On Christopher Columbus And The Concept Of Race
A new documentary claims Columbus was a Sephardic Jew. It shows us a lot more about 'race' than his actual heritage.
“Ideas do not die…At any given moment they may reach a scientific stage, and then lose it or even emigrate to other sciences. They can change their application, their status, even their form and content; but they retain something essential throughout the process…Ideas are always reusable.”
— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Heard about Christopher? According to a Spanish documentary that aired this past October, Genoa’s most famous son may not have been Genoese at all, but instead, an Iberian converso hiding his Jewish heritage. The period in which he lived is alternatively referred to as the ‘Age of Discovery’ and Spanish Literature’s ‘Golden Age,’ and in both domains, historians, literary critics and geneticists alike have spent decades rootling around for the converso ancestries of the good, bad and the ugly. Over the years, this historical edition of ‘Where is Waldo’ has roped in Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco Pizarro even Diego Velasquez. And while the jury is still out regarding that lot, the documentary says their DNA tests end the speculation around the world’s most notorious mariner. You can almost picture the Hollywood treatment — a man looking to hide his past sets off to discover the ‘new’ world in 1492, the very same year his patrons Isabella and Ferdinand busied themselves tearing apart the ‘old.’
Don’t get me wrong, it would make for a seductive irony. But a word of caution to any would-be producers out there: don’t get ahead of yourselves just yet! While the headlines have been fairly unequivocal about the new findings (see Reuters, Fox, the Independent, CNN etc), the evidence is shaky at best. Some commentators have already said as much but they’ve neglected to go the whole hog and tell you what this sleight of hand amounts to. I’m more than happy to oblige. The short version is that the certainty of said pronouncements wreaks of population genetics’ longest-running scandal — how it often reinforces notions of biological race in all but name.
If you’re at all familiar with the history of ‘race,’ you probably know it went decidedly out of fashion as a concept during the postwar period and that today, most social scientists (and many of their companions in the hard ones) dismiss it as a social construct without an empirical basis. Yet somehow, we still cleave to its descriptive powers and many of its assumptions. This shelf life is nothing short of remarkable in the human sciences. And while those Spanish documentary makers probably didn’t figure as much, they gesture to some interesting clues as to why.
Just for a moment, let’s imagine that Columbus’ life and deeds are a monumental tapestry, put his likeness to the side and consider the wider drapery. If indeed he was an Iberian converso, Columbus would have encountered the expression ‘marrano’, which came into widespread usage just before he was born in 1451. It meant ‘pig,’ its association with dirt was not incidental and it described people of Jewish descent even if they had in fact converted. Historians call this period the ‘genealogical turn’ in Iberian history, where religion suddenly starts being conceived in terms of blood and inheritance as opposed to personal a choice, a ‘stain’ that baptismal waters could not remove. What’s more, it saw a host of other expressions from animal husbandry grafted onto humans, namely ‘linaje’ (lineage), ‘casta’ (caste), and pivotally, ‘raza/raça’ (race). For centuries, the word ‘raza’ had been used to talk about horse breeding and afflictions in horse hoofs, as well as stains, imperfections and blemishes in both textiles and gems. The word probably derives from the Latin word ‘ratio’ or the Spanish one ‘haraz,’ meaning a herd of male horses. Whatever the case, it’s during Columbus’ lifetime that we first see it being applied to people and upon the discovery of the Americas, not just those in continental Europe.
Now, this runs fairly contrary to our understanding of ‘race’ today. It’s something that people are supposed to ‘belong’ to, not something they ‘have.’ But the earth-shattering consequences of ‘discovering’ a whole new set of continents (seemingly) demanded new regimes of classification, something ‘race’ was well situated to do. Which means the question is not whether words change over time because that’s clearly the case. It’s how much they change — and whether ‘belonging’ and ‘having’ are really so different?
If that sounds hopelessly abstract, I promise it’ll make more sense after we’ve talked about the documentary and its claims…Onwards!
The Thing About Port Towns
Over the course of the past century, people have claimed Columbus was variously Jewish, Greek, French, Polish and even Scottish. Regarding the latter, our mariner was once described as having fair hair and freckles in his youth, which was rather ludicrously presumed to be a hallmark of Scottish ancestry (at least according to the Catalan historian, Alfonso Ensenat de Villalonga). The Polish theory doesn’t bear repeating. The Jewish one on the other hand can marshal a tad more evidence to its cause, like Columbus referencing the Jewish expulsion of 1492 in his Captain’s log that same year. Sure, the terms are less plaintive and sooner descriptive —‘After you expelled the Jews, your Majesties sent me with a fleet…’ goes the opening, but defenders of the Sephardic thesis have some more tricks up their sleeve. They also cite Columbus’ use of Hebrew anagrams in his letters to his son and a fleeting reference to the fall of the Second Temple in another correspondence.
The fact that Biblical allusions in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic were literary tropes at the time escapes the most ardent defenders of said theory, but never mind the details. People see what they want to see. And while modern genomics may improve their optics, it’s not about to produce a smoking gun. For one thing, the data behind said ‘new’ findings has yet to be peer-reviewed, which is why many geneticists are skeptical that the featured study analysed the correct remains in the first place, especially given Columbus’ final resting place remains an object of contention. Then there’s the big elephant in the room. The documentary’s makers have kept it shtum about their evidence for now, but given the song and dance they’ve made about analysing the supposed remains of Columbus’ son Fernando, it doesn’t take much guesswork to glean what they’re working with. They’ve probably isolated a gene called J-M267 that’s passed from father to son and has long been associated with Sephardic Jews. The thing is, it’s also associated with southern Italians, North Africans, Syrians, Phoenicians, Turks, Greeks and Arabs.
Here’s the clincher — while there are degrees of consanguinity amongst Jewish people, there is no tell-all, distinctive Jewish genotype. Whether it's heritable conditions like Tay Sachs disease or the protein structures of Y chromosomes for the Jewish priestly cast (‘the Cohanim’), genetic structures associated with Jews are by no means exclusive to them and are often shared by neighbouring populations. Most of the findings that would be consonant with the Sephardic thesis would be equally so with the existing theory, namely, that the guy came from a heaving port town. Intermarriage has always been a fact of both human and Jewish life, all the more so in a city like Genoa and the myriads of people that passed through it. The bottom line is Columbus may well have had a Sephardic Jewish great-grandparent here, a Levantine Christian great-great-grandparent there and remained wholly ignorant of them both.
An Arboreal Fetish
We tend to think of ancestry in terms of trees that cascade outward in orderly geometric patterns. But this conceptual crutch can quickly become a straight jacket. It imposes an imagined order on something far more chaotic, a tangle of crisscrossing lines that sooner resemble dense forest foliage or the threads of a hastily knitted fabric. The danger of these trees is they seduce us into thinking of people as discreet branches, each imbued with their own distinctive characteristics. Which in many ways is the principal assumption behind most theories of ‘race.’ After all, what is ‘race’ if not a theory of kinship sketched out in bold, unyielding lines?
For descriptive purposes, these contours are easy enough to follow, something that makes them rather suggestive too. For awhile, many people thought that tracing the distance between different points was a reliable measure for the degrees of shared ancestry and relatedness. They were very much mistaken and that’s because this arboreal mirage isn’t just overly simplistic and omits more than it contains (not least by typically tracing just one line of descent), it’s also a mathematical impossibility. Geneticists call the reason why ‘Pedigree Collapse.’ Think about it — if our family trees cascade out like this, it follows that the number of our ancestors should double with each successive generation. That means four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents etc. so that by the time you get twenty generations back, the number would topple over the one million mark (and by thirty generations, closer to a billion). In reality, our number of forebears is much smaller, because many of said ancestors found mates already contained within said tree and sometimes not once, but twice.
What I’m saying is those lines of ours fold back in on themselves and intertwine at multiple different points, both as a function of geography and the limited potential mates in a given area. And then, in response to the winds of history, they leap across from one tangled mess to another when people migrate. Us humans are tangled up not just in each others affairs but in our very DNA, which makes those simplified 2-D representations of ancestry hopelessly limited in their perspective. That’s not to say we can’t make distinctions about who is who or that differences between people don’t exist. But as countless DNA studies have revealed, there is more variation between individuals within ‘ethnic’ groupings than between ideal types of said groups. So when subsuming individuals and their strands of DNA into said ideal genetic types, we should be wary about how we cut the cloth.
It’s worth keeping in mind this sleight of hand is partly a reflection of technological constraint. The two most effective means of DNA testing in humans, Mitochondrial and Y-DNA allow us to follow both maternal and paternal lines (i.e. your mother’s mother and your father’s father and so on) back successive generations. At least one generation deep, the results they produce account for 50% of our heritage. But by the 10th generation onwards, we’re looking at less than one percent of a person’s genetic profile. Relatedness from a maternal grandfather, the inverse (a paternal grandmother) are left out of the equation down successive generations. While other tests exist to piece the rest together (autosomal DNA testing), they are far less accurate, especially when dealing with degraded (i.e. old) DNA samples and only stretch back 6-8 generations anyways. And when it comes to Columbus’ DNA samples, word on the street is that they are very degraded indeed.
Some More Myth Busting
If the problem of confirmation bias wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of apples and oranges. The Sephardic Jewish genetic profile that we’re comparing Columbus to is almost definitely compiled from modern samples, most likely databases like HapMap and the 1000 Genomes Project that were assembled during the last couple of decades. It’s just not the same thing as a genetic profile dating from the 1400s where Sephardic Jews largely inhabited the same geography and that’s because the conclusion of that century saw the expulsions of 1492. This epoch-defining event saw the Sephardic Jewish diaspora ricochet throughout the Mediterranean basin and the modern Sephardic genetic ideal type reflects as much, hence the genetic resemblance to Southern European and Levantine groups. The end result is a hybrid genetic profile that took shape long after he was dead. His relative resemblance therein doesn’t point in any one direction other than what has already been made plain. I’ll repeat it again — the man came from a heaving port town!
Unless I’m very much mistaken, we can’t deduce much more from the extant genetic data. Which means piecing together the rest of the picture is a question of looking at the documentary evidence that should have foregrounded the documentary’s investigation in the first place. In this regard, the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto puts it better than I ever could:
The Catalan, French, Galician, Greek, Ibizan, Jewish, Majorcan, Scottish, and other Columbuses concocted by historical fantasists are agenda-driven creations, usually inspired by a desire to arrogate a supposed or confected hero to the cause of a particular nation or historic community – or, more often than not, to some immigrant group striving to establish a special place of esteem in the United States. The evidence of Columbus's origins in Genoa is overwhelming: almost no other figure of his class or designation has left so clear a paper trail in the archives.
This dressing down may date from 2009, but it’s still appropriate because the archival evidence remains the same and it is this evidence, not genetics, that should have always been in the driving seat.
Pivotally, what’s missing from so much of the current genetics chatter is that resemblance between Jews is a consequence of intermarriage on the basis of shared traditions. Both a downstream effect of culture and its tributary, the resulting commonality is neither transcendental in its own right nor the reservoir of Judaism’s fundamental nature. The documentary claim to have found the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but by fetishising the relationship between Judaism and biology, all they’ve done is made a series of outsized presumptions about a person’s life, background and motivations off the back of a few strands of DNA. They think they can tell which colour those strands are dyed (read: stained) and have used that to make a whole film about their little jig-saw. But they were never a looking at a puzzle to begin with. It is and always was a tapestry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the intentions behind the documentary were innocent enough. But what I’m banging on about are assumptions, and in this case they betray a (racialist i.e. believes in the category, not quite the same as racist) set about the nature of human difference, namely, that it's fixed and that there’s a definitive biological criteria for stacking people in neat rows. Since at least the 18th century, we’ve called this of kind of taxonomy ‘race science.’
Moving Goalposts
Part of what makes this so confusing is that even in its scientific guises, biological race has meant different things at different times. But if we want to trace its journey, a good place to start is with the father of modern racial taxonomy, Johann Blumenbach, who incidentally settled upon his definition of ‘race’ by looking at the differences between the European wild boar and domesticated pigs in North America in the late 18th century. By arguing both their differences and those between purported human ‘races’ were a mere function of geography, he was at pains to stress no one race was superior to another and furnished the world with a definition along the lines of ‘variety.’ But not all of his contemporaries agreed and other shorthands such as ‘subspecies’ also quickly emerged, followed by designations fixating on skin colour and observable phenotype (e.g. hair + eye colour, shape of nose etc.). Even after its fall from grace during the postwar period, proponents of ‘race’ attempted to recuperate its descriptive powers for blurrier designations such as ‘population.’
That all sounds fairly arbitrary because it is; and moreover, that was still the case all the way back in 1793, Blumenbach himself observing "All national differences in the form and colour of the human body run so insensibly, by so many shades and transitions one into the other, that it is impossible to separate them by any but very arbitrary limits." Fast forward to the present and modern genetics has done little to change this. “Within the human species,” writes the biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, “the genetic data revealed races when they were expected to, negated races when they were expected to, and consequently leave geneticists in disagreement on the subject at present.”
Clearly, the goalposts keep moving and that’s because the history of race isn’t just one of documenting difference. It’s about the search for meaningful difference, for some essential characteristic to make distinctions between humans. Now, we may reassure ourselves that race is a fiction that we’d do better sweeping to the side. But the Columbus case suggests that just maybe, this consolation puts too much faith in science. All of which leads me to a rather different proposition. Perhaps ‘race’ was never about the science to begin with.
Race as Taboo
I’m hardly the first person to suggest this and the most famous formulation today probably comes from Barbara and Karen Fields and their pathbreaking book Racecraft. “Racism creates race,” they tell us, not the other way around and I agree. But the same aphorism has emboldened writers like Thomas Chatterton Williams to argue that we can and should ‘transcend’ or ‘unlearn’ race because at the end of the day, the category is a fiction and a deeply oppressive one at that. This may be comforting but it explains neither the problem of shelf-life nor peoples’ emotional investment in upholding its logic, especially when most commentators today supposedly agree that race is a ‘social construct’. Chatterton Williams falls into the trap of so many other thinkers today by thinking the phrase ‘constructed’ is tantamount to a mic drop, when in reality, all it does is pose yet another question: constructed out of what?
I think the answer is taboo. Scratch away at the patina of ‘race’ and this is the material from which it is shorn, that fastens it in place. The concept of race is not a jig-saw puzzle with pieces so easily chucked to the side (…as you can probably tell by now, I’m rather attached to this weaving metaphor). However artless, it’s closer to a tapestry or textile, woven together in different places using the same individual threads. Whether you had ‘race/raza’ in 15th century Spain or you (supposedly) belong to one in the 21st century, both senses are redolent of the same imagery — that of the stain, a marking that speaks to the oppositions that make taboo what it is. I’m talking about anxieties around cleanliness vs. dirt (purity), man vs. animal (culture) and men vs. women (sex) among others. The word ‘marrano’ conveyed as much back when Columbus was around, and the same goes for ‘race,’ both then and now. As a hopeless Wittgensteinian (see his idea of Family Resemblance), what I’m saying is that the key to its durability as a concept lies in its woop and warf — and those threads run anything but straight.
That’s the argument of my forthcoming book, PIG: A History Of Us And Them, at any rate. If we want to understand how things are sewn into place (…so that one day, maybe we can wrench them out), a good place to start is by looking at one of the greatest taboos around, the one concerning the humble Sus Scrofa.