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Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
Claim raises idea explorer was from community expelled by his Spanish patrons, but experts view it with caution
The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire hailed from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from their kingdom in the same year Columbus reached the Americas. “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, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences told El País. Saturday’s revelation came two days after Lorente and his team said that DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego “definitively confirmed” that the partial skeleton kept in a tomb in Seville Cathedral was that of the famous navigator.
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