Columbus Day Returns
and So Do the Questions About Columbus Himself

President Donald Trump has signed a proclamation reclaiming Columbus Day — traditionally observed on the second Monday in October — reversing a shift made under President Joe Biden, who had designated the same day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

It’s not the first time the holiday has been caught in controversy. Since 1971, when Columbus Day became an official U.S. federal holiday, it has seen uneven support and celebration. Its origins date back to 1792, when a precursor to New York’s Tammany Hall organized the first Columbus Day event. Over the years, the day has been alternately promoted, ignored, or replaced — celebrated by some Italian American groups and dismissed by others. During World War II, when the U.S. was at war with Italy, the holiday quietly vanished from most calendars.

The irony is that Christopher Columbus may not have been Italian at all. Though long assumed to have been born in Genoa, recent scholarship and genetic evidence suggest a more complicated story — one that may redefine the explorer’s identity and motivations.

A genetic study launched in 2003 and recently published examined DNA from bones believed to belong to Columbus, buried in Seville Cathedral. Researchers compared the remains with those of his son, Hernando, and his brother, Diego, confirming a biological match. The study, led by forensic geneticist José Antonio Lorente, revealed markers in both the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA associated with Sephardic Jewish ancestry — Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.

While the findings stop short of definitive proof, they lend strong support to a theory long whispered among historians: that Columbus was a converso, a Jew forced to convert to Christianity to escape persecution during the Spanish Inquisition.

If so, even his name may have been a disguise. Columbus is believed to have been born Cristóbal Colón, a name that some scholars suggest could be derived from “Cohen,” a surname often linked to descendants of the Jewish priestly class. To conceal his origins, Colón may have fabricated a story of being from Genoa, adopting the Latinized “Columbus” and the Christian name “Christopher.”

Columbus was born around 1451, and by 1478, when the Spanish Inquisition began, conversos were being hunted and tried for secretly practicing Judaism. Many were tortured or burned at the stake. Some accounts suggest Columbus’s family fled to Genoa, where he studied the Old Testament and Hebrew history while learning navigation and trade.

In Portugal, he gained maritime experience in the merchant marine, mastering dead reckoning and celestial navigation. Among his intellectual influences was Abraham Zacuto, a Sephardic Jewish astronomer and converso whose tables of solar declination revolutionized navigation. Zacuto’s instruments, which allowed sailors to determine their latitude using the sun, likely helped shape Columbus’s westward route.

By the late 15th century, the Silk Road — once the lifeline between Europe and Asia — had fallen under Ottoman control. Trade became risky and expensive. European powers, driven by profit and curiosity, began seeking sea routes to Asia.

After surviving a pirate attack in 1476, Columbus settled in Lisbon and joined expeditions along Africa’s coast, studying Atlantic winds and currents. Convinced he could reach Asia by sailing west, he petitioned the monarchs of Portugal and England, and finally Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, for sponsorship.

It was not just royal favor that opened the treasury. Two prominent converso financiers — Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez — reportedly persuaded the Spanish crown to fund the voyage. For them, the journey may have represented more than exploration; it was a potential path to survival for Jews fleeing persecution.

The timing was fateful. In March 1492, just months before Columbus set sail, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering all practicing Jews to leave Spain by August 2. Columbus departed two days later, on August 3, 1492 — the day after Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Some historians believe this timing was deliberate, an effort to avoid launching on a sacred day of mourning.

The voyage, financed in part by private converso wealth, led to the fateful “discovery” of the Americas — though to Indigenous peoples, it marked the beginning of conquest and catastrophe.

More than 500 years later, as Americans continue to debate whether to honor Columbus or the Indigenous peoples his arrival displaced, new evidence complicates the story. Columbus may not have been simply an Italian explorer blessed by the Spanish crown — but a man navigating the perilous seas of identity, faith, and survival in one of history’s darkest times to be a Jew in Spain.

Whether hero or heretic, Columbus remains a figure defined by reinvention — of the map, of himself, and, perhaps fittingly, of the holiday that bears his name.

~ Al Zagofsky