The popular concept
of Christopher Columbus is that he was an Italian explorer, navigator, and
colonizer. He was alleged to have been born in the Republic of Genoa on October
31, 1451.
At a
time when European kingdoms were beginning to establish new trade routes and colonies, motivated by imperialism and economic competition, Columbus proposed to reach the East Indies (South and Southeast
Asia) by sailing westward. This eventually received the support
of the Spanish Crown, which saw a chance to enter the spice trade with Asia through this new route. During his first voyage in
1492, he reached the New World. Instead of arriving in Japan as he had intended, he
landed on an island in the Bahamas
archipelago that he named San Salvador. Over the course of three more voyages, he visited the Greater and Lesser
Antilles, as well as the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Central
America, claiming all of it for the Crown of
Castile.
Although
he never wrote in what was said to be his native language (a Genoese version of
Ligurian) he later learned Latin, Portugese, and (most importantly) Castilian,
the language spoken in Spain. He was said to have a keen interest in the
Bible, and he used that knowledge in order to convince the Catholic monarchy in
Spain to lend him money for his voyages.
In 1485 and 1488, he appealed (unsuccessfully) for money from
King John II of Portugal. Undaunted, he then applied for assistance from Genoa,
Venice, and England. All of those appeals also proved to be futile. He finally
found a benefactor in 1489, when the Catholic monarchs of Spain gave him a
modest annual allowance, which later was increased to full support in January
of 1492. On August 3, 1492, he finally set sail on the first of his four
voyages to the New World, and land was finally sited on the morning of October
12.
To quote the old Avis ads, though, the truth about Columbus is
“not exactly” the same as the story that we are all familiar with.
During Columbus' lifetime,
Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution.. On March 31, 1492,
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled
from Spain. The Alhambra Decree especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had
never converted, and gave them four months to pack up and get out. The
final date for them to leave was July 31 of 1492, which happened to be 3 days
before Columbus first set sail for the New World.
The Alhambra Decree was a
natural progression from the Spanish Inquisition, which was established on
November 1, 1478. By the time the Inquisition was formally disbanded on July
15, 1834, an estimated 150,000 had been persecuted and tortured, and between 3000 and 5000 people had been
executed. If you take the time to read the details in the link below, you will
discover that Jews were not the only target of the Inquisition.
As a
result of the Alhambra decree and persecution in prior years, over 200,000 Jews
converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled, an
indeterminate number returning to Spain in the years following the expulsion. Those who stayed faced the death penalty. The
Jews who actually converted to Catholicism were known as “Conversos”. The Jews
who PRETENDED to convert to Catholicism, but secretly still practiced Judaism,
were known as “Marranos”, or “swine”. Inevitably, of course, some of the “Marranos”
were “outed”. Tens of thousands of Marranos were tortured by the Spanish
Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of friends and family members,
who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds, tied to stakes and burned
alive. Their land and personal possessions were then divvied up by the church
and crown.
The Alhambra Decree was
formally and symbolically revoked on December 16, 1968, a full century after
Jews had been openly practicing their religion in Spain, and synagogues were
once more legal places of worship under Spain’s Laws of Religious Freedom. In 2014, the
government of Spain passed a law allowing dual
citizenship to Jewish
descendants who apply, to "compensate for shameful events in the country's
past.. Thus, Sephardi Jews who can prove they are the descendants of those Jews expelled
from Spain because of the Alhambra Decree can "become Spaniards without
leaving home or giving up their present nationality”.
Recently, a number of Spanish
scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and
Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was actually a Marrano, whose
survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background
in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Columbus,
who was known in Spain as Cristóbal Colón and didn't speak Italian, signed his
last will and testament on May 19, 1506, and made five curious -- and revealing
-- provisions.
Two of
his wishes -- tithe one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an
anonymous dowry for poor girls -- are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed
to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter.
On
those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters that
resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He
ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.
According
to British historian Cecil Roth's "The History of the Marranos," the
anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the
synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative. Thus, Columbus'
subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when
he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support the crusade he hoped his
successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.
Estelle
Irizarry, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, has analyzed the
language and syntax of hundreds of handwritten letters, diaries and documents
of Columbus and concluded that the explorer's primary written and spoken
language was Castilian Spanish. Irizarry explains that 15th-century Castilian
Spanish was the "Yiddish" of Spanish Jewry, known as
"Ladino." At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13
letters written by Columbus to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew
letters bet-hei, meaning b'ezrat Hashem (with God's help). Observant Jews have
for centuries customarily added this blessing to their letters. No letters to
outsiders bear this mark, and the one letter to Diego in which this was omitted
was one meant for King Ferdinand.
In
Simon Weisenthal's book, "Sails of Hope," he argues that Columbus'
voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of
their expulsion from Spain. Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist
at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man
whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade
to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews' holy Temple
.
In
Columbus' day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the
Temple rebuilt for the Messiah to come. Scholars
point to the date on which Columbus set sail as further evidence of his true
motives. He was originally going to sail on August 2, 1492, a day that happened
to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av, marking the destruction of
the First and Second Holy Temples of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this
original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday, which would
have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally
or significantly, the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were, by law,
given the choice of converting, leaving Spain, or being killed.)
Columbus'
voyage was not, as is commonly believed, funded by the deep pockets of Queen
Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew. Louis
de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an interest free loan of 17,000
ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the voyage, as did Don Isaac
Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.
Indeed,
the first two letters Columbus sent back from his journey were not to Ferdinand
and Isabella, but to Santangel and Sanchez, thanking them for their support and
telling them what he had found.
The evidence
seem to bear out a far more complicated picture of the man for whom our nation
now celebrates a national holiday and has named its capital, and it is a very
complicated story for three reasons:
1)
In recent years, Columbus has been criticized for starting the
slave trade in America, even though the first slaves from Africa did not leave
until after his voyages. However, the Papal Bull of 1493 gave almost all of the
New World to Spain, the Spanish started to send slaves from Africa to America.
The first enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. The slave trade
finally peaked in the late 18th Century. The U.S. states of Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, South Dakota, and Vermont do
not recognize Columbus Day at all; but they mark the day with an alternative holiday
or observance. Hawaii celebrates Discoverer's
Day, which commemorates the Polynesian discoverers
of Hawaii on the same date, the second Monday of October. though the name
change has not ended protest related to the observance of Columbus's discovery.
The state government does not treat either Columbus Day or Discoverer's Day as
a legal holiday. State, city and county government offices and schools are open
for business. Similarly, in 2016, Vermont started celebrating Indigenous Peoples'
Day instead of
Columbus Day. Because this change was made by Governor Peter Shumlin's executive proclamation, it only
applies for 2016. In the future it would have to be issued by the sitting
governor on a yearly basis, or officially changed by the legislature in order
to become permanent.On the other hand, South Dakota celebrates the day as an
official state holiday known as Native American Day. Until 2017, Oregon did
not recognize Columbus Day, either as a holiday or as a commemoration; schools
and public offices remained open. However, on Columbus Day, 2017, Oregon
Governor Kate Brown renamed
the holiday "Indigenous Peoples'
Day," to remember these cultures and commemorate the struggles
of native peoples during European colonization. Two additional states, Iowa and Nevada, do not celebrate it as an official
holiday, but the states' respective governors are "authorized and
requested" by statute to proclaim the day each year.
Several other states
have removed the day as a paid holiday for government workers while still maintaining it either
as a day of recognition, or as a legal holiday for other purposes. These include California and Texas.
The city of Berkeley, California,
replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day in 1992, a move which has been followed by
multiple other localities including Sebastopol and Santa Cruz, California;
Dane County, Wisconsin; Seattle, Washington; Missoula, Montana;
Cambridge, Massachusetts; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Austin, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Various tribal governments in Oklahoma designate the day Native American Day, or name it after their own tribe.
Dane County, Wisconsin; Seattle, Washington; Missoula, Montana;
Cambridge, Massachusetts; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Austin, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Various tribal governments in Oklahoma designate the day Native American Day, or name it after their own tribe.
The
first celebration in America has been recorded as early as 1792, when it was
started by the Tammany Society in New York City. In 1892, President Benjamin
Harrison called on people to celebrate the 400th anniversary of
Columbus’ landing in the New World. In April 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed October 12 a Federal holiday under the
name Columbus Day. Since 1971, the holiday has been fixed at the second
Monday in October. It is
generally observed nowadays by banks, the bond market, the U.S. Postal Service, other federal agencies, most state government offices, many
businesses, and most school districts
2) One of the real reasons wanted to sail to the New World was to
find a safe place to live for his fellow Jews, which would allow them to escape
from persecution by Catholic rulers in Spain and Portugal. As a result, it is
ironic that the biggest push for the holiday in America was a result of the
efforts by the Knights of Columbus in 1934 in New York City.
3) The
year 1973 provided another example of an ironic event, when the Yom Kippur War
(which started on October 6 and ended on October 25) neatly bracketed the celebration
of Columbus Day in that year.
As we
witness bloodshed the world over in the name of religious freedom, it is
valuable to take another look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such
freedoms -- landing in a place that would eventually come to hold such an ideal
at its very core.
