Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The question whether the Jews assisted in these discoveries has already heretofore been propounded,* but it has never before been care fully investigated. The credit of having given the first impulse to the present work belongs to one of the most public-spirited citizens of America, the venerable Mr. Lazarus Straus, and to his son, Hon. Oscar S. Straus of New York, formerly minister of the United States in Turkey and Since 1892 president of the American Jewish Historical Society. Entrusted with this honorable but diffi cult mission, I determined to visit Spain in order to complete my collection of material by exploring the Spanish archives and libraries. Such docu ments as I found there, I transcribed. They have been used with care in the text, and are printed in extenso in the Appendix.