Was Columbus Jewish? Identity, Memory, and the Politics of Reputation

Was Christopher Columbus Jewish? The question refuses to die, and that persistence tells us as much about our changing views of Columbus as it does about Columbus himself. His voyages were “paid in Jewish blood,” launched as Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, and they inaugurated a catastrophic era for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Those who see him as heroic explorer, and those who see him as architect of genocide, inevitably approach his Jewishness very differently. The debate is less a neutral historical inquiry than a mirror reflecting our anxieties about identity and responsibility.

The modern theory that Columbus was a secret Jew did not appear organically from fifteenth‑century documentation. In fact, such theory appeared for the first time when the Spanish writer and public figure García de la Riega proposed in a conference in 1898 and then in a 1914 book, Colón Español: Su Origen y Patria, a bold solution to the mysteries surrounding Columbus’s name, origins, and life story. Columbus, he claimed, was not a Genoese wool‑weaver’s son, but a Spaniard, a Galician from Pontevedra, of converso background who spent his life concealing his Jewish identity. This reframing, intended to claim Columbus for Spain, appeared at a moment when national and ethnic claims over “great men” served political and ideological needs.

In what follows and in the same vein, proponents of a Jewish Columbus, both Jewish and non-Jewish, assembled a thick bundle of circumstantial evidentiary clues. They note his closeness to Jewish and converso circles in Portugal and Spain, his ease with the Jewish communities that helped finance and facilitate his voyages, and his surname Columbo, associated by some with the Hebrew Yonah. Genoa itself, they point out, was a destination for Iberian conversos; his father’s profession as a weaver fit trades open to Jews there; and Columbus spoke Spanish, not Italian, as his mother tongue. In addition, Columbus delayed his voyage from August 2 to 3, the very day after Tisha b’Av, when both the Jewish fast of mourning and the expulsion from Spain occurred. Finally, his will included bequests to charity in general and specifically to the gatekeepers of the Jewish quarter in Lisbon. To those inclined to see him as a crypto‑Jew, these details read like the outline of a hidden biography.

From there, the argument drifted into the realm of the mystical and symbolic. Close study of Columbus’s surviving letters to his son Diogo has led some to see in certain marks a veiled B”H, “with God’s help,” the traditional Hebrew invocation that many Jews place at the head of documents. Likewise, his peculiar triangular signature was seen as a half‑formed Magen David or even an allusion to the Kaddish prayer, a coded signal of Jewish identity and mourning. In these readings the line between historical analysis and pattern‑seeking becomes thin as such designs might just as easily be scribal flourish or idiosyncratic vanity.

More revealing are the ways twentieth‑century writers projected “Jewish character” onto Columbus. Jacob Wassermann, in his 1930 work Columbus: Don Quixote of the Seas, offers an almost psychoanalytic catalogue of Jewish traits: a certain soft‑heartedness, a tendency to seek sentimental rather than practical solutions, and a timidity before far‑reaching responsibilities, rooted, he suggests, in an age‑old fear of irrevocable decrees. For Wassermann, these are quintessentially Jewish features. Columbus here becomes a canvas on which to sketch a quasi‑racial psychology, and the exercise tells us more about interwar Jewish stereotypes than about Columbus himself.

Salvador de Madariaga’s 1940 biography Vida del Muy Magnífico Señor Don Cristóbal Colón intensifies this approach. Madariaga describes an alleged Jewish “fascination for gold and precious stones,” in “deep harmony with the soul of Israel,” and links it to Columbus’s own attitudes. He dwells on what he calls a Jewish “contractual sense,” a mentality that makes every life event into a transaction demanding a precise quid pro quo. When he turns to Columbus’s sexual life, Madariaga contrasts Christian and Jewish sexual morality: a Christian woman who yielded outside marriage was certainly “good‑for‑nothing,” while a Jewish girl in the same circumstances might still be “a thoroughly decent soul.” In this framework, the question “Was Columbus Jewish?” functions less as a historical query and more as a pretext for exploring fantasies and fears about Jews.

Finally, more recently, a study led by Miguel Lorente Acosta, a forensic doctor, opened yet another front in this debate. The study focused on DNA samples from remains in Seville Cathedral tentatively associated with Columbus’s son Hernando and claimed that their genetic profile fits a Spanish Mediterranean origin and is compatible with Jewish ancestry. The focus and results of this study have been widely discredited on scientific grounds:  use of highly deteriorated DNA samples: non-disclosure of data; unsound methodologies and techniques; and conclusions that not subjected to independent review. The way in which the study was made public is very telling as to its intent. A study in the making for over 22 years was suddenly featured, in October 2024, on a documentary on Spanish national TV and its discredited results grossly misrepresented as showing conclusively that Columbus was Jewish. The parallel is inescapable: Jews today perpetrating or supporting genocidal Israel in Gaza have a famous forerunner, Jewish genocidal Christopher Columbus.

Against all these speculative constructions stand more sober voices. In 1893, a mere five years before García de la Riega publicized his theory, Meyer Kayserling, the German Jewish historian, produced the most authoritative early study of Columbus and the Jews simply titled Christopher Columbus. Kayserling had no doubt that Columbus was what he claimed to be, i.e., a devout Catholic from Genoa. Furthermore, he was sharply critical of Columbus’s religious fanaticism and of his lack of sympathy for the Jews expelled from Spain at the very moment he set sail. For him, Columbus’s significance for Jewish history lay in the tragic irony of timing, as the same crown that financed overseas discovery violently uprooted Iberian Jewry, and the interplay of both events.

It is in this spirit that Jonathan Sarna, a leading American Jewish historian, in his essay The Mythical Jewish Columbus and the History of America’s Jews, published in Commentary magazine in November 1992, in connection with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, warned about a dangerous slippage. To fantasize about an inherent Jewishness in Columbus is, he argued, only a small step away from resurrecting the trope of Jews operating clandestinely, engaged in a vast conspiracy for their own benefit. If Columbus’s “true” Jewish identity lurks behind the public mask of a Christian admiral, then the “discovery” of America itself becomes fodder for narratives about secret Jewish power. Sarna’s concern is that what may begin as a potentially flattering claim, Jews helped discover the New World, ends in the reinforcement of conspiratorial antisemitic myths.

In the end, whether Columbus was Jewish may be the wrong question. For those who still wish to celebrate him as a visionary explorer, finding Jewish roots can serve to fold him into a positive Jewish story of courage, endurance, and hidden creativity. For those who view his voyages as the opening act of colonial exploitation, enslavement, and cultural destruction, insisting that he was Jewish can function as at best a way of keeping that guilt at a distance and at worst yet another incarnation of old anti-Semitic tropes. In both cases, Columbus’s Jewishness becomes a token in a larger argument about whether he was fundamentally good or evil, hero or villain.

Published originally in the Passover 2026 Issue of Shalom Magazine, Boston, MA.

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