Obviously everyone is thinking about the return of the hostages today and the release of the prisoners, but it is also a federal holiday (yes, a holiday during a shutdown is a weird concept), one which has long recognized the now controversial Christopher Columbus. I wrote about my Gaza feelings yesterday, so today I will divert you with an unedited repost of my 2024 Columbus Day writing. It is especially relevant as our president has proposed that any of Columbus’ shortcomings be forgiven and forgotten.  Here goes. Hope you find it enlightening.

Today, Monday, October 13, is Columbus Day Observed or, if you prefer, Indigenous Peoples Day. Columbus Day itself, of course, is October 12, this year otherwise known as Yom Kippur.

And that is not irrelevant. Because, as you probably know, although Columbus was born in Genoa, and Columbus Day itself was originated by an Italian organization on the 300th anniversary of his “discovery” of America in 1492 (it became a federally recognized holiday exactly 100 years later, in 1892), there have always been rumors that Columbus was not really Italian.

Of course, in the 16th century, there was no nation called Italy, and Genoa was in what might be better referred to as the independent Republic of Genoa, and the language of Genoa was not today’s Italian, but a separate Romance language known as Ligurian, one of several languages spoken on the Italian peninsula. So the fact that it was reported that Columbus was not fluent in Italian is sort of a red herring as to his origins.

But there have been consistent rumors that maybe Columbus’ family was Jewish in origin, migrating from Spain to Genoa. I have read several impressively researched books on this topic, and became kinda convinced that these books were right.

Now, after a DNA study of more than twenty years, conducted by Spanish scientists, it has been declared, based on Y chromosome studies of Columbus’ two sons and what had been presumed to be (and now appears to be confirmed to be) the DNA of Columbus himself, that Columbus was Jewish, or at least of Jewish family origin. The news was released the day before Columbus Day (October 11) in a Spanish language documentary that I don’t believe is available here quite yet, but will be soon, I am sure.

Okay, where is this going? I belong to a Thursday breakfast group where, each week, some member makes a presentation on a subject of his choice. Last December, I gave a presentation on Columbus. I had a hard time figuring out how to present it without it being too fact loaded and dry, and came up with a concept of a “deathbed letter”, written by Columbus (obviously actually written by me), penned the night before he died at the young age of 55.

I know it is somewhat long for a blog post, but if you read it, I think you will enjoy it, and I know you will learn a lot. Here it is:

“Deathbed letter of Christopher Columbus

Dec 2023

It’s the 19^th of May 1506.  I am lying in my bed in Valladolid, Spain, hoping to see the dawn.  But I am sick. Very sick. This is not something new.  I have been sick off and on for almost fifteen years.  I am only 54 years old, but I feel much, much older.  I have seen so much.

After I die, my will will be read, I am sure.  It will be noted that I am leaving one half mark in silver to “the Jew at the entrance to the ghetto in Lisbon”.  That is going to raise a question that will be discussed over the centuries.  Was I Jewish.

I want to clear up this question right now.  My answer is:  I just don’t know.  After all, what is a Jew anyway?

So why am I leaving this poor man in Lisbon a token bequest? Good question. I really don’t know that, either.  In fact, I don’t know his name, and I don’t know if he is still there. How could he be?  All the Jews left in Portugal have been baptized, whether they wanted to be or not.  No one in Portugal identifies as a Jew today. But after all, what is a Jew anyway?

Let’s go back to my childhood. I was born in Genoa. At least that is what I tell everyone.  But some think I was born on Majorca. Really?  Do I speak like was born on Majorca?

Genoa was a fascinating place to grow up.  The sea in my front yard. A large city. A prosperous city.  The capital of the Repubblica di Genova. The year was 1451.  The date?  I’m not sure of that – August, September, October?  Is that very important?

Were there Jews then in Genoa? Again, that’s hard to say.  In 1451, there were lots of Jews in Spain.  And in Portugal. 

But in Genoa, there certainly wasn’t a Jewish community.  No synagogue or anything like that. But let me tell you a secret.  There were Jews everywhere. Perhaps especially in commercial ports like Genoa.  Not religious Jews, perhaps.  All Jews weren’t religious.  Some were just ordinary folk.

My father? Domenico Colombo. He was born in Genoa, too.  In 1418.  Passed away just seven years ago.  My grandfather’s name was Giovanni.  I actually don’t know if he was born in Genoa or not.  Could have been – I didn’t get a chance to know him very well. But he, like my father, was a weaver.  You know, Genoa in those days was famous for its woven wool.  Fabrics were exported everywhere, and my father was an artist in his field.  He wanted me to be a weaver, too.  I think he expected it. I gave it my best for a few years.  But – to tell you the truth – it just wasn’t for me. There was also a lot of weaving in Spain.  Most of the weavers were Jewish there.  Not sure why, but that’s a fact.

You are going to find out, I am sure, that no one ever heard me speak Italian.  That’s probably true – I rarely did, and when I did, it certainly wasn’t as a first language.  In Genoa, we spoke Ligurian.  Another Romance language – pretty limited geographically.  Might not pass the test of time. And you didn’t generally speak Ligurian when you were out of Genoa – no one would know what you were saying.  To be from Genoa, and to have contact with the outside world, you needed another language.  One, at least.

I spoke Castilian.  In fact, in my house growing up, we often spoke Castilian.  Why? I don’t know.  I never questioned it.  But it helped when I went to Spain.  I could talk to people. Although I must say that my Spanish was a bit different from the Castilian spoken in Spain.  Weird, you say.  True, and I could never understand why. But then one day, I ran into someone who said to me:  You’re Castilian is so old-fashioned.  Like you learned it one hundred years ago!  Then I realized that it must be true.  Maybe my family came to Genoa from Spain, and brought the Castilian that we still spoke with them.

Oh, I forgot to mention my mother.  Susanna Fontanarossa.  Or maybe she was Susanna from Fontanarossa.  Names are funny things. She was from Genoa, too, but from a neighborhood on the outskirts.  She was quite wealthy. My grandfather owned a lot of land. In fact, a village.  The village was called Fontanarossa (that’s the Italian name) – but was the village named after him, or he after the village?  I don’t know.  His first name was Jacob – okay, Giacomo.  Where did he come from originally?  Once more, I am really not sure. But he spoke Castilian too.

There are those who say that my family, or maybe part of my family, were at one time Jewish.  That has always intrigued me and I was interested in why they suggested that. You know, there are no Jews in Spain today, and haven’t been for about 15 years now.  In 1492 (a famous year, to be sure), my queen and my king exiled all of the Jews, or at least those Jews who did not fully convert to Christianity. But the problems for the Jews in Spain started about 100 years before that.  There were major riots (following an extensive church inspired campaign) in and around 1391.  It is said that more than half of the country’s Jews became Christian back then, leaving about 250,000.  And, at that time, some Jews who had the resources to leave Spain, left and went to various places around the world – Genoa was one, for sure.  Is this what happened to my father’s family – weavers leaving Spain to head to a commercial center like Genoa? Is this what happened to my mother’s wealthy family – with my grandfather’s family being wealthy enough to buy so much land on the outskirts of Genoa?  Did this joint background bring my parents together?

We were Catholics – at least that’s what we said we were and that’s what I think I am – but we only did what was expected of families like ours.  Were we performing any Jewish habits inside the house?  I don’t think so, but maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention.  Everyone in Genoa was Catholic. I don’t know if I ever heard the word Jewish until I left home.

I was only 14 when I first left home and took a job as a cabin boy on a ship.  For the next few years, I divided my time between land and sea, helping my father when I was home, and learning everything I could about navigation when I was at sea.

In 1473, when I was 20, I was hired by three wealthy families in Genoa to act as an agent for their commercial businesses.  I traveled all through the Mediterranean and even went to Britain and Ireland. In 1477, I went to Lisbon and found my older brother Bartholomew. He began to work for one of the families with me, one of the families that had engaged me four years earlier.  I met Felipa during this time – on a trip to Madeira – her father held an important position there; he was governor.  We married and had a son, Diego. Because of the connections Felipa’s family had, and the people I had met representing the Genoese families, I was pretty well connected. But  then I spent three or four years working on ships trading along the west African coast, but went back to Portugal in 1784, when I heard that my wife had passed away.  It was a real loss for me.

Shortly after that I met Beatriz – she was only 20 and we never married, but we had another son, Fernando.  I still see Beatriz, and I hope that my brother Bartholomew takes care of her financially from the resources he will inherit. I trust him to do this.

I admit I am a fairly smart fellow.  And if you are smart and apply yourself, you can learn a lot while you are at sea. I already had, as you know, learned to speak Ligurian, Italian, Castilian, and Portuguese.  At sea, I also taught myself Latin.  And I did a very large amount of reading.  There is so much dead time at sea that you can do all of this.  I read history, travel and geography books.  I read about astronomy and navigation. And I read the bible.  I became especially interested in the Old Testament.  And the Jews.

People are surprised that I knew so much, because I really never went to school.  But take it from me, you can learn more by yourself on a ship than in a musty classroom with a half educated teacher.

I also paid attention to what was going on in Portugal, now my home.  Portugal was trying hard to find a sea route to the east, to the Indies, so they could bring back spices and other eastern delicacies, and compete with the Muslims. For decades, they had been exploring the coast of Africa, hoping to find a sea route around the bottom of that continent.

But I had a different idea. You may think that we in the late 15^th century were pretty stupid and thought the world was flat.  No one – at least no one of any intelligence – thought that.  The world was round, a sphere.  And, having read so much, it seemed to me that it would really be feasible by sailing west across the Atlantic and winding up east, in the Indies.  Easier than going all the way around Africa.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t convince the royal family of Portugal to fund such a trip. They thought the future was to send ships around the Cape of Good Hope.  And they thought that the trip I suggested would greatly exceed my budget.  I couldn’t convince them otherwise even though I was close to most of the Portuguese cartographers (and most of them Jewish, as you may know).  Some I met through my wife; some I just met on my own.

So I approached the Spanish monarchy as well, and they thought we had underestimated the distance to the Indies. I couldn’t convince them otherwise.  They thought I had not planned correctly for the voyage. Now, I know they were right.

And we approached the English.  They had no interest at all.

Then back to Spain. In Spain, I had a lot of supporters.  I had supporters who were close to the king and queen, and I had very wealthy supporters who were willing to financially support my trip.  Guess what?  They were all Jewish.

Spain was a very Jewish country, and I enjoyed that.  Some of the Jews had converted to Christianity, but – to me and to everyone else, including themselves – they were all still Jewish. And many of them were very wealthy.

So when I went to try to convince the king and queen, all of my supporters were Jewish, or formerly Jewish, and they were my supporters and my friends.  And I was very comfortable with them.

You know there were many reasons for this trip.  There were many reasons to reach the Indies and commerce was a very important one – but not the only one. The others included acquiring new lands in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. And then there was the question of spreading Christianity to areas which had never seen a Bible.  Or maybe it was finding people who had seen the Bible, who were already Christians (or Jews) and who were simply isolated from our part of the world. The lost tribes. Or maybe we would find some relics.

But the end was clear – we were free to go, at the expense of the queen and king, and even more at the expense of the Jewish Sanangelo family, and if I was successful, Queen Isabella promised that I would be named Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and viceroy and government of all captured lands, and I would get 10% of all profits from these lands, in perpetuity.

I got together my crew.  I made sure I had Jewish crew members.  First, if we ran into the lost tribes, we wanted to be able to speak with them, so I had a Jewish translator, but there were others as well. I can’t even list them all.

 So on August 3, 1492, we left Spain, and on October 12, 1492, we landed in what we assumed were part of the Indies.  That was a big day.  Remember it – October 12.  My crew joked.  One day, they said, they are going to call this day “Columbus Day”.  Who knows if that will ever happen?

We had left Spain with three ships.  The biggest, under my command, was the Santa Maria, and the others, smaller caravels, were the Pinta and the Nina. Actually, the name of the second wasn’t the Pinta – but we called it that because it was painted very nicely; I don’t even remember the real name.

We thought we could sail straight through, but shortly after we left Spain, the Pinta had a problem and we stopped in the Canary Islands for repairs.  We had to stay several weeks in Las Palmas.  We were lucky that they were able to help us.  After all, it had been less than 10 years since the Canaries were given to Spain.  Before that, they had belonged to Portugal. Portugal was not likely to help a Spanish ship.

Everyone had a different idea about how long the trip should take us – different ideas about the size of the Earth, and about how far away the Orient would be.  And we also didn’t know precisely which direction we should take to find land earliest.  But about four weeks out, about a week before we landed, we saw birds – large birds.  So we decided it would be best to follow them, so we changed course a bit and proceeded. And on October 11, a sailor on the Pinta spotted land.

Of course, we did not know exactly where we were.  I named the land San Salvador – made sense to me, right? Ferdinand and Isabella would approve.

We knew we were on an island, not the mainland, and we spent the next few months exploring this island and others close by.  We saw that the islands were inhabited. The natives were very welcoming.

It was similar on most of the islands.  Until we got to the last one – this island was populated by very aggressive people, who didn’t want us there at all.  And we were told about still another island, where the natives were even worse.  They were said to be cannibals, and we were warned to stay away.  They were called Caribs.

We left the Indies to return to Spain in the middle of January, 1493.  We only took the Nina and the Pinta; I sailed on the Nina.  The trip back was not as pleasant as the trip forward.  We went into a big storm, and we were separated.  I didn’t know if the Pinto survived or not.

The Nina took refuge on the Azores, which were Portuguese, not Spanish.  I was afraid of trouble.  The Portuguese leader in the Azores thought the Nina was manned by Spanish Pirates and didn’t believe the story I told him.  It took some time, before the Nina and its crew were freed, and permitted to go back to Spain.  I don’t know if we could say we were prisoners while in the Azores, but we certainly weren’t at liberty.

After we left the Azores, fate intervened with more with more bad weather, and we were forced to land in Lisbon, my home of so many years but an enemy of Spain.  At first, we thought there would be trouble, because the King of Portugal, who was generous enough to meet with me, told me that we should not have undertaken the trip, that it was a violation of a treaty between Portugal and Spain, which had given the Canary Islands to Spain, but had determined that Portugal had the right to all Atlantic travel.

But he did let us return to Spain, and soon after landing we were able to meet with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in Barcelona. I had brought back four natives from the islands to Spain with me.  We also brought back some gold, and some pearls, and a few things that we never had in Spain – I am not sure what the natives called them – I just don’t remember – but maybe one was called “pineapple”, one was called “tobacco” and one was called a “turkey”.  Something like that. I told them about the beauty and the wealth of the land.

It was too bad that we couldn’t go further and had to return.  If we had been able to proceed west from these islands, I am sure we would have reached the known part of the Indies and China in short order, which would have been so important for our trade. But we didn’t.

I made three other trips to these new lands.  They were not as pleasant as the first, and I am not going to write about them here in detail.  We went with a much larger group of sailors.  We had over 15 ships.  And our hope was to continue our friendly relations with the native population and bring them to Christianity, and to set up trading posts, which could be used for future trading with China.  And of course to explore more. But things got out of hand.  This time, we ran up against all sorts of unfriendly natives – people who had very uncivilized habits.  Eating male captives. Raping and enslaving female captives.  That sort of thing.  And our men also caught natives stealing from us.  I had to allow my crew to treat the natives in their own way – to punish them harshly when appropriate, but also to teach them to be Christians at the same time.  But they never got to that stage.  And I know all of this is very controversial, but I think we only did what we had to do under the circumstances.

But that was also when I began to be sick.  For a long time on this voyage, I was bedridden. I couldn’t lead my men and they did what they did, and I must admit some did things that I did not support. Like taking natives as their own slaves, and buying and selling them.  That sort of thing.

We had discovered and explored many new islands on that trip, some of them quite large, but we hadn’t got to China or anywhere on the mainland.  That was the point of the third voyage, which followed the second in short order.

This trip was even more of a disaster.  We explored more islands, and found what we thought was the mainland, the eastern continent, with China and all that.  But it wasn’t China; we don’t know what it was. 

It was on this third trip that we brought with us a few hundred men to remain in the islands, to establish permanent settlements.

At the same time, I got very sick again, and could do little.  That’s when many of my men began to disregard me, just ignore me, to turn against me. They claimed that I had brought them to this place, and promised them they would find riches beyond their imagination, but they found none of that – only hard work.  They also accused me of ignoring the goal of religious conversion and of engaging in the slave trade myself.  Can you believe that? Some of my men were so much in rebellion that I had to have them hanged.  I didn’t realize how badly that would go over with the rest of the Spaniards who had made this third trip.

You know that’s when the Queen and King had me arrested, ordered me back to Spain and I was enchained the whole voyage.  They took away all my rights as governor of the newfound colonies, and completely violated the contract they had made with me after the first voyage.  But my health was bad, making it difficult for me to even respond.

So here I was, no longer in charge of anything, in continual pain and bad health.  We are only talking about five or six years ago.  That’s when I was faced with so many accusations:  that I wouldn’t allow slaves to be baptized because I wanted them to remain slaves, that I was trafficking in slaves, that I punished and sometimes killed both Spaniards and natives by having them starved, or beaten, or chained together, that I cut off hands and noses and ears, and more that I can’t even begin to write about.  There was a trial.  What could I do?  I confessed to some of these things, and awaited my punishment.

It could have been worse. I was jailed for six weeks.  My possessions were all removed from me.  Then the King showed some mercy and let me go.  For all that I had done for Spain, you would have thought they would have rewarded me and not made me suffer like this.  But one thing:  they said I could return to sail across the Atlantic once more.  And I did.  Just three years ago.

I had a new goal.  I wanted to sail all around the world. No one had ever done that.  But once again, the weather did us in.  We sailed the Atlantic quickly and smoothly, but then hit what I can only call a hurricane.  We were stopped for a long time, and then made our way to part of the mainland called Panama and we were told there was another ocean across the land.  We hoped to be able to sail around to it.  After all Vasco di Gama had just sailed around the southern tip of Africa for the Portuguese and had already reached the Indies that way – we have lost so much time here.

But the storms and the unfriendly natives kept at us, and we were forced to the island of Jamaica where we remained, if you can believe it, over a year, with no way out.  We had lost about 1/3 of the men who had sailed with us already and on Jamaica there was more mutiny and fighting.  Finally, the King sent some ships to rescue us.  While some of the men decided to stay longer or permanently in Jamaica, the rest of us went home to Spain.  My son and I had to pay our own way.

And that was just a little over a year ago.  And here I am.  I am at the end of my days.  That last journey, after all of the terrible times of the trial and its aftermath – no one could be expected to survive.

So, here I am.  I am sure I am on my deathbed. I need to pray to God.  I know how the Catholics do this.  I know how the Jews do this, too.  Please help me!  I have no idea what I am.  I have no idea what to do.  It has come to this.”