Lyrics like these are often considered conspiracy theory yarns, but serious scholarship is now producing some fascinating evidence lending support to the idea that the Spanish sailor was Jewish.
Columbus was born in 1451 and discovered America in 1492, the year that the Jews were expelled from Spain. At its full tempest, the Inquisition had already decimated Spanish Jewry and forced its dreadful ultimatum on the Jewish remnant: convert to Catholicism or be exiled. A group of Spanish scholars (non-Jews) has concluded that Columbus was in fact a secret Jew who set sail towards what he thought was the Indies, but for an altogether different reason than he claimed.
Columbus kept a personal diary; but it was not written in typical Spanish, rather in Ladino, a Jewish version of the Spanish language similar to what Yiddish is to German. Researchers also discovered a mysterious monogram imprinted on his letters which appears to be an old Hebrew greeting used among religious Jews to this day. The symbol is the two Hebrew letters bet and heh,...
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