The chatter around the “Columbus was Jewish” report gets at the complications of Jewishness, nationality, and the use of genes as proof of “identity.” Columbus was obviously and explicitly a Christian. But he was also — apparently — of Sephardic Jewish descent….Okay? Therefore …what? He wasn’t Spanish? Or Italian? Or Christian? Lots of Spaniards have Moorish genes, are they not Spaniards? Italians are a melting pot of genetic lineages from all over the Mediterranean. And it wasn’t until fairly recently that Italy was considered a single nation or had a single language. The fact that Columbus was of Jewish descent doesn’t necessarily answer many of the questions the researchers were trying to answer. But it does raise some more interesting questions.
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