As the result of my article debunking the claim that ‘lots of Marranos/jews sailed with Columbus’ on his 1492 expedition to the Indies which accidentally discovered the Americas; (1) there was a lively controversy in the comments sections with believers in the ‘Columbus was a jew’ theory – and it is worth remembering that the majority of Columbus biographers and historians of the period have long dismissed this claim on the grounds that there simply isn’t enough good evidence for it and plenty of documentary evidence against it – (2) restating their arguments and as a result several claimed facts were adduced to support the thesis.
In many ways this debate is rather like the ‘Stalin was a jew’ claim that I have had to keep returning to because of ‘new evidence’ purported to demonstrate it turns up/is manufactured every so often. The difference with the ‘Columbus was a jew’ claim is that it has better written theses in support of it, but often functions on the same kind of inference-based claims as the ‘Stalin was a jew’ claim but as Columbus was a man of the late medieval/early Renaissance period such evidence is taken much more seriously than it is in modern history due to the relative paucity of source material.
One of the more substantive claims – if true – that is said to prove that Columbus was a Marrano/of jewish ancestry is the claim that he wrote his letters to Diego in Ladino.
Ladino for those who don’t know is a jewish dialect of Old Castilian Spanish in the same way that Yiddish is a jewish dialect of Middle High German that both – in time – became in time languages in and of themselves. (3)
If true, this would still be circumstantial evidence – since one doesn’t have to be jewish to have known Ladino – but it would strong circumstantial evidence because one would be forced to ask the question: what reason would Columbus (and Diego) have to know Ladino other than their jewish?
It could be countered that because many bankers and merchants in the Iberian Peninsula as well as in Ottoman Empire and Flanders (especially what we now called the Netherlands) were Marranos or openly jewish then this might be why (so essentially Ladino could be seen as a ‘language of commerce’), (4) but the ‘jewish origin’ claim would be nearly as strong.
The problem with this claim however is that there doesn’t appear to be an actual source for it.
Wiesenthal’s ‘Sails of Hope’ doesn’t make this claim despite referencing Ladino and spending a lot of time discussing the letters of Columbus to Diego as they are his principal evidence for Columbus’ jewishness. (5) Taviani’s ‘Christopher Columbus’ doesn’t know of such a claim either let alone rebut it (6) nor does Milani’s work on Columbus’ languages from his known writings mention anything being written in Ladino. (7)
Indeed, despite the fact that Columbus’ corpus of documents/letters have had a problem with fakes and forgeries over the years; (8) Columbus’ letters to Diego have been known, translated and studied since the late 1800s or so. Yet no one seems to think that they are in Ladino.
To quote Taviani:
‘All of Columbus’ letters, even those addressed to Genoese friends and to the Banco di San Giorgio, are written in Castilian.’ (9)
Taviani also specifically mentions that Columbus never wrote anything in ‘Hebraic-Spanish’ (aka Ladino) albeit he often wrote badly in Spanish using Portuguese spelling (and doesn’t mention that anyone has actually claimed as such but rather that it is a point against the ‘Columbus was a jew’ theory). (10)
What languages do we know that Columbus spoke/wrote?
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin. (11)
Thus, we can see that the claim – despite being made in good faith – that Columbus ‘wrote letters in Ladino to his son Diego’ is simply false and without any foundation I can find whatsoever.
References
(1) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/why-did-christopher-columbus-take
(2) On this please see my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-christopher-columbus-jewish and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-columbus-jewishness-addressing
(3) https://yiddishlandcalifornia.org/christopher-columbus/
(4) Joachim Prinz, 1973, ‘The Secret Jews’, 1st Edition, Random House: New York, pp. 125-126
(5) Cf. Simon Wiesenthal, 1973, ‘Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: New York, esp. 123-132
(6) Cf. Paolo Emilio Taviani, 1985, ‘Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design’, 1st Edition, Orbis: London
(7) Cf. Virgil Milani, 1973, ‘The Written Language of Christopher Columbus’, 1st Edition, State University of New York Press: Buffalo
(8) Wiesenthal, Op. Cit., pp. 98-99; also, William Eleroy Curtis, 1895, ‘The Authentic Letters of Christopher Columbus’, 1st Edition, Field Columbian Museum: Chicago, pp. 100-102
(9) Taviani, Op. Cit., p. 30
(10) Idem.
(11) Ibid., pp. 30-31
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