Before Him Not the Ghost of Shores
Created | Updated 4 Weeks Ago
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Before Him Not the Ghost of Shores
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Monday, 14 October, was, ahem, Columbus Day. It's a federal holiday because nobody's bothered to repeal the law. Most people either ignore it or celebrate 'Indigenous People's Day' instead. Good idea: Columbus Day got started as a way to stop people from being prejudiced against Italians. These days, nobody wants to be associated with Columbus - they've found out what he was really like.
An American Jewish historian weighed in on Youtube with an update to the age-old question, 'Was Columbus Jewish?' If you didn't know about this one, you're excused - but I first heard about it in the 1980s in Athens.
I was attending a class in Ladino at the time. The instructor was a Jewish PhD candidate from Morocco who was studying in Paris. She was in Athens gathering data for her dissertation and offered the course as a courtesy through the Jewish Museum there. I was thrilled, although following a course in Hebraic Spanish, that was taught in French, with a bunch of native Greek speakers was a bit of a challenge. Nobody spoke English. Or German. When I asked about Yiddish, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. I shrugged, and struggled on.
Anyway, our Ladino instructor asserted that Columbus was Jewish. One piece of evidence in support of this is that he delayed sailing for a day because his original departure date was inauspicious – from a Jewish perspective. It seems unlikely that anyone else would know about Tisha B'Av, the day of fasting to commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples.
Arguments have gone back and forth over the years: was he Jewish or wasn't he? It was dangerous to be Jewish then. They did expect the Spanish Inquisition, you see. There were lots of conversos. He never denied being Jewish, etc, etc.
So this year, Henry Abramson thinks, maybe Columbus was Jewish. There's been some DNA testing, and he's got a Sephardic gene marker. Interesting.
A viewer commented, 'This doesn't seem fair. As long as he was the bold explorer, he was Italian. Now that he is a blood thirsty colonizer, he's Jewish. Maybe we can have a DNA test done on Karl Marx and make him Norwegian.'
Most of us feel Columbus Day has done its work – people don't hate on Italians these days, having moved on to target other ethnicities. We can retire those statues and stop spreading misinformation about 'discovering' a couple of continents. For me, the end of Columbus Day will be sweet revenge for the awful poem by the incredible Joaquin Miller1, which we used to have to recite every year.
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas. . .
So, Jewish, Italian, or whatever, Christoforo Whatshisname can safely be forgotten. But it's nice to have a holiday in October. Personally, I think of it as National Leaf-Appreciation Day. Something we can all enjoy discovering.
