On February 22, 1498, Christopher Columbus, in his mid-40s and quite worn out,
He ordered in writing that his property in the Italian port city of Genoa be left to his family, “because that’s where I came from and where I was born.” Although most historians believe the document is a truncated record of the famous explorer’s birthplace, some question its authenticity and wonder if there is more to the story.
A decade-long investigation conducted by forensic scientist José Antonio Llorente of the University of Granada in Spain confirmed the claim that Columbus may not have been Italian, but was in fact born to Jewish parents somewhere in Spain. .
The discovery was announced as part of a special program broadcast in Spain in honor of Columbus’s arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492. It is important to remember that scientific information in the media should be approached with caution, especially when there is no peer-reviewed publication available for critical analysis.
“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really evaluate what happened in the documentary because they did not present any analysis data,” Antonio Alonso, former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, told Manuel Ancede. he said. and Nuño Domínguez of the Spanish news service El País.
“My conclusion is that the documentary never showed Columbus’ DNA and as scientists we do not know what analysis was done.”
However, historical documents are increasingly contradicted and corroborated by forensic analysis of biological records; This raises the possibility that Columbus’ own DNA could potentially shed light on his family history.
According to interpretations of chronicles written in adulthood, the man known to much of the Western world by his English name Christopher Columbus was born Christopher Columbus between late August and late October 1451 in Genoa, the bustling capital of northwestern Italy. Ligurian region.
It was only in his twenties that he found the courage to travel west to Lisbon, Portugal, to find wealthy patrons who could finance his daring attempt to take a “shortcut” eastward in the opposite direction. . .
Although most historians accept court documents stating his birthplace as Genoa, alternative succession has been speculated for decades.
A persistent rumor claims that Columbus was a secret Jew born in Spain during a period of intense religious persecution and ethnic cleansing. Defenders of the claim cite strange deviations in his will and syntactical interpretations in his letters. Now it looks like their own genes may provide new evidence.
Analyzes of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from the remains of Columbus’ son Ferdinand and his brother Diego were consistent with a Spanish or Sephardic Jewish heritage, Lorente and his research team said in a televised broadcast.
Of course, this does not categorically exclude Genoa and does not identify any place in Europe as the explorer’s birthplace. Indeed, Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century, when Columbus made his famous voyage, drowned in the Italian city seeking refuge, but few succeeded.
However, the preponderance of Lorente’s findings will make it more difficult to prove Columbus’s Italian origins and raise the question of how someone of Sephardic Jewish origin could have been born in Genoa in the 1450s.
For the results to be widely disseminated, the results need to be examined carefully, even if they cannot be convincingly reproduced in detail. Even then, there is much more to an individual’s history than genetics; This leaves open the issue of how an individual from a persecuted minority became the leader of Spanish expansion.
For now, Columbus’s story remains that of an Italian sailor both celebrated and reviled for the mark he inadvertently left on history, far from the “noble and mighty city by the sea” that caught the attention of the Spanish royal family. His house in Genoa.
Source: Port Altele
