SURPRISE! CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS WAS A SEPHARDIC JEW
- Gonzalo Santos
- Oct 14, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 15, 2024
DNA does not lie, as opposed to all the misinformation Columbus deftly planted about his Genoese origins. Turns out he came from a Jewish family in Valencia, Spain. It's understandable he hid this. In his lifetime, that was an indelible mark exposing him to summary expulsion, torture, or death by the Spanish Inquisition. He hid it well with his Genoese navigator origin story. (Italians and Italian Americans are now left holding the bag with all those monuments to their "national hero").
Columbus also faked well his Catholic fervor. He was a merchant of death, wholly uninterested in "saving souls." By his second - much larger - voyage, he conceived financing his explorations by starting an Indigenous trade system between the "discovered" lands he landed on and Spain, bringing back caught natives to sell in the (longstanding) African slave market in Seville provided for by the Portuguese merchants. They all died either on the voyage or shortly after landing. Another source of financing would have to be procured, so Columbus orchestrated the massive deployment of enslaved natives to pan for gold in the shores of Haiti and dive for pearls in the islands off Trinidad.
The Spanish crown went along, as long as it ensured it got its “Quinto Real” (20% tax) on both the sale of captured and enslaved natives in the slave market of Santo Domingo in Española, and all the gold, pearls, and other precious gems extracted from the pan-Caribbean area. That’s why the Spanish crown banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade of Amerindians, they were more profitable as “disposable slaves” in situ in the Caribbean. But that did not stop Columbus and his settlers from enslaving and exploiting natives “off the books” throughout the Caribbean islands, using a village-by-village coerced labor form known as “naboría,” as they set out to build their early colonial settlements, plantations, roads, shallow water mines, etc., depopulating the entire region in a matter of a few years.
This two-tier native enslavement system (one official, the other contraband) was the first modern slave trade system established in the Americas, before the trans-Atlantic African slave trade, which was established to replace it once there were no more natives left to enslave in the Caribbean.
Columbus died in disgrace, accused of crimes by the brutal, enslaving settlers, who felt restrained from their excessive abuses of the natives, and then by the appalled Spanish court, who was not getting its due and saw the mismanaged decimation of “its subjects”. He was jailed and stripped of his titles. His bones were first returned to and interned in Hispaniola, then went to Cuba, then Seville.
Hernán Cortés, who also died in disgrace and banished in Spain, instead, is today interned, entirely unnoticed, in a church in Mexico City-Tenochtitlán, which he conquered in 1521. Somebody ought to run a DNA test on that guy, too. He was so Machiavellian that maybe HE's Italian!
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