A 20-year genetic study of Christopher Columbus’s remains has upended conventional historical wisdom by concluding that the explorer whose voyage to the New World changed the course of world history may have been a Spanish Jew rather than was a son of Genoa.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central role in the creation of the powerful Spanish Empire came from the same community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, came from in the same year that Columbus reached the Americas. expelled from their kingdom.

The results of the investigation were announced on Saturday evening during a special broadcast on national broadcaster RTVE, which coincided with Spain’s national holiday commemorating the arrival of Columbus in the New World on October 12, 1492.

José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medicine expert at the University of Granada who led the research, said his analysis showed that Columbus’ DNA was “compatible” with a Jewish origin.

“We have very incomplete but sufficient DNA from Christopher Columbus,” he said. “We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and in both the Y chromosome (male) and the mitochondrial DNA (transferred from the mother) of Fernando there are traces consistent with a Jewish origin.”

While Lorente acknowledged that he could not pinpoint Columbus’ birthplace, he said the likelihood was that he came from the Spanish Mediterranean.

“The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origins were in the western Mediterranean,” the researcher said. “If there were no Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the likelihood that he came from there is minimal. There was also no large Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes the situation very delicate.”

Since there are neither well-founded theories nor clear evidence that Columbus could have been French, Lorente added, the search area has narrowed even further.

“We are left with the Spanish Mediterranean, the Balearic Islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange because then Christopher Columbus would have been written with a touch of Italian or the Sicilian language. All this means that its origin most likely lies in the Spanish Mediterranean or in the Balearic Islands, which were then part of the Crown of Aragon.”

According to RTVE, Lorente’s findings ended 500 years of speculation about Columbus’ birthplace and nationality. Over the centuries it has been suggested that the explorer may have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish. After analyzing 25 possible locations and then narrowing down to a shortlist of eight, Lorente landed in Western Europe.

However, his history-changing conclusions were greeted with extreme caution by some of his colleagues.

“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really assess what was contained in the documentation, as no data from the analysis was available,” said Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences El País.

“My conclusion is that the documentary never shows Columbus’ DNA and we as scientists don’t know what analysis was done.”

Rodrigo Barquera, an expert in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said he was surprised that the results were shared without prior review by others in the scientific community.

“Normally you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the article and at least three independent reviewers review the work and decide whether it is scientifically valid or not. If so, it will be published and the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree with it or not. Putting it on the screen, away from this dialogue and with all this media focus, hinders the scientific community from having anything to say about it.”

Lorente defended his actions to the same newspaper, saying: “Our team and the university have always viewed this study of Christopher Columbus and his family as a single, connected and inseparable entity, and nothing will be published until the investigation is complete.”

Saturday’s revelation came two days after Lorente and his team said DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego had “definitively confirmed” that they were in a tomb in the cathedral Partial skeleton preserved by Seville is that of the famous seafarer.

Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were brought there in 1542, transferred to Cuba in 1795, and then taken to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba following the Spanish-American War.

If Columbus were a Sephardic Jew – Sefarad is the Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula – his identity would be a significant historical irony and something he would have liked to keep secret from society and his famous patrons.

His arrival in the Americas paved the way for the rise of the incredibly rich and powerful American empire of Spain, which emerged just as Ferdinand and Isabella, who financed Columbus’ voyages, expelled Spanish Jews out of anti-Semitic fears of supposed racial purity. Centuries of persecution, pogroms and regional expulsions culminated in 1492, when the country’s Jewish population was exiled, forced to convert to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

In 2015, Spain sought to atone for the expulsion, which it called a “historical mistake,” by passing a temporary law granting Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled from the country at the end of the 15th century awarded.

About 132,000 people of Sephardic descent applied for citizenship before the offer expired in October 2019. More than half of the applicants came from Latin American countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Chile and Ecuador.