Chinese-Backed Code Pink Group Takes Wreath for Christopher Columbus Ceremony

Ill-timed and pretty gross

This morning on Columbus Plaza outside of Union Station, a spot vandalized repeatedly by pro-Palestine protestors, a ceremony in honor of the explorer was held:

Afterward, a protestor who appears to be affiliated with Code Pink took the wreath sent by the Spanish embassy for the ceremony and affixed it to his bike. He had a sign calling Christopher Columbus “Netanyahu with a boat.” It’s hard to imagine a stupider slogan, the presentism of it and the way it only resonates with people who have been propagandized the way he has.

While Code Pink has done some good anti-war work, they also have a number of well-documented links to the Chinese Communist Party, by way of Neville Roy Singham.

Second, this comes on the heels of some reporting that Christopher Columbus had Sephardic ancestry. Jewish publications like JNS are suggesting one should exercise caution, with a quote from a Jewish studies professor saying the DNA evidence can’t establish that he was a practicing Jew.

That’s all true. There’s quite a lot of richness to this contretemps, though. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, who came up with the argument, novel at the time, that the vast majority of conversos were enthusiastic Catholics. Prior to that a lot of the historiography of the Inquisition took its cues from the Holocaust and New Left history, with a lot of focus on furtiveness and the preservation of traditions in the face of oppression.

The way the Church thinks about this is that a Jew who becomes a Catholic is not any less of a Jew, in the same sense that a Nigerian who becomes Catholic is no less Nigerian. You can see that in the narrative of the martyrdom of St. Edith Stein by the Nazis, in which she says at one point, “we are going for our people.” This is a point of view religious Jews understandably have some reservations about.

Where this bears on the Inquisition is this: there really was a great deal of suspicion of conversos, which probably led to a lot of reporting of suspected heresy which the civil power is incompetent to adjudicate—an unbaptized Jew cannot be a heretic by definition.

This is a controversial point, but when you look at how the vast majority of cases before the Spanish Inquisition were dropped or resulted in acquittals—only 1-2 percent were relaxed to the secular arm to carry out a death sentence, a ratio almost the reverse of federal prosecutions today—you can see how it actually had the effect of muting vigilante violence against Jews. The most common result is for the Inquisition to say, actually, they’re not heretics.

When it comes to the specific case of Christopher Columbus, Jewish ancestry or not is immaterial to his hero status among Catholics, especially Italian ones. Where I would probably go further than the JNS reporting is a genetic identity of Sephardim is difficult to establish, much more so than Ashkenazi Jews, who are more endogamous and have been shown to very clearly have their origins in a specific small population.

If you read the Spanish reporting on these various Columbus origin theories, it’s pretty clear various Iberian ones are getting a hearing, the two mentioned here are that he is from the Balearic Islands, and the Llorens theory is that he is Valencian—with his father immigration to the Crown of Aragon from Liguria, which basically just sets his Genoese origins back a generation. There are even Portuguese and Galician origin stories getting a hearing. I suspect this is more about the Spanish trying to claim Columbus back from the Italians than Jewish history.