Does it Matter if Columbus were Jewish
Answer: no
The headline in the Guardian this morning was that Christopher Columbus might have been Spanish and Jewish. The tragedy of being a university administrator at the current moment is that my first thought was “oh no, what does that mean for campus protests.” There has been for the past decade an uptick in vandalism and relocation of statues to the explorer and renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. (This piece is an excellent source of data on Christopher Columbus politics over the centuries.) But now antisemitism could be part of the conversation, I worried. I wrote to a colleague wondering if Columbia University would change its name.
Claims (or worries) that Columbus was Jewish are old.[1] There are whole books devoted to this, including Christopher Columbus and the Participation of Spanish Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries (1894), Columbus: A Spaniard and a Jew (1913), and Was Christopher Columbus a Jew? (1925). And yet now, in an era of growing conceptualization of indigenous studies broadly, as a field that focuses on settler colonialism wherever it occurs rather than in specific instances (such as a narrowly focused Native American Studies or Māori Studies program), the alignment of Columbus with Judaism and, by extension to some, Zionism, it could get ugly. The persecution of Jews under the Spanish Inquisition won’t matter.
Investigating people’s “real” ancestry can serve many functions. In some cases, it can show patterns of migration and settlement and why place names are what they are. Or, it can help explain an individual’s actions and motives that were misunderstood at the time, as in “passing.” Or, it can shake up our received ideas about race and ethnicity, generally, and help us understand that heredity and history are related only by the contingencies that humans impose on each other, across individual lifespans and across whole civilizations. (Everyone should watch Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Emmy-nominated PBS series Finding Your Roots.) Whether DNA or a paper trail, “true” identity remains elusive. All pursuit of knowledge is, after all, a form of disruption.
Very few of us live where our ancestors lived, speak the language our ancestors spoke, operate under the political regime our ancestors operated under. Who is to blame for that? I’ll return to the question, one that isn’t often asked in this simple way, on campus. Certainly not on placards.
Ideally, evidence that Christopher Columbus was Jewish, if true, ought to be an opportunity for the kind of disruption and reflection on the contingencies of identity. If campus protests do fixate on the Jewish question, it will reveal that we haven’t taught well enough the nature of contingency.
My fundamental worry is that such a revelation about Columbus might just add another layer of rancor and typological thinking to current narrow campus discourses about Jewishness and settler colonialism.
As a dean, I care about interdisciplinary programs. I have invested heavily in launching and growing Native American Studies programs and initiatives at two different universities, partnering with local tribal communities and Nations on scholarship, education, language study, curriculum, and research. I’m not at all opposed to the renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day, even as the many conversations I’ve had with tribal leaders have encouraged me to resist the trend in academia toward grouping this work under the umbrella of “indigenous studies.” Many Native American and First Nations leaders and scholars resist the term as flattening or erasing wildly different experiences of diverse peoples in very different geographies and conditions. “Settler colonialism” is too wobbly a noun phase to do real analytical work.
I also believe that the hard, clear look at Columbus’s violent and inhumane treatment of the Taino people and establishment of the brutal encomienda system was long overdue. Washington Irving’s 1828 four volume “fanciful and sentimental” The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus did a great deal of mythmaking work in the nineteenth century. It was taught in schools to many generations of young people who subsequently saw him as a dashing navigator, not a destroyer of worlds as he ushered in new ones.
Maybe awkwardness in realizing what was left out of these myths is the best outcome of new revelations. One irony of all this is that not even a whole generation ago, Columbus’s Italian identity was a source of Italian-American pride. (Note Italian immigration to the United States was a 19th and 20th century phenomenon, not a 15th century one.) Our revised view of Columbus now has made that pride awkward.
Also this morning I, along with much of the world, cheered SpaceX’s successful Starship booster catch, which was touted as possibly bringing us closer to settling Mars. Why is that relevant here? Well, like many of today’s engineers, Columbus was in fact an extraordinary technician and navigator, as well as a fearless sailor. He didn’t watch from the shore with binoculars but got in the ship and sailed it.
In case you are wondering, here’s the list of “best navigator-sailors in human history” given to me by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5:
1. Zheng He (1371-1433): Chinese explorer who led seven major expeditions, navigating from China to Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and East Africa.
2. James Cook (1728-1779): British explorer who mapped much of the South Pacific, circumnavigated New Zealand, and was the first recorded European to reach Hawaii.
3. Vasco da Gama (1460s-1524): Portuguese explorer who found the sea route to India, navigating around Africa's Cape of Good Hope.
4. Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521): Portuguese explorer who organized the Spanish expedition that resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth, though he didn't complete it himself.
5. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506): Italian explorer who crossed the Atlantic and reached the Americas, forever changing the course of history.
6. Leif Erikson (c. 970-1020): Norse explorer believed to be the first European to reach North America, centuries before Columbus.
7. Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002): Norwegian adventurer who made several long-distance seafaring journeys in primitive vessels to prove ancient migration theories.
8. Matthew Flinders (1774-1814): English navigator who led the first circumnavigation of Australia and identified it as a continent.
9. William Bligh (1754-1817): British naval officer known for his exceptional navigation skills, particularly his 3,618-nautical-mile journey in a small boat after the mutiny on the Bounty.
10. Ibn Majid (1432-1500): Arab navigator known as "The Lion of the Sea," who wrote several important works on marine science and navigation.
Anthropic does not yet know of the new Columbus findings. But more importantly, this list might be seen as the people without whom there would have been no “settler colonialism” as universities currently understand it, for better or worse. That is, were it not for these navigators, one might ask where everyone would be on this earth. Should the drive to get to other places always be linked to the brutal things done upon arrival? Must there always be brutality.
Ideally universities are places where in one building there would be researchers working on new technologies to bring us to faraway places and in other buildings there would researchers studying past brutality to learn how not for it to be part of our future. And in yet another there would be conversation that without exploration, many of us would not be in the places we currently are, with contingent heredity and history imposed by others upon us, across uncountable lifespans and whole civilizations. And if there are any statues or memorials to Columbus they would be solely for his impressive navigational skill, that is all.
[1] See also The Mythical Jewish Columbus and the History of America’s Jews (1996), The Ethnic Background of Columbus: Inferences from a Genoese-Jewish Source, 1553-1557 (1975),