JTA — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.

The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.

In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.

Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”

“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.

The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a

© The Times of Israel