Christopher Columbus Finding The New Jerusalem And King Solomon’s Ophir
Cristobal Colón was born in mid-1460 as the illegitimate son of Prince Carlos (Charles IV) of Viana, Spain, and Margarita Colón, of a prominent Jewish family in the ghetto of the Island of Mallorca, near the village of Genova. He took on the identity of Cristoforo Colombo, a wool merchant - born in the latter half of 1451, to Dominick and Susana Colombo in Genoa (Italian “Genova”) in the Liguria section of Italy - whom he had met on a ship, and so became ‘Chrisopher Columbus’. The question is why did he conceal his identity?
Colombo (baritono), costume design for ‘Cristoforo Colombo act 1’ by Adolfo Hohenstein (1918) (Archivio Storico Ricordi / CC BY-SA 4.0)
In the 13th century King James I of Aragon, also known as James the Conqueror, had launched an invasion into Mallorca and on December 31, 1229 Mallorca, birth place of Cristobal Colón, became part of Christian Spain. It should be remembered that Spain was only liberated from the Moors in early 1492. Because of the close collaboration between Jews and Moslems in Spain, Jews were persecuted by the Spanish crown and officially expelled from Spain at that time. In fact, the day that all Jews were to have left Spain under penalty of law, was the very day that Columbus had set sail for the Indies, August 3, 1492. If was safer and more lucrative to take on the name of a Genoese sea-fearer, than being persecuted for being Jewish.
The Search For King Solomon’s Ophir
Was Christopher Columbus looking for a new homeland for the exiled Spanish Jews, or perhaps searching for a lost Jewish city or Kingdom on the other side of the Atlantic? Perhaps he was doing both.
In the 12-volume set, Life of Christopher Columbus, it says that Columbus’ son wrote of his father: “Their progenitors were of the Royal Blood of Jerusalem.” (Vol. 12, page 2) This statement makes one think that Colón/Columbus was deeply concerned with ancient Jewish history. Did he believe himself to be a descendent of King Solomon and other Biblical kings? Perhaps he believed that he was rediscovering the Biblical land of Ophir which had made King Solomon rich. He may also have been looking for a lost Jewish colony across the Atlantic and a new country with a New Jerusalem in which all of the Jews expelled from Spain might take refuge.
King Solomon in Old Age" by Gustave Doré (1866) ( Yitzilitt/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Bible says of the voyages to Ophir: “King Solomon made a fleet of ships in Ezion-Geber, which is beside Eilat on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy of his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon… Once in three years the fleet came in bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, peacocks… a very great amount of red sandalwood and precious stones.” I Kings 9:26-28, 10:22, 11.
- King Solomon’s Mines Discovered: Kings and Pharaohs
- The Cataclysm of Easter Island
- Columbus’s Identity Crisis and the Ongoing Spread of False Columbus News
King Solomon (circa 1000 BC) and his father-in-law, the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre, built refineries and a port on the Red Sea, and with Phoenician naval expertise, built ships and commissioned the dangerous voyages to Ophir. Ships apparently left from the Mediterranean ports as well. The Phoenicians and their “ships of Tarshish,” named after the Phoenician port in Spain called Tartessos, were well suited to the venture of going after the gold of Ophir, having sailed throughout the Atlantic.
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