Christopher Columbus – a Messianic Jew?

New DNA research into the remains of Christopher Columbus has concluded that the famous explorer who “discovered” America may have been Jewish. This is not a new claim, but this newly published research has caused the discussion to bubble up again, and has also resurrected the age-old discussion of what being Jewish even means. Let’s unpack it.

If being Jewish means “not believing in Jesus” as so many people seem to think, then case closed. Columbus definitely believed in Jesus. So if you believe in the ancient anti-Semitic lie that “you can’t be a Jew if you believe in Jesus,” you can stop reading now. He was a Christian, end of story.

But let’s be honest here – we all know it’s an old anti-Semitic lie, and it becomes a circular argument the moment they claim that “the Jews rejected Jesus.” Of course they did, if anyone who accepted him by definition is not Jewish anymore. And this was the myth that the Spanish inquisition was determined to perpetuate.

Because if a Jew came to the Inquisition and stated that “I am a Jew and I have always been a Jew and known as a Jew,” they wouldn’t do anything to him except expel him from Spain. The Inquisition was rather focused on finding “false Christians,” that is Conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) who were really Marranos – people leading double lives and secretly still believed in Judaism.

Dr. Benzion Netanyahu (yes, the father of…) claims in his 1,400-page book “Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,” that most of the Jews did in fact NOT lead double lives, but rather strongly did believe in Jesus. The Inquisition rather used the few cases of people living double lives as an excuse to attack all Jews who believed in Jesus for racist – not religious – reasons. The Inquisition would accuse anyone who kept part of the Sabbath, refused to eat pork, or didn’t want to bow down to statues of Mary as being a false Christian and a secret Jew. In fact, if those people could be transported to the modern-day State of Israel, they would chiefly want to kill us, the Messianic Jews, rather than our Jewish secular and orthodox neighbors.

This means that the Jews were attacked not because they weren’t good Christians, but because they were too good Christians. The gentile Christians of the Inquisition were maybe afraid of Jews within the church, who had direct lineage with the apostles and the people of Jesus. Their legitimacy surpassed that of the pope, and they could easily bring Jewish influence into the church, such as the Sabbath and biblical holidays.

I don’t know if it’s correct to label these Conversos as “Messianic Jews.” It’s a bit of an anachronism, and we can’t forget that they did embrace the Catholic version of Christianity. Still, if this is true, these Jewish Conversos were definitely some sort of early Messianic Jews embracing Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, and part of their forefathers’ faith, just as we do today – and as the disciples and the earliest Christians did.

If it’s true that Columbus was indeed one of these Conversos, as claimed, it would make perfect sense for him to have blurred his family background. The consensus is that he was born in Genoa, but there is no official documentation proving this, and based on his fluency in his writings and letters, some believe he was Spanish. Did he blur his background to impress King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with a better lineage, or was it because he was one of these Conversos?

There are other things that point to this as well. He wanted to prepare Jerusalem for Jesus, for example, and as Jerusalem was in the hands of the Muslim Mamluk Empire at this time, he urged for setting a fund aside to liberate Jerusalem. Going west, finding a way to reach India from the other direction, might have been part of his goal to help the Christians reach the Muslim world from the other direction, and thus liberate Jerusalem from the infidels, according to an article by One for Israel. Another thing to note is that his voyage was funded by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew, according to a 2012 CNN article. It would also explain why his voyage was delayed by one day because he didn’t want to leave on Tisha be’Av, the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the temple.

Our editor-in-chief and founder, Joel C. Rosenberg, also touched on this subject in an ALL ISRAEL NEWS article from 2022 where he goes more deeply into the different theories on the subject, and the way in which Columbus spoke of Biblical prophecies and his desire to spread Christianity. Again, this information is not new – but the DNA research is, and that’s pretty amazing.

Some anti-Semites from the left side of US politics have embraced this news as “proof” that the Jews are “white” and “colonialists” pointing to the way in which Columbus allegedly treated the Native Americans he encountered. This is a bit weird to me, if we take into account that Spanish-speaking people in the Americas are not seen as whites by these same people. So the descendants of the gentile Spanish have no “white guilt” left, but the Jews somehow do? The acrobatics the anti-Semites have to do to blame the Jews for everything is pretty astonishing.

Others have used this opportunity to point out that he didn’t discover America – the Native Americans discovered it a lot earlier. The Vikings had already been there, and the existence of a land beyond Greenland was not forgotten, but a continuously known fact in Scandinavia. In addition, there were fishermen from the Basque region who had been fishing in Newfoundland for centuries, probably encountering Native Americans as well. But this was knowledge among the common people and from faraway regions, which didn’t reach the Spanish royalty.

We also need to point out that Columbus was wrong. Not only about finding India, but about everything. The king and queen of Spain believed, rightly, that the circumference of the world was roughly 252,000 stadia, which Eratosthenes had calculated around 200 B.C. (24,270 to 25,050 miles). If this was true, which it was, and if there was only open sea between them and India, which there wasn’t, then India was much too far away to reach that way. The Portuguese had recently discovered that Africa didn’t continue forever, and were able to reach India that way. Reaching India by going west would not be shorter, the Spanish thought. Columbus believed that Eratosthenes was wrong – he thought the world was a lot smaller. He was, of course, very wrong. (A few centuries later, the British beat both of them by building the Suez Canal, but that’s a different story).

So was Columbus Jewish? Let’s see. Faith in Jesus, Love for Jerusalem, Hebrew phrases in his letters, DNA evidence, funding by rich Jews, blurry background, avoiding sailing on Tisha b’Av, and most importantly – being extremely wrong about a lot of things, while still changing history forever.

Sounds very Jewish to me.