ABSTRACT
None now pressed either the greater or the lesser claim. In a way, it could be argued, this in itself was a sign of 'Decolumbianization'. If all and sundry were no longer seeking to get hold of him was not this an indication of his diminished importance? Under the influence of a brilliant Hispanist3 of the 1930s some still argued that Columbus was a Jew. (The starting point for this is that his mother's name was Suzanna; perhaps we ought to be thinking more deeply about Figaro, Beaumarchais, and Mozart?) But even they normally thought of him as a Jew who was a Genoese. On the other hand, and more consolingly, no-one outside the fringe any longer believed that America had been discovered before 1492, by a Welshman, a Scotsman, Irish monks, a (fifteenth-century) Dane, a Nuremberger, or even — most wounding to Genoese pride — a Venetian.4 It was true that most thought that the Norsemen had come across America in the tenth century.5 Many Portuguese espoused a pre-1492 Portuguese.6 An Irish scholar of great distinction had claimed that as a result of an AngloIcelandic cod-war, Bristol fishermen might have moved in the 1480s to the Newfoundland banks.7 Yet no-one who believed any of these things seemed likely to allow them a significance which diminished the importance of Columbus.
