In 5252, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue
Sanders, Ronald
IN 5252 COLUMBUS SAILED THE OCEAN BLUE RONALD SANDERS Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, the newest book by Ronald Sanders, from which this segment is excerpted, traces the origins of American...
...Ferdinand and Las Casas both come to the rescue by attributing a noble and ancient lineage, going back to the Roman Republic, to the Colombo family, which had fallen upon hard times owing to "the wars and factions of Lombardy...
...The ethnic history is multiple, taking in Blacks, Indians, Jews, and the white Christian dominators themselves, as well as some others, Ronald Sanders is the author o/The Downtown Jews and Reflections on a Teapot Lost Tribes and Promised Lands will be published in April by Little, Brown and Company, Inc...
...An ironic aspect of this story is the fact that the A Imanach Perpetuum, finished by Zacuto in 1478—the year the Inquisition began—was originally written in Hebrew, and intended mainly for such pious purposes as the calculation of the new moon for the Jewish calendar, which is lunar...
...And there still were alternatives, countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe, where the Jewish community structures absolutely essential for a daily life in conformity to Mosaic Law were in existence...
...It is well known that he developed in his writings and correspondence certain symbolic flourishes of virtually mystical—one is tempted to say Cabbalistic—import, such as his remarkable signature: • S-• S • A • S • XM Y underneath which usually came the formula "Xra FERENS," a rendition of his first name which stresses its meaning as "Christ-bearer...
...This obviously had seemed problem enough to other kings, but to the rulers of a Spain militant with the resurgence of Catholic Reconquista, the problem was made especially grievous by the fact that their professing Jewish community was an unusually large one, and that its presence was having a particularly complicating effect upon the vast New Christian population of the realm...
...All his life, Columbus' ideas about geography were permeated with a peculiar religious mysticism...
...Copyright © 1978 by Ronald Sanders...
...How was this humble artisan's son, still only starting out in the world, able to contract such a marriage...
...yet it only further complicates the mystery of Columbus' origins...
...As for the possible spiritual, even messianic, aspects of the Columbus enterprise, these in particular would have been highly suspect to rabbinical Jews, who were no less sensitive to intimations of heresy in this era than orthodox Christians were, and who were certainly not going to be led anywhere pointed out as a place of their redemption by someone born and baptized a Christian...
...But it is not characteristic of Orthodox Jews in any era to look for homes in wildernesses, at least if any alternatives are available...
...How much this enterprise of discovery owes to New Christian initiative we can only guess...
...1451 is the likeliest year, but we do not know the month or the day...
...it is not unlikely that some refugee from the great school of Majorcan Jewish mapmakers could have established himself in Genoa, the old capital of Mediterranean map-making and commerce, and sired a line of teachers ever ready to be of service to fellow descendants of conversos...
...Columbus thereupon set out for his home in Cordova, intending to go from there to France, where he would begin trying out his luck all over again...
...Moreover—what is perhaps the most important point—he represents the sole vehicle whereby the author, a Jew himself, can legitimately place his own intuition into the midst of the things described here...
...But the bulk of Castil-ian Jewry, unable to reach the sea quickly, emigrated to Portugal after giving up a tithe of all their possessions...
...At Isabella's court, Abraham Senior finally accepted baptism, perhaps hoping that a day for Judaism could yet come again in Spain...
...but it may well be that America began its history as a promised land of Spanish heresy...
...But nothing in the Genoese archives supports this claim, and most historians have rejected it...
...But this does not mean we are entirely lacking in literary testimony from the viewpoint of the racial outsider...
...For, as both Ferdinand Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas relate, when Columbus once again obtained an audience from the King and the Queen—this time in the royal camp at Santa Fe just after the victory over Granada—his plan was at first rejected by them, apparently once and for all...
...The discoverer himself clearly was a man of enormous ambition, lofty conviction, and unshakeable confidence in his own destiny, and though these traits alone hardly make for a messianic pretender, they are—given his mystical streak and the messianic ardor of the age—a step in that direction...
...But few conclusions can be arrived at with finality about Colum1978 5738 -1492 -486 486 5252 bus' life, which is shrouded in mystery made more complex by nearly five hundred years of controversy...
...Israel is exemplified by stars," he wrote of the great men of the Jewish past in his preface, "who shine like the splendor of the firmament...
...This aspect of the matter was made quite clear by the Expulsion order promulgated on March 31, which said that "there were some bad Christians who Judaized and apostasized from our holy Catholic faith, the chief cause of which was the communication of Jews with Christians...
...But there may be more to it than that...
...Some historians even have thought, though without adequate evidence, that Zacuto held a chair at the university there...
...He kept a "Book of Prophecies" in which he collected quotations— mostly from the Bible, often those dealing with "isles far off"—that seemed to prophesy his own discoveries...
...For one fact about Santangel stands out with perhaps special significance: he was a New Christian, scion of an Aragonese family that had been wealthy and prominent as Jews before 1391 and still were so as Christians...
...for in the Jew we have a special case...
...By nightfall, not a single outwardly professing Jew was left in Aragon or Castile...
...Although his geography was for the most part scientific, d'Ailly does not hesitate to try to establish the location of the terrestrial paradise, and the marginal notes in Columbus' copy show consistent interest in this quest...
...Positing a New Christian milieu for the Columbus family also would make it more comprehensible how an offspring of weavers and tailors could make the necessary early contacts to learn cartography and navigation...
...Diligent self-study may be the answer, but the bootstraps theory becomes all the more remarkable when we learn that at the age of 28, Columbus, an ambitious navigator newly settled in Lisbon, married Dona Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, daughter of an old Portuguese noble family on her mother's side, and of a prominent landholder on Porto Santo in the Madeiras who was himself of Italian noble descent...
...Bartolome de las Casas, another of Columbus' earliest biographers, also mentions the city of Pavia as the place where the latter obtained "the basic rudiments of letters, mainly grammar," but this hardly seems to describe a university education...
...His personal copy, still in existence today, of Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi—a kind of Christian-Plinian synthesis of world geography—contains numerous handwritten notes in the margins which are of a similar religious import...
...It is ironic and significant that unconverted Jews did not seem interested...
...Portugal was to be the scene of still more misfortune, and the Jews who escaped from there a few years later with their religion still intact, like Zacuto himself, were mainly to follow the established refugee route to the south and to the east...
...but what is true, and not much less remarkable, is that he enjoyed the patronage of the Bishop of Salamanca for a time, and then of a devoutly Christian nobleman whom he instructed in astrology...
...D'Ailly, after describing the blissful climate said to exist in certain regions of the west, goes on to say cautiously, "and most likely terrestrial paradise is like this and perhaps even the place which authors call the Fortunate Islands is like this...
...Why, even though he does not seem to have settled in Spain until he was in his thirties, was he apparently so much more at home in Spanish...
...What a penchant for fateful configurations this bespeaks...
...This would resolve the apparent contradictions between the "Italian" and the "Spanish" Columbus, for a family of converso descent could very well have gone on speaking a form of Spanish at home through the generations—as some do to this day—and it could thereby have been Columbus' mother tongue...
...At one point, the notes even leap ahead of the text in their enthusiasm for this discovery...
...Yet the archives of the city of Genoa contain considerable documentation about the 15th century weaver Domenico Colombo and his sons, Christoforo, Bartolomeo and Giacomo—evidently the future discoverer and his two brothers, Bartolome and Diego, who will also be prominent in the first years of New World colonization...
...What was the relationship between these two men...
...But then the story takes a remarkable turn...
...Another mystery enters the Columbus story, then, in the form of Luis de Santangel: how many discussions went on, how many understandings were exchanged, between him and Columbus of which we can have no inkling...
...The configuration is so emphatic here that one could almost think Zacuto is dating the expulsion decree immediately after the taking of Granada rather than three months later...
...But it was also a family whose name was scattered all over the records of the Inquisition...
...One of Luis' cousins, bearing the exact same name as his, had been burned at the stake in 1487, and only six months before his intercession with the Queen on Columbus' behalf, Luis himself had been made to do penance...
...Nor was he an unusual phenomenon at court, especially Ferdinand's, which was filled with New Christians...
...The great Spanish statesman and historian Salvador de Madariaga has offered an audacious theory which, if correct, would not only resolve many of the contradictions in the story of Columbus' origins and early life, but also explain a number of mysteries surrounding his later career...
...And blindly giving themselves over to their vain hopes, they submitted to the hardships of the road and left their native regions, great and small, old and young, on foot and mounted on donkeys and other beasts, and in carriages, and made their way to the various points of departure to which each of them had to go...
...begun immediately after the completion of the A Imanach Per-petuum, was also meant at first to be an astronomical treatise of sorts...
...The possibility of New Christian contacts in Spain and Portugal could furthermore help to explain young Columbus' startling ability to rise rapidly, reflected in his career as well as in his marriage...
...For though he disappears from view for long stretches, he is in a sense the main protagonist...
...indeed, it was to save the discoverer's life one night in 1504, when he pacified a group of hostile Indians in Jamaica by using Za-cuto's A Imanach Perpetuum to predict successfully an eclipse of the moon...
...There is a constant effort here to perceive realities as much as possible from within, an effort that is facilitated, of course, whenever I can make use of literary records left by the actors themselves...
...We are forced, for the most part, to adopt the viewpoint of the oppressive but highly articulate white man...
...But is the mention of the Expulsion of the Jews in this context simply an overflow of Reconquista exuberance, or does it have particular significance for the author...
...A possible reading for that line, then, is Christus Messias Israel...
...IN 5252 COLUMBUS SAILED THE OCEAN BLUE RONALD SANDERS Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, the newest book by Ronald Sanders, from which this segment is excerpted, traces the origins of American racial history...
...Therefore, after having expelled all the Jews from all your realms and possessions, in the same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me to go with a sufficient fleet to the said Indian parts____" Here we see with great emphasis Columbus the holy crusader, possibly the would-be Messiah— though, to be sure, there also are good practical reasons for depicting his enterprise to the King and Queen as an extension of their most Christian victory at Granada...
...Why, its detractors ask, if Columbus was born and bred in Italy, do his existing writings show no inclination to use Italian, and possibly little or no knowledge of it...
...He describes the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 in terms that hint at the angry Christian reaction which is to come against all infidels and heretics...
...The preamble goes like this: "Most Christian, most high, excellent and mighty princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the islands of the sea, our Lords: In this present year of 1492, after Your Highnesses had brought to an end the war with those Moors who had been reigning in Europe—finishing that war in the very great city of Granada .. . Your Highnesses, like true Catholic Christians and princes who love and seek the increase of the holy Christian faith, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said parts, the Indies, to see the said princes, peoples and countries, and everything concerning them and their disposition, and the way in which their conversion to our holy faith might be brought about, and ordered that I not go eastward by land, which was the customary route, but by the westward route, which we do not know with certainty to this day whether anyone has ever taken...
...Dealing with the middle years of the 15th century, he refers to the Portuguese capture of a North African town called Sabata, which, he says, was founded by Noah's son Shem, and which the Portuguese attacked because it had been overly hospitable towards Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula...
...In any event, it is curious that he places the Expulsion or the Expulsion decree—in either case, erroneously— in the same month of January as that in which the Conquest of Granada and the Sovereigns' consent to his plan took place...
...but Columbus never ceased searching for it, and went to his grave believing that his discoveries had brought him close to it...
...but the marginal note more rashly concludes: "Terrestrial paradise perhaps is the place which authors call the Fortunate Islands...
...now, however, he is more the astrologer than the astronomer, less interested in the stars themselves than in meaningful configurations...
...The Jews had begun leaving Castile "in the first week of the month of July, in the 1,492nd year of the Nativity of our Redeemer Jesus Christ," wrote the pious chronicler Andres Bernaldez, Curate of the village of Los Palacios...
...Genoa is widely accepted to have been his native city, though serious doubts have been expressed about its claims...
...On the practical level of search for a refuge, Jewish needs in 1492 were even more urgent than New Christian ones...
...The last of the fateful configurations of the year 1492 occurred at the end of July and the beginning of August, when the final departure of the Jews from Spain and Columbus' departure for what turned out to be a New World took place within three days of each other...
...Ferdinand Columbus, the discoverer's adoring son and biographer, endows his father with an education at the University of Pavia, but no other records support this...
...And here we come upon what is for Zacuto the most significant configuration of all: the intertwining destinies of Jew and Moor...
...because it is the book's underlying premise that the questions it deals with can best be understood as elements in a broad social drama in which all these groups come together as the principals...
...Eight ducats at the very least had to be paid even by those who had no money, or else they were taken as slaves...
...And some in their grief converted and remained, but very few, for their rabbis were ever by their side giving them courage, getting the women and children to sing, and playing tambourines to cheer everyone up...
...Some of the Jews emigrated to Turkey," Abraham Zacuto wrote in the Sefer Yahusin, "others to Africa, to the cities of Fez and Oran whither they were pursued by hunger and pestilence, so that almost all perished...
...No doubt this is to some extent the mark of a man who has risen in the world and does not care to offer, or be offered, reminders of his humble birth...
...In his preface Sanders explains the kinds of ideas that his work touches upon...
...Did Columbus have any messianic pretensions...
...Indeed, Columbus goes a step beyond Zacuto in presenting the fateful configurations of the year 1492, for he places his own historic enterprise in significant juxtaposition with the closing of Moorish and Jewish history in Spain...
...In the end it is centered upon the future United States but its point of departure is in the Mediterranean, more than a hundred years before the New World was discovered, and it includes a good look at the Portuguese and Spanish conquests along the African coast and in America, with even a side glance at the French overseas adventures, before falling at last upon the fledgling English colonies...
...Can the Conquest of Granada and the Expulsion of the Jews, both occurring in the same year, be seen, then, as simply two arms of the same resurgence of Reconquista...
...But this book was written through a period of some 25 years, during which its author experienced disasters that were bound to shake up the serene vault of his spirit and transform his sense of history...
...For these reasons, the theory has been offered that the Genoese origin was a fabrication, and that Columbus was in fact a Spaniard, perhaps a Catalan, by birth...
...And thus they left Castile, some going to the ports from which they then embarked, others going to Portugal...
...But, curiously enough, we get the same impression in an important text by Columbus: the preamble, addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, of the journal of his first voyage to America...
...In addition, every person paid one ducat besides a fee of one ducat for a transit permit...
...The rest of the book is often angry and passionate, even poetic, but the scientist remains as well...
...This, coupled with the "Xro FERENS," certainly would suggest messianic pretensions...
...Later on, the notes are more willing to be skeptical about this location for Eden...
...There is a decidedly messianic element in Las Casas' literary treatment of him years after his death, but that could be more Las Casas than Columbus...
...A messenger was sent after Columbus, who was on the road back to Cordova when he thus received news that his plan had been accepted after all...
...Might the uppermost "S" be a Shaddai ("Almighty...
...Gabriel Sanchez, Ferdinand's treasurer-general, belonged to a New Christian family closely related to the Santangels through frequent intermarriages, that had also suffered greatly at the hands of the Inquisition...
...In 1484, after a sojourn of some ten years in Portugal and in Porto Santo, Columbus, an experienced seaman 33 years of age, presented to King John II of Portugal a plan for the discovery of a western route to the Indies...
...Isaac Abravanel made no such bet, and departed for Italy on July 31, the last day allotted by the Expulsion decree...
...Could the middle "A" stand for Adonai ("Lord...
...The upper triangle of letters with dots is beyond reasonable speculation, although it is highly suggestive to anyone who would want to think of Columbus as something of a Cabbalist and be willing to posit a small knowledge of Hebrew on his part...
...This theme is first sounded dimly, in tones that are richly resonant but scattered...
...How did this weaver's son, an apprentice weaver himself, become one of the most astute navigators of his time, and learned in Latin as well as in mathematics...
...The grip maintained by both these groups on their ancestral religions implied a steadfastness in the old geographical ideals as well...
...Columbus certainly knew Za-cuto's work in astronomy and made use of it...
...At various moments, the relationships seem too resonant to be accidental...
...And on the roads and terrains over which they passed they encountered much hardship and misfortune, some of them falling down, to be picked up by their companions, others dying, others being born, others getting sick, so that no Christian could look upon them without anguish, and many along the way tried to persuade them to accept baptism...
...The import of this material is undeniable to all but the most fervent mongers of forgery theories...
...This is not so on any grounds of ethnic prejudice or favoritism, but out of artistic and philosophical necessity...
...So far as we know, the King's ships were not to round the southern tip of Africa for another four years, nor to reach India that way for ten more after that, but perhaps the Portuguese were already too committed to this route to entertain any other possibility...
...The Queen wavered, and Santangel then clinched the matter by offering to lend whatever money the project would require...
...The meaning of all this—including the careful distribution of the dots—has been anyone's guess for centuries, though it seems likely that the "X" which begins the bottom line is the Greek initial for Christ, just as it is in the first-name signature right below it...
...D'Ailly was one of the writers who convinced the young Columbus that the western route to the Indies must be fairly short, but the strength of his influence on the latter seems—judging from the notes—to be largely due to the pious factor...
...Born at around the same time as Columbus, Zacuto grew up in Salamanca, a city great not only for its learning but for the tolerance prevailing in the relations between its Jews and Christians...
...In the case of two of our main characters—the Black and the Indian—such firsthand written material does not really exist from this period...
...But the story is in several respects more complicated than Columbus makes it sound here, and one element he has left out in his depiction of the sudden royal consent to his project is a New Christian one...
...The most astute scholarship even has ascertained that the Latin in which he wrote many of his letters and annotations contains Hispanicisms, but no Italianisms...
...And what follows at first is a veritable description of the heavens, a series of brief biographies, from Adam, Noah and the Patriarchs all the way through to Judah Ha-Levi, Moses Maimonides, and the great rabbis of medieval northern Europe...
...There were other New Christians aboard besides the possibly New Christian Columbus himself...
...Sanchez and two other Aragonese New Christians at court with similar family histories also were ardent supporters of the Columbus project...
...Only New Christians remained, bearing a faith ever heretical in terms of their Jewish past and often so in terms of their Catholic present as well, and marked by a racial taint that was to grow more virulent in the years to come...
...They also surrendered one quarter to one third of all the possessions they brought into Portugal with them...
...Zacuto's historical work, the Se-fer Yuhasin ("Book of Genealogies...
...As a European, he has left records as rich as those of the general culture he represents—indeed he has done more, for we shall find him taking a central place among the bearers of a vision out of which the American experience first emerged...
...for on the very day of Columbus' departure from Santa Fe, King Ferdinand's Secretary of the Exchequer, Luis de Santangel, appeared before the Queen and argued eloquently in favor of Columbus' proposal...
...The very date of his birth seems to vary in his own and other contemporary writings...
...What is especially noteworthy about all this mystery surrounding the origins and early life of Columbus is that he himself was the most ardent contributor to it, making in later years a round of ambiguous and contradictory statements on his youth that bespeaks nothing so consistently as a desire to be confusing and evasive...
...This certainly was the view of one man who should have known, the Jewish scientist and historian Abraham Zacuto, who lived through the Expulsion, as well as through many of the other disasters and triumphs of the era...
...However, it must be added that the role played by the Jew in this book is not just that of one among several actors in a comparative racial history...
...He is at once one of the dominators and one of the victims...
...This flight back to the ancient and traditional lands was to be repeated by the Moors of Spain when their turn came to suffer full-fledged religious and racial persecution, beginning in the ensuing decade with the forcible conversions of the Muslims of Granada and of Castile...
...Can we see in the two lateral "S"s the Wings of the Shekhina (roughly, the Jewish counterpart to the Holy Ghost...
...It is also likely that he sat as a member of the Talavera commission that heard Columbus defend his project in Salamanca in 1486...
...The final scene of the drama of 1492 takes place just before dawn on August 3, as the sails are unfurled on Columbus' three ships at the port of Palos in the mouth of the Guadalquivir, from which some of the last shiploads of Jewish refugees had departed three days before...
...All this leads inexorably, through the conquest of Malaga described above, to Spain's final solution: "In 1492, right after the Christian New Year, Granada was taken, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was then decreed...
...The mystery begins with his birth and origins...
...John II appointed a committee of scientists to hear out Columbus' plan, and they at length decided against acceptance of it...
...The Jews of Castile, Aragon and their overseas possessions were given exactly four months, until July 31, either to convert or to leave...
...Through the history of the first, and worst, years of the Spanish Inquisition, the story of Christopher Columbus' rise to fame moves like a counterpoint...
...The last of the large states of western Europe to come into being, Spain was now also the last of them to have an organized Judaism openly existing on its soil, with the exception of Portugal...
...As a matter of fact, it was a Jew who translated the book into Latin only about ten years before Columbus' exploit with it—Joseph Vizinho of Lisbon, who had sat on the Portuguese royal commission that rejected Columbus' project in 1484...
...Among the troubled races who flee the crumbling edifice of medieval Spain, then, it is the New Christians alone who can be seen turning away from the ancient promised lands and looking for a new one westward across the Ocean...
...But as an outcast, he has thereby given a voice to the otherwise silent sufferers from racial oppression in that epoch...
...According to Madariaga's hypothesis, Domenico Colombo of Genoa, his wife and their children, were a family of New Christians, most likely descended from Catalan Jews converted by the pogroms of 1391 who had subsequently migrated to Italy...
Vol. 3 • March 1978 • No. 4
