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The woke are going to like this one because they detest both Zionism as a “settler colonial” crime and the European colonization of North America, which they believe was theft from the indigenous natives. Columbus’s goal and the striving for Zion/Jerusalem come together in this true slice of history.

Christopher Columbus was no Jew, though some want to believe that. In 1892, the Spanish government promoted this fiction because, as America celebrated the quadra-centennial year of his historic voyage, Spain thought it might experience a tourist boom if it identified him as a Spaniard (even a Jewish one) rather than an Italian.

And indeed, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest his maternal grandparents were Spanish Jews who fled to Italy following the tsunami of monstrous massacres of Jews in 1391 when pogroms ignited all over Spain. Perhaps half of the Spanish Jewish population over the next decade converted to Catholicism because of these horrors. Others fled the country, and evidence suggests Columbus’s forebears were among those who settled in Italy. Historians have also claimed his Spanish was better than his Italian.

Image: Christopher Columbus. Public domain.

However, there is no evidence that he was anything but a Catholic and a spiritual, religious man. He used this religious side to appeal to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to fund his belief that a voyage westward from Spain would eventually reach the Far East.

Schoolchildren in the 20th century were taught that Columbus wanted to find a new route to the Far East for the spices, although no one explained why the old route—whatever that was—was now no good. The answer only surfaced decades later when I was doing some historical research after being asked to teach a class in American Jewish history to Jewish refugees from Russia. I began at the beginning with Columbus and discovered a surprisingly new dimension to the discovery of the New World.

The man’s biographers, such as naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, have focused on Columbus the Mariner, the Navigator, and his voyages. But most have not been historians of the role of religion in Spanish history, such as the eight centuries when Spain’s Christians endured the hostile Muslim Empire that meant that the old route to the Far East was no longer safe.

In 1453, when Columbus was two years old, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and, over the coming decades, expanded southward into the Land of Israel, then into Egypt, and westward across North Africa. For Spanish Christians trying to reach the Holy Land, the voyage was now a potentially life-threatening enterprise.

The Crusades may have petered out at the end of the 13th century, but the hostility between Muslims and Christians continued in lower-level clashes. For example, for a thousand years, the coast of North Africa was “home” to thousands of Christian slaves kidnapped at sea by the so-called Barbary Pirates, who were not pirates at all; that was a colloquial nickname. In their own eyes, they were jihadis. The Jihad is eternal, and they believed they had the right and even duty to hijack Christian commercial shipping in the Mediterranean, keep the ships and cargos, of course, and to enslave the passengers and crews until ransomed.

It was the Jihad that catalyzed the need for finding a new route to the Far East, though historians with an economic bent teach that it was for the spices that the Muslims now made impossible to reach.

In truth, it took Columbus some fourteen years to find backing for his project of sailing west and not falling off the flat earth. That last, of course, is a canard. Even then, every intelligent person believed the earth was a ball, even if there was no proof yet. Cartographers among them split only over the estimated size. One school of thought believed the earth was so huge that sailing west would take too long, and crews could not carry enough food to sustain them. The opposing school was that the earth was small enough for explorers to survive such a voyage.

Columbus subscribed to that latter calculation, though his fund-raising appeal to the King and Queen did not rely upon the journey’s commercial prospects. Instead, Columbus pitched the religious dimension to Isabella in particular, for she was quite devout.

To repeat, the war between Christianity and Islam was still very much alive. On January 1, 1492, the Catholics captured Granada, the last Muslim-ruled city in Spain, ending eight centuries of Muslim domination and concluding the Reconquista, or Reconquest, the Catholics had waged for centuries against their Muslim colonizers. Three months later, the Spanish ordered all Muslims and Jews out of Spain and gave them five months to leave. After that, any Jew or Muslim found in Spain would be killed.

In these final days in court with the royal couple, Columbus concluded his appeal with his belief that, on the other side of the earth, he would find the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, turn them into an army, and lead them in an attack on Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem from the east, when the Mussulmen would only be expecting a naval invasion from the west. He would lead the reconquest of Jerusalem and drive out the Muslims. Under Christian eschatology, this would trigger the Second Coming.

For this project, Columbus would take aboard the Santa Maria a Jew, Louis de Torres, who was chosen because he knew Hebrew and Aramaic. In that way, when they found the Ten Lost Tribes, they would be able to converse with them. When Columbus sighted land and espied the natives, he likely put Louis de Torres ashore, and when he approached them, his first word was probably “Shalom.”

In conclusion, “Zion” has long been a poetic synecdoche for Jerusalem, the place to which Columbus was most certainly headed, he was like the 19th-century Zionists, with the major difference being his religiosity and their atheism. It was Marxism’s hatred of Judaism that propelled the late, iconic Israeli socialist Moshe Dayan in 1967 to order IDF soldiers to return the conquered Temple Mount to the Muslims, who the week before had been shrieking, “Slaughter the Jews! Let’s Finish Hitler’s work!” Dayan sneeringly declared, “Who needs this Vatican? Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have no religious significance for Israelis; only historic.”

And it is this same anti-religious spirit that has kept Israel from ever claiming sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip and continuing to foolishly expect their Muslim neighbors and enemies to respect the right of Jews to live free when Islamic Sharia law requires them to be “oppressed and humiliated.”

The secular Israeli elite has yet to understand that the enemy is not the verbal hologram of “the Palestinians,” but the Muslims’ antisemitic religion. The obtuse Zionists thought that if they stopped being religious, the Arabs would like that. What they have never understood is that the same Muslims that forced Columbus to sail westward to Jerusalem are the ones attacking Israel today to take back the Holy City brought back to life by the Zionist Jews.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.