As I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, I thought widely circulated claims, put forth in a recent Spanish television documentary, of conclusive genetic evidence that Christopher Columbus was Jewish—or even had Jewish ancestry—were a little overblown. In fact, it’s not even entirely clear the DNA researchers analyzed belonged to the famed explorer, even if there is reason to believe so. Menachem Wecker investigated the claims, and spoke with a variety of experts, among them the historian of New World Sephardim Ronnie Perelis:

 “For over a century, if not since his own lifetime, people have been obsessed with Columbus’s origins. He is a fascinating, flawed and enigmatic figure. . . . I encourage people to read his own writings to appreciate his complex identity—he was an autodidact, who took advantage of the explosion of knowledge after the birth of printing to create an eclectic theology that had many Judaic elements—but in a deeply Christian, mystical vein,” Perelis said.

Matt Goldish, another expert on Sephardi Jewry Wecker interviewed, provides some additional context, and raised a different kind of skepticism:

“The ahistorical attitude that Columbus is to blame for everything Europeans did in the Americas is itself highly problematic. If you look at his biography, you learn that he was very careful with native people and was not a slave owner, which was not so common for hidalgos,” or noblemen, Goldish said.

“He is, however, used as the fulcrum on which to place all blame for the sins of Europeans in the Americas,” Goldish told JNS. “Once Columbus is to blame for everything, the anti-Semitism melds with the post-colonial and postmodern trends to create a truly dangerous idea.”

He noted that post-colonialists view Zionism as a European movement “to steal Palestine from the poor native Arabs. . . . As ahistorical as this claim is, it may create a perfect storm of Jew-hatred if the same Jews caused the destruction of native American civilization and of native Palestinian civilization. . . . We might next expect a conspiracy picture out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but coming from the left this time.”

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”