Today marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus . Everybody knows the story of Columbus , right ? He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient . Not quite . For too long , scholars have ignored Columbus ' grand passion : the quest to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims . During Columbus ' lifetime , Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution . On March 31 , 1492 , King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain . The edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted , and gave them four months to pack up and get out . The Jews who were forced to renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as `` Conversos , '' or converts . There were also those who feigned conversion , practicing Catholicism outwardly while covertly practicing Judaism , the so-called `` Marranos , '' or swine . Tens of thousands of Marranos were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition . They were pressured to offer names of friends and family members , who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds , tied to stakes and burned alive . Their land and personal possessions were then divvied up by the church and crown . Recently , a number of Spanish scholars , such as Jose Erugo , Celso Garcia de la Riega , Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez , have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano , whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal , systematic ethnic cleansing . Columbus , who was known in Spain as Cristóbal Colón and did n't speak Italian , signed his last will and testament on May 19 , 1506 , and made five curious -- and revealing -- provisions . Two of his wishes -- tithe one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an anonymous dowry for poor girls -- are part of Jewish customs . He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter . On those documents , Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain . He ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity . According to British historian Cecil Roth 's `` The History of the Marranos , '' the anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish , a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative . Thus , Columbus ' subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when he died . Finally , Columbus left money to support the crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land . Estelle Irizarry , a linguistics professor at Georgetown University , has analyzed the language and syntax of hundreds of handwritten letters , diaries and documents of Columbus and concluded that the explorer 's primary written and spoken language was Castilian Spanish . Irizarry explains that 15th-century Castilian Spanish was the `` Yiddish '' of Spanish Jewry , known as `` Ladino . '' At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13 letters written by Columbus to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew letters bet-hei , meaning b'ezrat Hashem ( with God 's help ) . Observant Jews have for centuries customarily added this blessing to their letters . No letters to outsiders bear this mark , and the one letter to Diego in which this was omitted was one meant for King Ferdinand . In Simon Weisenthal 's book , `` Sails of Hope , '' he argues that Columbus ' voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their expulsion from Spain . Likewise , Carol Delaney , a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University , concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews ' holy Temple . In Columbus ' day , Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the Messiah to come . Scholars point to the date on which Columbus set sail as further evidence of his true motives . He was originally going to sail on August 2 , 1492 , a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av , marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples of Jerusalem . Columbus postponed this original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday , which would have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail . ( Coincidentally or significantly , the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were , by law , given the choice of converting , leaving Spain , or being killed . ) Columbus ' voyage was not , as is commonly believed , funded by the deep pockets of Queen Isabella , but rather by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew . Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the voyage , as did Don Isaac Abrabanel , rabbi and Jewish statesman . Indeed , the first two letters Columbus sent back from his journey were not to Ferdinand and Isabella , but to Santangel and Sanchez , thanking them for their support and telling them what he had found . The evidence seem to bear out a far more complicated picture of the man for whom our nation now celebrates a national holiday and has named its capital . As we witness bloodshed the world over in the name of religious freedom , it is valuable to take another look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such freedoms -- landing in a place that would eventually come to hold such an ideal at its very core .
Sunday marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus . Charles Garcia : Columbus was a Jew , or a Jew who claimed to be a Christian . He says that during Columbus ' voyage , Jews were the target of religious persecution . Garcia : Columbus ' voyage was motivated by a desire to establish a safe haven for Jews .