Jerusalem Report

In my Baltimore grade school, we learned the mnemonic “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” In Hebrew school, we learned that was the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. Nobody then, however, told us about an ongoing discussion over the years on the connection, if any, between Columbus and the Jews. There have been suggestions that Columbus’s voyage was financed with Jewish help, not by the sale of Queen Isabella’s jewels, as legend claims. Others say that conversos forced by the Catholic rulers to accept Christianity were aboard the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria, or that Chris himself was born Jewish.

In figuring out whether Chris was an MOT (Member of the Tribe, of course), it might be wise to get some context. At http://www.labyrinth.net.au you’ll learn that in 1473, 19 years before Columbus set sail, Jewish scientist Abraham Zacuto created the first comprehensive table combining the accurate date in the solar year and the height of the midday sun above the horizon. At http://mywebpages.comcast.net you’ll find a good description of the use of the astrolabe, an instrument for measuring the angle of heavenly bodies in relation to the horizon. And http://www.hebrewhistory.org tells us that Zacuto (1452-1515), a professor at Salamanca University, conferred with Columbus about a westward passage to the Far East.

More details than you’ll ever want to know about the voyage itself, including a list of the crews on Columbus’s three ships (some, like interpreter Luis de Torres, presumed to be Jews), can be found at the Columbus Navigation Homepage http://www1.minn.net And stories that Luis de Santangel, a Jewish merchant from Valencia, helped finance Columbus’s voyage appear at http://www.fortunecity.com So do clues that Chris may have really been a converso, including the fact that his son, Diego, placed the Hebrew letters bet and heh (for be’ezrat hashem, “with God’s help”) in the upper left hand corner of his letters - the same letters Orthodox Jews use today!

Prof. Charles Merrill, featured in the recent Discovery Channel TV series, “Columbus: Secrets from the Grave, notes at http://dsc.discovery.com that it is “possible that a mark found on some letters to his [Columbus’s] son were the Hebrew letters bet heh, but not everyone sees that.” More clues to a Jewish connection are enumerated at http://www.millersv.edu where it’s claimed that our explorer-to-be was born in Genoa to Jewish parents who had fled Spain, and refers to an unfortunately unnamed “French language book published in the 1980s” claiming that Columbus was married to the daughter of a Portuguese Jewish merchant.

There’s no one answer to the question, but the journey into the unknown - like Columbus’s voyage - is fascinating.

Howard Blas