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Transcript:
Here in the US, I grew up learning a lot about Christopher Columbus. For instance, not sure if you all know this, but in 1492 he sailed the ocean blue and something something something, can’t remember what happened after that but long story short he did a bunch of murder and enslaving and rape and stuff.
But this week, I learned a brand new thing thanks to the BBC: “Columbus probably Spanish and Jewish, study says.” Wow! Spanish? And Jewish? Seems weird but if a “study” says he “probably” was, who am I to object?
Oh yeah, I’m Rebecca Watson, Official Person who Objects to Terrible Science and Also Terrible Reporting on Science. Welcome to my channel.
Okay, the big news up front: despite that BBC headline, there is no study. None. Not even a pre-print. Nada.
Instead, there is a TV show. A reality TV show in which contestants representing various theories about Columbus were eliminated until only the one about him being Spanish and Jewish remained. Which aired on a Spanish TV channel on Spain’s National Holiday. Hosted by a Spanish researcher. Who has spent twenty years trying to get anyone to take seriously his hypothesis that Columbus was Spanish.
According to the Spanish newspaper El País, Jose Antonio Lorente first got permission to dig up the purported remains of Christopher Columbus back in 2003, finding just a tiny pile of Columbits: 150 grams, or less than half a pound, of bone fragments, the largest of which was 4 centimeters long, or an inch and a half. He handed the Columbits over to forensic anthropologist Miguel Botella, who examined them for several days before determining that no decent DNA could be extracted, at which point Botella quit the project.
Lorente then announced that the bits would be examined by two other geneticists, both of whom told El País that they also quit the project upon discovering that the samples were too degraded to work with.
Despite this, in 2007 Lorente announced that he had conclusively proven the bits were in fact Columbus, having matched them to the purported remains of his brother.
Which is weird because in this new TV show, Lorente admits that recent analyses show the two different sets of remains are not brothers at all, but actually second cousins. But, like, they definitely maybe knew each other, okay? Look, stop asking questions and accept this brand new “finding,” which is that these remains are definitely officially Columbits, and a DNA analysis of a partial profile of the Y chromosome establishes that they are Spanish and, yes, Jewish.
Now, let’s be clear: these are genetics, so we’re talking about Jewish as an ethnicity, not a religion one would practice, right? And there ARE genetic haplogroups, or a group of genes basically, that researchers see occur more commonly in some Jewish people. So if you have those markers, there’s a chance you have some Jewish ancestors somewhere in your past. However, race and ethnicity are messy concepts that do not map perfectly with our genes, so people from nearby regions may share some of those genes without having any Jewish ancestors. As Antonio Salas, who runs the Population Genetics in Biomedicine group at the Santiago de Compostela Health Research Institute, told El Pais, “This hypothesis (that the remains represent a Sephardic Jew) is, to say the least, surprising: there is no Y chromosome that can be defined exclusively as a Sephardic Jew.”
As bad as all that is, it gets even worse when you hear that Lorente was NOT simply referring to “Jewish” as an ethnic group. The hypothesis his TV show set out to provide evidence for is that Columbus was a secret Jew, practicing Jewish customs in private while publicly pretending to be Catholic. This genetic discovery seemingly supports that, just how I found out I’m 1% Finnish which explains why I love saunas and when I turn 72 I’ll leap to my death from a cliff. Wait, that was Sweden…
But let’s forget all the DNA pseudoscience. If you picked a random person living in Spain in the late 15th century, you’d have a decent chance of, yeah, finding someone who is pretending to be Christian but is secretly Jewish. Muslims and Jews were driven from the country with extreme violence, and many people either converted to Christianity or pretended to convert to Christianity to avoid being uprooted or murdered. Is it possible that Christopher Columbus was one such “crypto-Jew?”
No. He wasn’t. You know how I know? Like, forget all the bad science. Forget the degraded DNA of the supposed Columbits, forget the faulty thinking that DNA is destiny, let’s just look at Christopher Columbus, the guy, and what we know about him. For a start, we know his name since birth was “Christopher.” Well, maybe he went by Cristoffa or Cristóbal or whatever, but the meaning is the same: Christ-bearer! As in Jesus Christ. The guy Christians love but Jews can take or leave.
“But Rebecca, what’s in a name? Jews can name their kids whatever they want! Maybe they named him that because they were hiding and that’s a clever way to make him seem Christian.” Sure. But did Christopher Columbus also need to sign his letters “xpo-ferens,” a pun on his name that emphasizes the “Jesus Christ” bit? No, he did not. Did he need to test out every new pen by writing “May Jesus with Mary be with us on the way,” as his son reported in his biography of his father? No! Why did he? Because Christopher Columbus wasn’t just a Christian. Christopher Columbus was a completely BONKERS Christian.
Here’s something I didn’t learn in school about him, even after hitting high school and learning about all the murder and rape and enslavement: Columbus didn’t just decide to sail to the New World in order to get rich. He did it because he fervently believed that he was acting as the hand of God and pledged to use his wealth for the ultimate goal of launching a new crusade that would allow him to conquer Jerusalem for the Christians. Yes. Jerusalem. I know this not because of a tiny fragment of bone that contains a DNA mutation associated with religious fervor. I know because he wrote it all down in his diaries, which have been examined by historians and dutifully cataloged. And those diaries show that he was absolutely OBSESSED with conquering Jerusalem. And you will never believe it. You’ll NEVER BELIEVE IT. But remember how many years ago I made a video explaining that American fundamentalist Christians are funding Israel because they think it will lead to the Rapture? Well guess why Christopher Columbus wanted to free Jerusalem from the Muslim infidels? That’s right: the fucking end times.
His diaries, along with reports from contemporaries, show that he was deeply, deeply religious. Even on the ship he prayed constantly, attended Sunday mass, and named every island he found with something honoring the Christian god, like Trinidad (like the Trinity) and Santa Maria.
From those diaries, as well as letters he wrote and assorted notes he left behind, historians have noted that he was primarily obsessed with two things: converting everyone in the world to Christianity and conquering Jerusalem, the two big steps that have to be taken before all the Jews can be sent to hell forever and the Christians rewarded with heavenly paradise and the final return of Jesus Christ. For instance, in the opening of his diary he laments the fact that no Christians went to China to convert everyone earlier, and rejoices that he gets to go now to see how their conversion to our Holy Faith might be undertaken.”
As usual, links to everything are found in the transcript for this video, linked on my Patreon in the description box. I highly recommend you go read some of the historians if this interests you, because I just don’t have enough time to stress exactly how fucking obsessed this guy was with converting everyone he met to Christianity and blowing up Jerusalem.
So yeah, it’s really impressive how much effort Christopher Columbus put into hiding his true Jewish nature.
In conclusion: there was no study, there’s a decent chance those bits of bone weren’t even Columbus, there probably wasn’t any DNA to extract anyway, if there WAS it doesn’t prove he was Spanish or ethnically Jewish, and if it did it wouldn’t be evidence that he was a practicing Jew because we know for an absolute fact that Christopher Columbus was an extremist Christian fruitcake. And finally, it’s maybe time for people (Italian, Spanish, Jewish, or other) trying to claim this giant piece of shit. Was he an important man in humanity’s history? Yes, undoubtedly. Was he a hero worth celebrating? Obviously not.
