Everyone knows the history of Columbus. He was an Italian explorer from Genoa, who sailed in 1492 to enrich the Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the East.
But for too long, scholars ignored a great passion of Columbus: the quest to free Jerusalem from the Muslims.
During the life of Columbus, the Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Elizabeth proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The order was specially addressed to the 800 thousand Jews who had never converted, and gave them four months to make the luggage and leave.
The Jews who were forced to renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as "converts." There were also those who feigned conversion, practicing Catholicism to the outside, while secretly practicing Judaism.
Tens of thousands of them were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. They were pressured to give the names of their friends and family members, who paraded in front of a crowd tied to stakes and burned alive. Their lands and personal possessions were then distributed by the church and the crown.
Recently, a series of Spanish scholars, such as José Erugo, Celso García de la Riega, Otero Sánchez and Nicolás Díaz Pérez, came to the conclusion that Columbus was a Jew, whose survival depended on the suppression of all evidence of his origin by the brutal ethnic cleansing.
Colon, who was known in Spain as Christopher Columbus and did not speak Italian, signed his will on May 19, 1506, and made five curious revealing provisions.
Two of her wishes - decimating a tenth of her income to the poor and providing an anonymous dowry for poor girls - are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance to the Lisbon neighborhood.
In those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of points and letters that resembled the inscriptions found on the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.
According to the British historian Cecil Roth, the anagram was a cryptic substitute for Kaddish, the prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative. Finally, Columbus left money to support the crusade that he hoped would lead his successors to liberate the Holy Land.
In Simon Wiesenthal's book, he argues that Columbus's voyage was motivated by the desire to find a safe haven for Jews in light of his expulsion from Spain. Similarly, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose goal was to navigate to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to recover Jerusalem and rebuild the sacred temple of the Jews.
In the days of Columbus, the Jews widely believed that Jerusalem should be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the arrival of the Messiah.
Scholars point to the date when Columbus sailed as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to set sail on August 2, 1492, a day that coincided with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temple of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed the original date to avoid embarking on the party, which would have been considered by the Jews a day of bad luck to set sail.
Columbus's trip was not, as is commonly believed, financed by the pockets of Queen Elizabeth, but rather by two converts: Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez gave him an interest-free loan of 17,000 ducats from his own pockets to help to pay the trip, as did Isaac Isaac Abarbanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.
In fact, the first two letters that Columbus sent back from his trip were not to the Catholic Monarchs, but to Santángel and Sánchez, thanking them for their support.
Source: State of Israel
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