Plot Twist: Columbus May Have Been a Spanish Jew

After it was recently confirmed that Christopher Columbus' remains were indeed housed in Spain's Seville Cathedral, the forensic medical expert from the University of Granada who tested those remains said he'd also soon reveal where Columbus originally hailed from, in a TV documentary set to air over the weekend. That special aired Saturday on Spanish broadcaster RTVE, and it included Jose Antonio Lorente's promised revelation: He says that his analysis, the culmination of a 22-year investigation, has shown the explorer's remains to be "compatible" with Jewish origins, reports the Guardian.

Lorente says the "very partial, but sufficient" DNA extracted from Columbus' remains was compared with that of one of Columbus' sons, and that even though researchers couldn't exactly point to where Columbus came from, signs suggest the Spanish Mediterranean region. "If there weren't Jews in Genoa in the 15th century," the Italian city that has long claimed Columbus as their own, "the likelihood that he was from there is minimal," Lorente says. "Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very tenuous." Reuters notes that about 300,000 Jews resided in Spain before Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, who sponsored Columbus' journeys overseas, purged their nation of Jews and Muslims by demanding they convert to Catholicism or leave.

Lorente's peers, however, aren't quite so sure about his findings. "Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can't really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever," Antonio Alonso, one of Spain's leading forensic geneticists, tells El Pais. Jonathan Ray, who teaches Jewish studies at Georgetown, tells the Jewish News Syndicate that records indicate Columbus was Catholic. He says that the DNA evidence would instead "seem to indicate that he was a converso, or New Christian, as they are often called—that is, a descendant of Iberian Jews who had converted to Christianity under duress during the century leading up to Spain's expulsion of the Jews in 1492." Read more on similar takes here. (More Christopher Columbus stories.)