The Myth of Columbus’ Jewishness: Addressing the Latest DNA Evidence Claims

Recently we were greeted by loud claims by the jewish-run mainstream media that ‘Christopher Columbus was a jew’ and that this was ‘proven’ by ‘new DNA evidence’, with Reuters announcing that ‘Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, study finds’, (1) the Independent shouted ‘Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish, new DNA study reveals’ (2) and the Times of Israel screamed ‘Study finds Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe’. (3)

This wasn’t really a massive surprise to historians familiar with the jewish propaganda campaign to try and use genetics to try and sure up nonsense (and often long debunked) claims that major figures in European and world history were jewish – for example similar claims have been made on similarly dubious ‘DNA evidence’ about Adolf Hitler (4) and Eva Braun (5) among others – and as previously stated the key to understanding claims such as these is how the study is conducted, what the actual claims are (not the broad claims made by the media) and if the claims stack up with the study being used as the basis for them.

Let’s begin with the Daily Mail’s run-down of the actual claims being made:

‘Many historians have questioned the traditional theory that Columbus came from Genoa, Italy. Other theories range from him being a Spanish Jew or a Greek, to Basque, Portuguese or British.

To solve the mystery researchers conducted a 22-year investigation, led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente, by testing tiny samples of remains buried in Seville Cathedral, long marked by authorities there as the last resting place of Columbus, though there had been rival claims that he was buried in the Dominican Republic.

They compared them with those of known relatives and descendants and their findings were announced in a documentary titled 'Columbus DNA: The true origin' on Spain's national broadcaster TVE on Saturday.

'We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son,' Lorente said in the programme.

'And both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.'

Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the 'Reyes Catolicos', Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country.

Many settled around the world. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.

After analysing 25 possible places, Lorente said it was only possible to say Columbus was born in Western Europe.

On Thursday, Lorente said they had confirmed previous theories that the remains in Seville Cathedral belonged to Columbus.

Research on Columbus' nationality was complicated by a number of factors including the large amount of data. But 'the outcome is almost absolutely reliable,' Lorente said.’ (6)

Now if we read this closely, we should note that what Lorente actually says is self-contradictory in that he states that 'the outcome is almost absolutely reliable’ but also that ‘both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.’

Put another way: all Lorente is actually stating that his ‘DNA evidence’ has proven is that both sides of Columbus’ family have genetic material that is ‘compatible with a jewish origin’ not ‘is of a jewish origin’. The latter is how Lorente and the Spanish television documentary – which I have watched – are seeking to spin the findings (probably for free publicity and also because of Spain’s policy of granting citizenship to Sephardic jews as a sop to international jewry which 90,000 – largely Israeli – jews have already used to acquire Spanish and European Union citizenship as part of its ‘Golden Visa’ program) (7) which is not what Lorente’s study suggests.

Interestingly what the Daily Mail article – and almost all media outlets for that matter – conveniently ignores (and for obvious reasons) is the problem of providence of these remains in that Columbus was actually buried (in accordance with his wishes) on the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as Vicente Olaya explains in El Pais:

‘Columbus’ bones have been preserved in a tomb in Seville Cathedral since 1899, when control of Cuba passed from Spain to the United States, and Spanish authorities left Havana, where the explorer’s remains had been interred until then. A series of haphazard transfers over the centuries — first to the Spanish cities of Valladolid and later to Seville, then to Santo Domingo and Cuba — raised questions about whether the bones might have been lost or replaced during these transitions. In fact, Dominican Republic authorities maintain that Columbus’ body never left the island and is still buried in Santo Domingo’s cathedral.’ (8)

Add to this the fact that Lorente admits very little genetic material could be extracted (9) but tries to sure up his claim by saying ‘very partial, but sufficient’ (10) which is a weaselly way of saying ‘I don’t have much material to go on, but I need to imply otherwise’.

This means that there is doubt over the providence of these particular bone fragments in part because the Dominican Republic actively contests that they are not actually Columbus’ bones which they maintain are still buried in Santo Domingo and that even then Columbus’ alleged remains have been disinterred and transferred on multiple different occasions over the centuries which opens up very serious and significant doubts as to whether it is Columbus’ bones that Lorente is using.

This is the problem with Lorente’s study in that he has taken DNA evidence from a skeleton that may be Columbus’ (but is of doubtful and unproven providence) and compared it to the graves of his two (bastard) sons Diego and Ferdinand then announced that it is related.

The problem is – and what Lorente or the Spanish documentary never brings up – is that a genetic relationship between Diego and Ferdinand and the remains is both tenuous (due to the lack of a significant amount of suitable genetic material from the alleged remains of Columbus) and also need not be Columbus himself.

The issue you see is that Columbus was granted the rights to rule the Indies as ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Governor of the Indies’ with his sons and their descendants being made ‘Admirals of the Ocean Sea/Indies’ and governors (later viceroys) of the West Indies and Columbus’ grandsons – such as Luis Colon – were the Marquesses of Jamaica which means they were in the area for significant amounts of time.

Now add to that Columbus’ son Diego married Maria Alvarez de Toledo – these were Luis Colon’s parents – and they were involved in the running of Hispaniola and that the Alvarez de Toledo line has been recently suggested to be of partial converso origins based upon genealogical research. (11)

Then we already have a potential candidate for this alleged ‘possibly Sephardic’ DNA in that all that Lorente has proven is that Diego and Ferdinand were related to the individual allegedly re-buried in Seville from Santo Domingo not that Columbus was that individual. Lorente is merely assuming this and hasn’t eliminated the very real possibility of the individual concerned being another Columbus relative (which is quite likely) or a bastard child of Columbus’ by another mother as we know he had numerous sexual relationships with women other than his longtime mistress Beatriz Enriquez de Arana. (12)

A major problem with Lorente’s claims that the remains are those of Columbus is also the fact that back in 2004 when these remains were exhumed it was quickly realised by Spanish physical anthropologists that they could not have been Columbus’ given their age and size.

To quote Giles Tremlett writing in the Guardian at the time:

‘Although DNA tests have not been done, the anthropologists have already concluded that the body in Seville is too young and puny to have belonged to the rugged, hefty sailor who, depending on which version of history you prefer, was either Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.

"This was a man who never developed his musculature and died at around the age of 45," said Marcial Castro, who is leading the investigation. "Columbus was a strong man who was aged between 55 and 60 when he died."

The corpse lying under the Columbus Lighthouse monument in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, appears to be of someone around 60 years old who had taken a lot of physical exercise, he said. "I am convinced that Columbus is buried in the Dominican Republic," Mr Castro added.’ (13)

Put another way: the bones concerned are of a man roughly ten to fifteen years too young to have been Columbus and of completely the wrong physical build. Lorente doesn’t rebut this but simply ignores the issue because it automatically renders his entire case null and void.

We can already see just from this that Lorente’s claims that the bones are those of Christopher Columbus are almost certainly nonsense given that we have no solid providence for these being Columbus’ (and we know these remains were exhumed, transported and reinterred on several different occasions), that we also have numerous other potential candidates from Columbus’ family that they could be and that they are simply a decade too young and of the wrong physical build to be Columbus in the first place.

In addition to this we are quite specifically told by Lorente that his work only shows that the ‘DNA evidence’ is ‘compatible with a jewish origin’ not ‘is of a jewish origin’ which – as before stated – is not the same thing Lorente is claiming to have concluded.

The problem you see is that genetic studies of the Sephardim are quite lacking as Nogueiro et al explained in a 2015 article in ‘Frontiers in Genetics’ when they wrote that:

‘Nevertheless, very little information is available concerning Sephardic and Iberian Crypto-Jewish descendants. Data from the Iberian Peninsula, the original geographic source of Sephardic Jews, is limited to two populations in Portugal, Belmonte, and Bragança district, and the Chueta community from Mallorca.’ (14)

Commenting on Noguiero et al’s article Marcus, Ebel and Friedman pointed out that studies on jewish genetics in general are also prone to (and dogged by) false positives and poor research methods.

They explain that:

‘Many of the data reviewed suffer from methodological issues that weaken or invalidate the conclusions made. Specifically, the data are ambiguous with regards to the inference of Jewish ancestry and do not identify diagnostic patrilineal or matrilineal markers.’ (15)

‘A recent study (Tofanelli et al., 2014) finds that Jewish haplotype motifs in much previous work are inadequate for “forensic or genealogical purposes,” because ambiguity in the molecular clock, along with haplotype polyphyly, preclude their usage as “reliable Jewish ancestry predictors.” Furthermore, the cited studies do not, even amongst themselves, find a diagnostic Jewish “genetic profile.” Many of the “Jewish” haplotypes cited by Nogueiro et al. (Gonçalves et al., 2005; Pacheco et al., 2005) are pan-Middle Eastern markers—common in self-identified Jews, but also in multiple Arabic lineages. Thus, these haplotypes are of ambiguous ancestry—they could be of Jewish ancestry, Arab ancestry, or observed at high frequencies due to more complex demographic scenarios.’ (16)

In essence what Marcus, Ebel and Friedman are saying here is that there so-called ‘Sephardic jewish ancestry predicators’ are not a diagnostic jewish profile at all and are often broader markers common to much larger groups that are merely common in the Sephardim as well but are not remotely unique so cannot be used to conclude that someone or a population is jewish yet they often are.

A good example of this occurred in 2008 when a study by Adams et al in the ‘American Journal of Human Genetics’ caused a major stir when it was used by the World Jewish Congress (17) and jewish-dominated news organizations like Reuters (18) to claim that one fifth of male Spaniards had significant levels of jewish ancestry.

This was complete cobblers since – as Marcus, Ebel and Friedman explained in the quoted article from 2015 – this is almost certainly caused by false positives caused by large amounts of Spanish admixture into the ‘Sephardic’ base sample used by Adams et al as they themselves noted in their article albeit subsequently trying to downplay it:

‘It is important to consider factors that might act to elevate the apparent proportions of Sephardic Jewish ancestry that we estimate, because these values are surprisingly high. Choice of parental populations in admixture analysis can have a major effect on the outcome, and among the parental populations in our analysis, the Sephardic Jewish population has a different status compared to the two others: whereas Basque and Moroccan samples are drawn from sizeable populations that have maintained their existence in situ, with a probable low level of admixture with the other parentals, the Sephardic Jewish sample is taken from a comparatively small group of self-defined individuals whose ancestors have lived in various parts of the Iberian Peninsula and were themselves probably subject to some degree of admixture with Iberians. This potential past admixture would have the effect of increasing the perceived level of Sephardic Jewish ancestry compared to the actual proportion. The presence of the typically western European lineage hgR1b3 at a frequency of 11% in the Sephardic Jewish sample might be a signal of such introgression. To examine this, we constructed a network of hgR1b3 Y-STR haplotypes in Iberian, Sephardic Jewish, and Moroccan samples. Twelve of the 20 Sephardic Jewish R1b3 haplotypes are shared with Iberian examples, suggesting that they will indeed affect the admixture proportions.’ (19)

Putting that into context: sixty percent (twelve) of the haplotypes Adams et al used were not unique to Sephardim and common to non-jewish Spaniards and Portuguese, while forty percent (eight) were significantly linked to Sephardim but not unique to them.

In other words, Adams et al were essentially measuring Spanish/Iberian genetic material as if were Sephardic jewish genetic material then announcing to the world a figure that made little sense in the context of previous genetic estimates and studies (including their own work from 2003).

This is precisely what Marcus, Ebel and Friedman are talking about in that there is a tendency in studies of jewish genetics to claim that haplotypes common to multiple different populations are simply ‘jewish’ when they are in fact not which causes significant amounts of false positives (i.e., fake claims of jewishness).

Lorente is likely doing the same thing in that he only says ‘compatible with jewishness’ not ‘uniquely jewish’ which means in effect that the Columbus family only have genetic markers common among Sephardim but also Spaniards and Portuguese which means you ‘can’t rule out jewishness’ in effect.

This is why I referred to Lorente’s comments on this subject as weasel words earlier in this article because he is making a conclusion that his results almost certainly don’t actually support.

Now as we can see the genetics don’t support a ‘Columbus was jewish’ conclusion and nor are the bones being tested likely Columbus’. However, Lorente also claims there wasn’t a jewish community in Genoa until the sixteenth century, but this isn’t true since there was, but it is believed to have been tiny with – for example - only two jews present in 1165. (20)

Indeed, Lorente states that:

‘“The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origin lay in the western Mediterranean,” Lorente said. “If there weren’t Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the likelihood that he was from there is minimal. Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very tenuous.”’ (21)

Now even though we know that Lorente’s ‘Columbus’ bones’ (which almost certainly aren’t his) and his subsequent DNA analysis don’t support his ‘jew from Spain’ conclusion. It is worth pointing out that it isn’t true say there ‘weren’t Jews in Genoa in the fifteenth century’ given we know that while there wasn’t a major jewish community there. We do know there probably were jews present albeit in small numbers (22) and it is deliberately misleading of Lorente to claim otherwise because it is the only way he can lend support to his thesis.

Further Genoa is in the western/central Mediterranean not in the eastern Mediterranean as Lorente wants to imply because it sounds better for his case. Nor is it impossible that Columbus’ ancestry in Genoa could have been part-Spanish/Portuguese given that Spain/Portugal were significant trading partners of the Genoese Republic during the medieval era. (23)

Thus, we can see that Lorente is significantly misrepresenting both Genoese history as well as his own case in support of his alleged ‘DNA evidence’ that ‘Columbus was a jew from Spain’.

By way of ending, it is perhaps useful to remind ourselves about why the ‘Columbus was a jew from Spain’ argument has long been extremely weak and lacking in evidence compared to the general consensus that he was the son of a Genoese weaver and a devout Catholic by quoting Jonathan Sarna’s summary of where this nonsense comes from:

‘Nor, so far as I can tell, did anyone else in 1892 suggests that Columbus was anything other than what he claimed to be – namely, a religious Catholic and a native of Genoa.

The idea that Columbus was a Jew arose instead in non-Jewish circles in Spain. The man who first promoted it was an aristocratic scholar named Don Garca de la Riega, and his evidence consisted of documents (now believed to have been largely forged) which he claimed to have found in Pontevedra in Galicia. These contained names of members of the Colon family, whom he associated with Columbus, and of the Fonterossa family, whom he associated with Columbus’ wife and whose ancestors turned out to be Jewish. From these rather meagre shards, de la Riega fashioned a highly original theory purporting to solve many mysteries connected with Columbus’ name, background, and life by arguing that Columbus was really a secret Jew who had been born in Spain, not Genoa, and who had a lifetime concealing his identity.’ (24)

Put another way Lorente is another Don Garca de la Riega but rather forging his evidence; he is heavily misrepresenting both it and the history of the jews in the Mediterranean! (25)

References

(1) https://www.reuters.com/science/columbus-was-sephardic-jew-western-europe-study-finds-2024-10-13/

(2) https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/christopher-columbus-sephardic-jews-dna-b2628687.html

(3) https://www.timesofisrael.com/study-finds-christopher-columbus-was-a-sephardic-jew-from-western-europe/

(4) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-of-jewish-or-rothschild

(5) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-eva-braun-jewish

(6) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13954769/Christopher-Columbus-Jewish-Spanish-study.html

(7) https://www.imidaily.com/sponsored-feature/spains-golden-visa-and-sephardic-jewish-heritage-a-path-to-european-citizenship/

(8) https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-10-10/research-confirms-authenticity-of-christopher-columbus-remains-in-spain.html

(9) Ibid.

(10) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13954769/Christopher-Columbus-Jewish-Spanish-study.html

(11) Cf. Manuel de Parada, Luca de Tena, 2014, ‘El Contador Mayor Alvarez de Toledo y el Condado de Cervera, en Cuenca: Un linaje converso de judíos ennoblecido por privilegio’, Anales de la Real Academia Matritense de Heraldica y Genealogia, No. 17, pp. 251-280

(12) For example: John Cohen, 1969, ‘The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 139

(13) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/aug/11/spain.science

(14) Ines Nogueiro, Joao Teixeira, Antonio Amorim, Leonor Gusmao and Luis Alvarez, 2015, ‘Portuguese Crypto-Jews: The Genetic Heritage of a Complex History’, Frontiers in Genetics, Vol. 6, No. 12 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4313780/)

(15) Alexander Marcus, Emily Ebel, Daniel Friedman, 2015, ‘Commentary: Portuguese Crypto-Jews: The Genetic Heritage of a Complex History’, Frontiers in Genetics, Vol. 6, No. 261 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528994/)

(16) Ibid.

(17) https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/one-fifth-of-spaniards-have-jewish-ancestry-study-reveals

(18) https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/sephardic-jews-leave-genetic-legacy-in-spain-idUSTRE4B45II/

(19) Susan Adams el al, 2008, ‘The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula’, American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 83, No. 6 (https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(08)00592-2)

(20) https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6584-genoa

(21) https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/christopher-columbus-sephardic-jews-dna-b2628687.html

(22) See for example: Cecil Roth, 1950, ‘Genoese Jews in the Thirteenth Century’, Speculum, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 190-197; Georges Jehel, 1995, ‘Jews and Muslims in Medieval Genoa: From the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century’, Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol. 10, Nos. 1-2, pp. 120-132

(23) Gabriella Airaldi, 2012, ‘International Relations and the Colonial System in Medieval Genoa’, Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 21, p. 146

(24) Jonathan Sarna, 1992, ‘Columbus & the Jews’, Commentary, Vol. 94, No. 5, p. 39

(25) For a detailed run down of why Columbus wasn’t jewish according to the historical evidence see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-christopher-columbus-jewish