A twenty-year genetic study of the remains of Christopher Columbus has turned conventional historical wisdom on its head by concluding that the explorer whose voyage to the New World changed the course of world history may have been a Spanish Jew rather than a son of Genoa.

This claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central role in the creation of the mighty Spanish empire came from the same community that expelled his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, from their kingdom the same year Columbus reached the Americas.

The study’s findings were announced on Saturday evening during a special program on national broadcaster RTVE, to mark Spain’s national holiday, which commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492.

José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada who led the investigation, said his analysis had revealed that Columbus’ DNA was “compatible” with a Jewish ancestry.

“We have very partial but sufficient DNA from Christopher Columbus,” he said. “We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and both in the Y (male) chromosome and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Fernando there are traces compatible with a Jewish ancestry.”

Although Lorente acknowledged that he had not been able to determine Columbus’ birthplace, he said there was a good chance he came from the Spanish Mediterranean.

“The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’ origins were in the western Mediterranean,” the researcher said. “If there were no Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the chance that he came from there is minimal. There was also no large Jewish presence on the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very weak.”

Given that there were no solid theories nor clear indications that Columbus might have been French, Lorente added, the search area was narrowed even further.

“We are left with the Spanish Mediterranean, the Balearic Islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange, because Christopher Columbus would have been written with a trace of Italian or Sicilian language. All this means that its most likely origin lies in the Spanish Mediterranean or the Balearic Islands, which at the time belonged to the Crown of Aragon.”

According to RTVE, Lorente’s findings put an end to 500 years of speculation about Columbus’ birthplace and nationality. Over the centuries it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish. After analyzing 25 possible places and then focusing on a shortlist of eight, Lorente focused on Western Europe.

However, his history-changing conclusions were received with extreme caution by some of his colleagues.

“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really assess what was in the documentary, because they did not offer any data from the analysis,” Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, told me. El Pais.

“My conclusion is that the documentary never shows Columbus’ DNA and that we as scientists do not know what analysis was performed.”

Rodrigo Barquera, an expert in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said he was surprised that the findings had been shared without prior research from others in the scientific community.

“Normally you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the piece and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it is scientifically valid or not. If so, it will be published and the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree or not. By putting it on the screen, far away from that dialogue and with all this media attention, it prevents the scientific community from saying anything about it.”

Lorente defended his actions to the same newspaper, saying: “Our team and the university have always viewed this study of Christopher Columbus and his family as a single, unified and inseparable entity, and nothing will be published until the research is completed. ”

Saturday’s revelation came two days after Lorente and his team said DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego “conclusively confirmed” that the partial skeleton kept in a tomb in Seville’s cathedral that of the famous navigator.

Although Columbus died in 1506 in the Spanish city of Valladolid, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which today is divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then taken to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American War.

If Columbus were a Sephardic Jew – Sefarad is the Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula – his identity would be an important historical irony, and something he would have happily hidden from society and his illustrious patrons.

His arrival in America paved the way for the rise of Spain’s dazzlingly rich and powerful American empire, which emerged just as Ferdinand and Isabella, who sponsored Columbus’s voyages, expelled Spain’s Jews amid anti-Semitic fears over perceived racial purity . Centuries of persecution, pogroms and regional expulsions culminated in 1492 when the country’s Jewish population was sent into exile, forced to convert to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

In 2015, Spain attempted to atone for the expulsion, calling it “a historical mistake,” by passing a time-limited law offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled at the end of the 15th century. had been driven out of the country.

About 132,000 people of Sephardic descent applied for citizenship before the offer expired in October 2019. More than half of those who applied came from Latin American countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Chile and Ecuador.