they sought to secure their own position on the white side of the color line, with the privileges and protections that status bestowed.

U.S. President Benjamin Harrison........

© The Conversation