Jewish Discoverer?

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS -- Salvador de Madariaga--Macmillan ($4).

In 400-odd years, 400-odd researchers have worried the question: Who was the man called Christopher Columbus? Was he a nobody from Genoa? A royal bastard from Portugal? An imaginative pirate from Catalonia? Annoyed with the name Christopher Columbus, he called himself Cristobal Colon ("Bringer of Christ-Repopulator"). What was his real name? He claimed he went to sea at ten. Others snorted that he was only a high-pressure promoter. Why was he so evasive about his past?

Latest answer to these riddles was offered this week in a shrewd and seductive biography by erudite, witty, sparrowish Salvador de Madariaga, Spain's famed philosopher-journalist-diplomat. He declares that Cristobal Colon was a Genoa-born, converted Spanish Jew; that his family fled Catalonia during the Jewish pogroms around 1390.

Unlike Shakespeare, Columbus has baffled biographers by a plethora rather than a lack of contemporary witnesses. Catch is that one contradicts the next, while Columbus' own plentiful writing contradicts both them and himself. Ingenious Author de Madariaga culls through the lot. His best technical evidence: 1) Columbus' Spanish resembled the language of the 14th rather than the 15th Century (suggesting that he learned it from his parents) ; 2) his mistakes in Latin were those of a Spaniard, not an Italian or Portuguese.

Convinced that Colon was a Spanish Jew, Biographer de Madariaga satisfies himself about the rest. Explained (for him) is Colon's mysterious caginess about his origins--only Nazi Germany is unhealthier for Jews than was Spain under the Inquisition. (De Madariaga's account of Spain's complex Jewish problem of that day is a model of lucidity.) This explains to de Madariaga the reason why Colon's sponsors were invariably converted Jews, who formed a sort of braintrust for Ferdinand and Isabel.

But such "proof" is only a starter for de Madariaga's deductive piece de resistance. Now he traces Colon's Jewish origin in his character--in his Messianic bent; in his preoccupation with human "contracts"; in his studious avoidance of editorial judgment on the expulsion of the Jews at a time when such sentiments were as conventional as Heil! in Nazi Germany; in his fascination with gold and jewels (rather more esthetic and symbolic than mercenary).

To accuse Biographer de Madariaga of anti-Semitism would perhaps be easy--if it were not equally possible to call him pro-Semitic. His Columbus, opaque to biographers for over 400 years, is a preincarnation of Don Quixote, an epic figure of epic contradictions, sailing "across a sea of errors to the shore of truth." Even de Madariaga does not think his own view is the one & only. So he says, (quoting an old Spanish proverb): "Truth marries no one."

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