Christopher Chaim Columbus

Yes, the man who discovered the land of milk and money was a Jew. And now we have the evidence, as Michael Freund tells us in The Jerusalem Post.

Columbus, it seems, was neither Italian nor Spanish nor Portuguese. He was - believe it or not - a Jew.
That, at least, is the conclusion reached by Estelle Irizarry, a professor at Washington's Georgetown University, who studied Columbus's grammar, language and syntax in more than 100 surviving letters, diaries and documents that he penned.
Inconsistencies in his spelling along with numerous grammatical errors led Irizarry to deduce that Catalan, not Spanish, was the native tongue of the Great Navigator and that he hailed from Aragon in northeastern Spain.But she also found that his style and punctuation corresponded with that of Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken by Spain's Jews. That, along with other aspects of his writings, led her to resolve that he was a Jew or a Converso (a Jewish convert to Christianity) who sought to hide his identity.