Columbus the Colonizer, a Real Jew

This is a piece of satire.

In a new DNA study on Christopher Columbus and his 500-year-old remains, Spanish researchers, and a plethora of news outlets, announced that the colonizing explorer was actually a Sephardic Jew from western Europe. Since 2003, scientists have tested samples of remains buried at Seville Cathedral in Spain. Christopher Columbus, whose given name was discovered to be Christ Killer Columberg, was raised in a kind of Western European shtetl. Think “Fiddler on the Roof” meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Think a Hasidic rabbi playing with a dreidel meets his own curly peyos getting smothered by a Jewish mother’s cream cheese. Think intelligently.

As part of their profession, forensic scientists investigate the murders of our society’s most vulnerable; they can absolve an innocent man from an unjust life sentence. And then you have the forensic scientists who humbly ask, “Hmm, what homicidal squatter from history should we look into next?” They want to make sure the money they paid for their degrees are going toward justice, and they knew right away that their subsequent act of heroism would be a 22-year-dig into Christopher Columbus, the dude who’s now bringing shame to America, and never discovered anything. Or, maybe the afikomen 3-year-olds have no trouble finding? I don’t know. What I do know is that these are the people who truly make a difference. Haven’t we all asked how we would raise our children in a world where we were lacking the lineage of a disgraced navigator that got very, very lost?

When Christ Killer was growing up, he was a tough young boychick. The attacks and murders leading up to the Spanish Inquisition basically rolled off his family’s shoulders. “Eh,” they said, “we live in Italy, where we have specific dress codes for Jews and our own cool expulsions of them.” His father, Domenico Colombo and mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, who were known in the community by the joint name “you better run,” had raised their Christ Killer to be a diligent student, and only allowed him to explore and adventure after finishing his Hebrew homework, which was super popular in Italy all the way until the country joined forces with Hitler but only after Jews were slaves in Rome.

Of course, Domenico and Susanna wanted their son to be a Jewish doctor, or a Jewish banker, or a Jewish demon, but there was no convincing the colonizer we now know as Christopher Columbus, or what New Yorkers like to call, “Hot Chris,” of the challenges that lay ahead. So Hot Chris could think of nothing else to do than kiss the Star of David he’d tattooed on himself when he was a teenager in a place no one could see it, since being Jewish at the time was actually quite dangerous. Yes, it was tattooed on the interior of his tuchus, the one given to him by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But only his family knew. As soon as they were all done with Havdalah, Columbus the Jew went to ask for some money from the heretic-killing Christian royalty. Maybe Ferdinand and Isabella were Jews, too. Maybe Ghengis Khan, Henry VIII and his daughter “Bloody Mary,” the Roman Empire, the Umayyad Dynasty, and all of England were Jews. People are also looking into Puff Daddy’s maternal great grandmother.

In the sweet Semitic spring of 1492, Columberg signed, along with King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, the “Capitulations of Santa Fe,” granting Columbus, their “big Jew on campus,” the titles of admiral of the Ocean Sea, viceroy, and governor-general and the honorific don, along with a tenth of all money he would collect from a successful voyage. It was a standard 15th-century contract, one any Jew at the time would be privy to. You know, a time when Jews were promised safety but instead thrown overboard by Spanish captains, a time they faced massacre deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands (debated by historians depending on how okay they feel about Jewy stuff). In a time where Spanish Jews were forced to convert by means of violence, that’s when the King and Queen of Spain enthusiastically sponsored their proud Jewish tatala on his journey west, in pursuit of his Hebrew dreams. They said, “we’re trusting one Jew and one Jew only in the whole of Spain, and it’s you, Christ Killer.” We know they said this because the forensic scientists took two decades to not actually confirm it scientifically.

They said, “we’re trusting one Jew and one Jew only in the whole of Spain, and it’s you, Christ Killer.”

It doesn’t really matter that the evidence of these scientists is not at all conclusive, that “compatible” with his being of Jewish origin isn’t actual evidence. It doesn’t matter that Columbus would not have practiced, been able to practice, or even know he was Jewish. What matters is that after centuries of putting him on a pedestal as America’s white Christian genius celeb savior, he gets labeled a “Jew” the second he’s  federally considered a colonizer. The mad scientists got together, and said, just like Doctor Frankenstein, “let’s make this one … Jewish. You know, for inclusivity.” For once, Jews are not being left out of the diversity conversation—specifically in a time when Jews are denied being a distinct ethnicity you can trace back to their ancestral homeland, when Jewish people all around the world are being referred to as colonizers as well as attacked and murdered for wanting to live in their scientifically proven indigenous place of origin. It’s very exciting news for the Jewish community that our beloved, Christ Killer Columberg, who used the powerful stage name Christopher Columbus to get him to the top, will in his demise be remembered as a Jew.

Alexandra Ozeri is a Los Angeles-based writer who has written for Reductress, The Belladonna, The Foreigner, Flexx, Robot Butt, and the Jewish Journal.