Nazi Hunter Read Online Free Page A

boat-like symbol in the upper
left-hand corner.
    With the help of an American Jewish scholar named Maurice David, Wiesenthal deciphered it as two Hebrew characters,
beth
and
hei
, standing for
baruch hashem
, meaning
Praised be the Lord
. It was, Wiesenthal thinks, Columbus’s way of reminding his son: ‘Do not forget where you come from. The cross is a tribute to the religion you now follow,
but within the circle of your family give the sign
beth hei, so
that they remember their origins.’ In one of the letters, Wiesenthal adds, he discussed with Diego the possibility of
marriage to a
Marrano
.
    ‘I spent a lot of time in Seville,’ Wiesenthal went on. ‘I had in my hands all his writings that have survived – not just letters, but books he had read, with his
jottings in the margins, and books he valued enough to have copied for himself at his own expense: usually by hand, because this was very soon after Gutenberg. 4 Now whywould you imagine that a Christian sailor five hundred years ago would make a copy of a work by Rabbi Samuel Jehudi urging Jews to accept
conversion, even forced baptism? There were just too many coincidences.
    ‘In all, I find two hundred and fifty references by Columbus to Jews. He knew the Jewish calendar, the Jewish prophets, and his diary showed a deep knowledge of Jewish history. The beliefs
of Columbus were a mixture of Christianity and Judaism. In a book of history by Pope Pius the Second, he makes a marginal note that the year 1481’s Jewish equivalent was 5241. He writes that
Adam lived to be one hundred fifty years old and, when he tells how the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in the year Seventy by the Romans, he calls it
Casa secunda
, the Second
House. Only Jews use that phrase; in no non-Jewish publication have I ever met this idiom, Second House.
    ‘But the most important marginal note I find is the one that tells me Columbus knows the diary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the east three centuries before him and came to
the conclusion that the ten lost tribes of Israel were in “India”. I have this book in my own library. So now I go back to the register of the crew and look a little closer. Not only
are there a number of Jewish names, but later I learn that several in Columbus’s crew spoke Hebrew and a couple of them may have been rabbis. And who was the interpreter on board? Luis de
Torres, who had been interpreter for the Governor of Murcia, which had a large Jewish population. It took me two weeks to confirm that Luis de Torres had been the governor’s interpreter of
Hebrew. Now the only possible explanation of this is that Columbus expected to reach countries in which Jews lived and governed.’
    From research on Columbus that began around 1965, Wiesenthal was convinced ‘that the Jews, concerned about their deteriorating situation in Spain, 5 were looking for a homeland, a place to flee to, where they would find a protector. And so, in the belief that the ten lost tribes had found refuge in “India”, they
financed the expedition of Columbus: a man they could trust.’ Simon saysColumbus was surely a
Converso
and quite likely a
Marrano
: ‘I am
convinced he was following the Law of Moses. But I’m not saying to the bitter end that I’m sure he’s Jewish. I make the matter open.’
    Still, when Simon wrote a book-length manuscript that became
Sails of Hope
:
the Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus
, he hesitated to offer it to publishers because ‘I
feel when I give out that Columbus had a Hebrew interpreter, people will think I am absolutely crazy or else some Jewish fanatic. So I cannot publish the book. But then I have an idea. I was
invited to lecture in Lisbon, so I am going to the Royal Library there and looking on the documents of Vasco da Gama, who was also looking for a way to India and really found it. 6 He had also an interpreter for the Hebrew language. When I saw this, now I should publish.’
    When