Reddit reviews Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus

But it affected some of his crew I would think. I have a small book around here somewhere and I'll have to find it...:http://www.amazon.ca/Sails-Hope-Mission-Christopher-Columbus/dp/0026284006

That's a good point

"Opposing Colombus" is often a front for antisemitic neonazis

https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewish/index.html

>...During Columbus' lifetime, Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave them four months to pack up and get out.


>...Tens of thousands of Marranos were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of friends and family members, who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds, tied to stakes and burned alive. Their land and personal possessions were then divvied up by the church and crown.
Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Columbus, who was known in Spain as Cristóbal Colón and didn't speak Italian, signed his last will and testament on May 19, 1506, and made five curious -- and revealing -- provisions.

>...In Simon Weisenthal's book, "Sails of Hope," he argues that Columbus' voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their expulsion from Spain. Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews' holy Temple.


>In Columbus' day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the Messiah to come.
Scholars point to the date on which Columbus set sail as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to sail on August 2, 1492, a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday, which would have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally or significantly, the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were, by law, given the choice of converting, leaving Spain, or being killed.)

>Columbus' voyage was not, as is commonly believed, funded by the deep pockets of Queen Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew. Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the voyage, as did Don Isaac Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.


Simon Wiesenthal (ie the one with the infamous international "anti-hate group") wrote a book about it

https://www.amazon.com/Sails-Hope-Mission-Christopher-Columbus/dp/0026284006

>Did Columbus discover America while looking for a haven for Spain's persecuted Jews? Was Columbus Jewish? Five years of detective work and painstaking research in Spain, Portugal, the Vatican, and North Africa convinced Simon Wiesenthal, world-famous head of the Documentation Center in Vienna, that Columbus was of Jewish origin and that his 1492 voyage was actually a desperate search for a new homeland for the Jews.