The problem is that many historians doubt the deed’s authenticity, believing it to be apocryphal. Such historians argue that not once in the 536 plus pages that make up Columbus’s correspondences is there solid evidence that he comes from Genoa. But regardless of whether they’re right or wrong about this, there’s another more pressing problem with Columbus’s documents: the language in which they’re written. Columbus never wrote in his native Italian, or rather Ligurian, dialect. He wrote in either Spanish (Castilian) or Latin. And this is problematic; especially when writing to his supposedly Genovese brothers you’d expect him to use his native Ligurian. So if not Genoa, where was Christopher Columbus from?
A theory that’s gained popularity in recent years locates Columbus’s origins in one of Spain’s Catalan-speaking areas. The theory is rooted in linguists and has been around since the early 20th century. And currently leading the charge with it is Estelle Irizarry, professor of linguistics at the University of Georgetown. Her analysis of Columbus’s language and grammar has led her to the conclusion that Columbus was from the Kingdom of Aragon and that his native tongue was Catalan. He may have written in Castilian, argues Irizarry, but his grammatical errors and use of syntax suggest that it wasn’t his first language, and that the whole time he was translating from Catalan.
Irizarry doesn’t just believe that Columbus was Catalan. She also argues that—contrary to the conventional view of Columbus as a devout Catholic—he was an Iberian Jew at pains to conceal his identity from the rampaging Spanish Inquisition. Her evidence is that at a number of points throughout his writing Columbus deviates from Spanish to write in Hebrew, and that during his account of his first voyage he makes reference to the Jewish High Holiday. Others have gone further in trying to establish Columbus’s Jewish origins, and in doing so have somewhat unconvincingly projected Zionist elements onto their characterization of Columbus.
Simon Weisenthal, for example, suggested that his quest to sail west to the Indies was driven less by geographical curiosity than by the desire to find a new homeland for his fellow Jews. As evidence for this, Weisenthal cites a couple of passages from the Book of Isaiah: “Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from afar…” and “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth”, before tentatively suggesting that, at the end, Columbus believed he had fulfilled this prophecy.
Another attractive, albeit wildly implausible theory is that Christopher Columbus was Polish royalty: the product of a whirlwind romance between the exiled the Polish king Wladyslaw III and a Portuguese noblewoman. According to Portuguese academic Manuel Rosa, Wladyslaw wasn’t in fact killed and beheaded by Ottoman forces at the Battle of Varna in 1444, but survived and fled to the Portuguese island of Madeira. There he took on the identity of Henrique Alemao (one assumes his Portuguese was convincing enough for him to do so) and met the Portuguese noblewoman, Filipa Moniz Perestrelo.