What's beneath the question of whether Columbus was a Jew?

The old question of whether Christopher Columbus (pictured here at his high school graduation or possibly his bar-mitzvah) was Jewish has been back in the news recently.

If you, too, have been wondering why now, why again and whether it makes any difference at all, this Religion News Service column may help answer your questions. It was written by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a regular RNS columnist who is always worth reading.

Salkin notes that the "definitive essay on the subject comes to us from Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, the preeminent scholar of American Jewish history. It appeared in Commentary magazine in 1992, marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ 'discovery' of America." (What a silly and Euro-centric term "discovery" is.)

There are, Salkin points out, various hints of Columbus having Jewish connections and possible ancestry, but at this stage it's unprovable. So, he suggests, let's not get all hung up on it one way or the other.

He notes, however, that "there was one big Jewish link in Columbus’ life. He had an illicit relationship with Beatrice Enriquez, the mother of his son Ferdinand and, in his biographer Salvador de Madariaga’s view, herself a secret Jew. 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."

There are various reason for people's interest in the question of the Jewishness, if any, of Columbus, as Salkin notes as he writes particularly about the interests of Jews: "We want to be loved, accepted and confirmed as part of the American story. Who came blame us? But, at the very least, let us do so with real history, and not with myths.

"If Christopher Columbus turns out to have been Jewish — fine. I will include him in my posthumous much-more-than-a-minyan of great Jews. And, if he’s not really Jewish, we can live with that, too."

All of that said, I think there is something else going on with this question of Columbus and Judaism. I detect an underlying fascination with (and/or repulsion of) Jewish people by non-Jews, most of which has ancient roots in the centuries-long anti-Jewish teachings of the Christian church. You can read my essay about that sordid history here.

For most of Christian history, church leaders have worked hard to make Jews "the other." It began as a theological question about whether the Jews of Jesus time were blind to the arrival of the long-promised messiah. Early church teaching was that, indeed, Jews wrongly rejected the messiah and, thus, should be treated as ignorant, unrepentant outsiders. History is full of stories about how that developed, some of which I cover in the essay to which I linked you in the previous paragraph.

Eventually, anti-Judaism as a theological rejection of Jews provided ammunition for the creation of modern antisemitism, which is not so much theological in nature as it is racial, ethnic and economic, with its widespread lies about Jews controlling the world's economy. (See the fake "Protocols of the Elders of Zion.")

As Salkin points out, in recent years Christopher Columbus has been degraded as a hero by the telling of more truthful history, namely that his arrival in the West led to the physical and cultural genocide of huge numbers of Indigenous residents of what became the U.S. and Central America. So if Columbus can be shown to be Jewish, it would mean one more strike against what the Catholic Church in its liturgy for so long referred to as the "perfidious Jews."

In the end, the question of whether Columbus was Jewish is nowhere near as important as how and why the 1493 "Doctrine of Discovery" from the Vatican provided solid cover for white European invaders to conquer what they ignorantly labeled the "new world," a name that suggests it didn't become real until white invaders discovered it. In the end, that document also provided much of the theological grounds for white supremacy.

So let's focus on that important, destructive history and not so much whether Columbus kept kosher.

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'LIBERATION THEOLOGY' LOSES ITS FOUNDER

A controversial Catholic priest often known as the father of "liberation theology," has died. The Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez died Tuesday in Peru at age 96. He and other liberation theologians took lots of hits from critics who called them Marxists and thought they should be silenced. In more recent years, however, Gutiérrez has had at least some approval from the Vatican under Pope Francis. At its core, liberation theology emphasizes the need for every human being to be free of oppression, whether that oppression comes from the economy, politics or even the church.

As the RNS story to which I've linked you puts it: "In Gutiérrez’s writings, he emphasized Christ’s message for the poor, especially the need for the church itself to be poor, and its duty to help those who live in poverty, citing especially the Beatitudes and the Book of Revelation."

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P.S.: President Joe Biden finally did something this week that should have been done long ago -- he apologized for the U.S. government's role in the Indian boarding school scandal. Far past time, but the right thing to do. Only an acknowledgement of what went wrong or what was an evil system can start the process of healing. Here is a link to a blog post about this scandal that I wrote a couple of years ago.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about the spiritual content of live theater in KC -- now is online here.