Columbus Day and America Reconsidered

Columbus statue in New Haven removed

Very little was known about Christopher Columbus when in 1892 President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation encouraging Americans to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage.

 

History tells us: “Columbus Day is a U.S. holiday that commemorates the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492, and Columbus Day 2024 occurs on Monday, October 14. It was unofficially celebrated in a number of cities and states as early as the 18th century, but did not become a federal holiday until 1937… The first Columbus Day celebration took place in 1792, when New York’s Columbian Order—better known as Tammany Hall—held an event to commemorate the historic landing’s 300th anniversary. Taking pride in Columbus’ birthplace and faith, Italian and Catholic communities in various parts of the country began organizing annual religious ceremonies and parades in his honor… In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation encouraging Americans to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage… In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a national holiday, largely as a result of intense lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, an influential Catholic fraternal organization.”

 

So far, so good. The closer history is to us, the more accurate it appears to be. Many people, even attentive historians, suffer from nearsightedness. The remote past is discreetly covered with clouds of unknowing.

 

Did the American vandals, many of them blacks, who made war upon mute Columbus statutes in Connecticut a few years back know that Columbus died about a hundred years before slaves were shipped from Africa to the New World? Did reporters and editors know that President Harrison singled out Columbus for special attention because at the time it was politically opportune to do so? 

 

The trigger apparently was the mob hanging of 11 Italians in New Orleans in 1891, the largest mass lynching in US history. The Italian victims had been acquitted of the murder of popular police Commissioner David Hennessy, but the mob was unappeasable and lusting for vengeance.

 

The lynching produced an editorial in the New York Times that showcased the extreme anti-Italian sentiment in the country at the time: “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigations.”

 

Harrison was angling for the Italian vote. Some things never change, right?

 

DNA, we now realize, does not lie, and it is virtually certain that Columbus’ lineage was rooted in a Sephardic Judaism to which Spain was hostile. However, not everyone is impressed by the DNA evidence. In an essay – “Was Columbus Jewish? And does it matter?” – RNS notes, “As for the DNA testing: In my humble opinion, meh. It proves some Jewish genetic presence, but that would not be unusual. There is Jewish DNA all over the place.”

 

"Columbus was Jewish,” DNA researchers now tell us. “Jewish in culture, Jewish in religion, Jewish in nationality here, and above all, at heart, because this man exudes Judaism in his writings… Not Castilian, not Portuguese, not Galician, not a nobleman from Mallorca and not Genoese. According to a study on his DNA, Christopher Columbus was a Spanish Sephardic Jew, dismissing all other theories about his origin.”

 

Who are the Sephardic Jews?

 

They were exiled Jews rooted for centuries in Spain. In 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain expelled all Muslims and Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. The expulsions formed part of the Spanish Reconquista. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced out of Spain and ended up in Morocco, Portugal, Turkey and beyond. Those who chose to remain in Spain either converted to Christianity or were compelled to hide their Jewish identity.

 

DNA, we now realize, does not lie, and it is virtually certain that Columbus’ lineage was rooted in a Sephardic Judaism to which Spain was hostile.

 

Like Blacks wretched from the bosom of Africa – with the aid of other Black slave holders, the warlike conquistadors of Africa -- and transported to a strange land, the Sephardic Jews were a truly oppressed class. What bearing could any of this have had on Columbus we do not know because – we still know little about Columbus. Historians have yet to fit this large and important Sephardic Jewish piece into the Columbus puzzle.

 

Is it likely that a son or daughter of Sephardic Jews would favor the dispossession of Native Americans, given the option of a free choice? Why did Columbus take the part of the Taino -- an Arawakan-speaking people who at the time of Columbus’ exploration inhabited what are now Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands -- against the warlike and aggressive Carib people, who had conquered the Lesser Antilles to the east, a tribe that, some say, enslaved their enemies and practiced cannibalism? Why did Columbus choose to adopt a transported slave into his own household? Is it possible Columbus did so because the laws in Italy at the time extended full rights only to Italians and Columbus wanted his adoptee to be invested with full Italian rights and privileges?

 

We do not know the answers to such questions, largely because the distant past is smothered in a cloud of unknowing. But the questions are worth asking, and Columbus’ Sephardic origins should inform the answers.

 

In modern times, we are juggling balls on a precarious anti-historical ledge that has little to do with Columbus. As early as thirty or forty years ago, we had settled upon the proposition that cultural differences should give way to the practice of assimilation.  Assimilation did not, of course, require the uprooting of family roots. It did require a slow and steady reorientation to a new experience – the Americanization project, successful acculturation in the second or third generation of immigrants.

 

Anti-Catholicism – the oldest prejudice in America, according to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the bard of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot – is less fervent that it was when the founders of the American nation in liberty-loving Boston, Massachusetts used yearly to march an effigy of the Pope through the streets so that it might be pelted with rocks by children.

 

Slavery in America was answered by a Civil War and President Abe Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. A portion of his Second Inaugural Address, engraved of the (south) wall of the Lincoln memorial by a woman sculptress still stirs mystic chords of memory: “The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

 

That is the America that still serves as a beacon of light to the poor wretches of the world who wish to slough off the winding cloth of slavery, socialism, fascism, communism and every foreign creed that would abrogate the God given rights of free men and women.