One of the most frequent questions I get when I lecture about Jewish documents and autographs is “what is it worth?” Pricing autograph items is far from a precise science but, much like real estate, it is possible to form reasonable estimates based upon comparable items that have sold in the past and considering trend lines.
There are any number of variables that intersect to set the value of a particular autographed item. Of course, first and foremost, as in any asset, supply and demand play an important role. Thus, for example, a simple Gerald Ford signature may be the least valuable of any U.S. President, primarily because he was a prolific signer and, in any event, he is not among America’s most popular presidents. However, a letter in which Ford discusses Raul Wallenberg would command a premium, particularly for a Judaica collector (see exhibits).
Although there is a plethora of Abraham Lincoln signatures and they are widely available, his letters are very expensive because of the great demand. The rarest and most valuable autograph signed as president is William Henry Harrison, who had the shortest presidency in U.S. history: one month, from March 4, 1841 to April 4, 1841. He defied the bitter cold when he gave a two-hour speech at his swearing in on March 4, 1841 without wearing an overcoat and he died shortly after he took a local walk, again without coat or hat, that led to illness and death (and created a brief constitutional crisis because presidential succession was not then fully defined in the U.S. Constitution). His signature alone as president can run to $100,000.
Another crucial element in valuing autographs is content. For example, George Washington’s signature alone is valued at $6,000 and up, but the most expensive American autograph of all time is his personally signed copy of the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights. and Proceedings of the First Congress, which brought in $9.8 million. A simple stand-alone Abraham Lincoln signature will cost $4,500 or more, but the second most expensive autograph in American history is a signed copy of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (it had been owned by Robert Kennedy) that sold in 2012 for $3.7 million. An Albert Einstein letter discussing his theory of relativity will far exceed the value of a simple letter of greeting, with correspondence discussing his theory of relativity bringing in six figures.
According to one list, the ten most valuable American autographs in 2024 – which is subject to broad dispute, including why Jimmy Page, who is British, is on the list and why Button Gwinnett (see below) is not – includes:
- Signed copy of Washington’s Acts of Congress ($9.8 Million)
- Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (3.7 million)
- John Lennon’s Murderer signed LP ($525,000)
- Babe Ruth baseball ($388,375)
- Jimi Hendrix contract ($200,000)
- Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe signed baseball ($191,200)
- Albert Einstein signed photograph ($75,000)
- Jimmy Page’s guitar ($73,000)
- Jesse James’s Photo ($52,000)
- John F. Kennedy Newspaper ($39,000)
According to this list – again, highly arguable – the most valuable American Jewish signature is Albert Einstein. But who really is the most valuable American signature? It is not George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln but, beyond any dispute, it is Button Gwinnett! (Who?)
Gwinnett (1735-1777) was a British-born American Founding Father who was appointed to represent Georgia at the Continental Congress, where he voted in favor of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by Congress on July 2, 1776 (and not on July 4) and signed the famous parchment copy on August 2, 1776 (again, not on July 4). He also served briefly as the provisional president of Georgia in 1777, and Gwinnett County, now a major suburb of metropolitan Atlanta, was named for him. He was killed in 1777 shortly after he signed the Declaration in a duel with rival Lachlan McIntosh following a dispute after a failed invasion of East Florida.
Many American collectors attempt to assemble an autograph collection including all 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, and the most difficult signature to obtain is Gwinnett’s – there are only 51 known examples (and only ten of these are in private hands), since he was an obscure person prior to signing the Declaration and he died shortly afterward. In 2010, a Gwinnett signature sold for $722,500 in New York City, and it would probably set a collector back $1 million to purchase one today. (The author is proud to have a complete collection of every signer of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, not so easy to put together, but those 37 letters and signed photos together are worth only a very small percentage of a collection of American Declaration signers.)
There are many references to Gwinnett’s autograph in the popular culture, including Button, Button, a 1953 short story by Isaac Asimov concerning an attempt to obtain a genuine Gwinnett signature by means of a device that can move objects through time.
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Some would argue that the most expensive autograph by a Jew is by the Rambam, R. Moshe Ben Maiman (Maimonides), or Albert Einstein, or an Anne Frank letter sold at auction for $165,000 in 1988 (again, it would be worth much more 36 years later). There are any number of other worthy candidates, but my choice for the most valuable Jewish signature is Christopher Columbus.
The ethnic or national origin of Columbus (1450 or 1451-1506) has been a source of broad speculation, particularly since the 19th century. There are many hypotheses, including claims that his origins were Catalan, French, Galician, Greek, Ibizan, Majorcan, and Scottish, which are generally agenda-driven creations, usually motivated by a desire to appropriate a hero to the cause of a particular nation, historic community, or movement. In this regard, Jews are no different; during the year commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first settlement of Jews in North America (1904), several speakers, arguably influenced by the increasing exclusion of Jews, particularly foreign-born Jews, from public life, proudly claimed Columbus as one of their own. The broad consensus among historians, however, is that Columbus’s family was from the coastal region of Liguria, that he was born and spent his boyhood and early youth in Genoa, and that he subsequently lived in Savona, where his father Domenico moved in 1470.
Much of the evidence derives from documents concerning Columbus’s immediate family connections in Genoa and opinions voiced by contemporaries on his Genoese origins. For example, in a 1498 deed of primogeniture, Columbus wrote that “As I was born in Genoa… came from it and was born there…” Lending credibility to the claim of the authenticity of the document, Columbus’s heirs presented it in a 1578 lawsuit. Nonetheless, while most historians confirm the document’s authenticity, there are still credible doubters who claim that it is apocryphal. Moreover, in an April 2, 1502 letter from Columbus to the Bank of Saint George, the oldest and most respectable of Genoa’s financial institutions – which expert graphologists have confirmed was written by Columbus – the explorer writes from afar: “ Though my body is here, my heart is constantly there…” (This letter is one of a group of documents entrusted by Columbus to a Genoese friend after the negative experiences of his third voyage and before setting out on his fourth and final voyage.)
However, the mere statement that his “heart was in Genoa” does not prove that Columbus was born there or lived his life there. To shamelessly paraphrase Yehuda Ha-Levi, the fact my heart is in the east (“ba-mizrach;” i.e., Eretz Yisrael) but I was born and lived my life in the farthest regions of the west (“b’sof maarav”) does not mean that I was born in Israel or that I reside there. Given Columbus’s deep immersion into everything Jewish, as we will see below, one can conjecture whether Columbus’ statement, which so closely mirrors the famous saying by Yehuda Ha-Levi, derives from the statement by the famous Jewish poet almost four centuries earlier. In any case, there is actually significant evidence that Columbus was of Spanish origins, including the fact that he always wrote in Spanish (and never in Italian) and he spoke Spanish as his mother tongue, most unusual for a boy in Italy.
But what about Columbus’s religious creed and faith?
The theory that Columbus was a Jew actually had its origins in non-Jewish circles in Spain when Don Garcia de la Riega, an aristocratic Spanish scholar, produced documents – now believed by many experts to be fraudulent – which contained the names of members of the Colon family and the Fonterossa family, whom Don Garcia associated with Columbus’s wife, whose ancestors were Jewish. It was he who first came up with the idea that Columbus was a Spanish marrano.
Columbus was obviously and explicitly Christian and there is no question that he was by no means an “open Jew.” However, according to the prevailing theory regarding his Jewish origins, Columbus was a marrano – in modern Spanish, the offensive and pejorative term means “pig” or “dirty person,” Jews prefer the term anusim (those who were forced to convert”) – forced to leave Spain for Genoa and that he was a Sephardi Jew who, while careful to conceal his Judaism, was also eager to locate a place of refuge for his persecuted countrymen. Marranos were Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity through royal coercion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but who continued to remain committed Jews who practiced Judaism in secrecy.
In fact, the term marrano came into significant use in 1492, when the Spanish rulers, celebrating the unification of Spain as a Catholic country, promulgated the infamous Alhambra Decree, or Edict of Expulsion, which was the culmination of a process that had commenced in 1391 to destroy the Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula, to prohibit the practice of Judaism, and to require all the 300,000 Spanish Jews to convert or face expulsion. Moreover, it cannot be mere coincidence that in letters to his son, Columbus insisted that his ships sail before midnight August 2 – which, ironically, happened to be Tisha B’Av – the date when the Alhambra Decree was to go into effect. [However, unwilling to set sail on the greatest day of Jewish tragedy and mourning and a day of significant ill omen, he set sail the very next day.]
An estimated 50,000 Jews remained in Spain and kept their traditions as secret Jews. Several leading scholars have included Columbus among them, and there is significant evidence to that effect. In his first accounts, Columbus made references to the expulsion of the Jews and mentioned the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Hebraic term “Second House” [Bayit Sheni]. In his journal during his first voyage, he referenced the Yomim Noraim (the High Holy Days). He used the Hebrew letters bet–hei (“B’ezrat Hashem,” with G-d’s help) on all but one of his letters to his son – and, not coincidentally, his correspondence to the King and Queen never contained these Hebrew letters – and his writing occasionally included other Hebrew phrases.
Moreover, he occasionally linked his own experiences to events in Jewish history and he manifested knowledge of Jewish mystical sources. He included punctuated copious marginal notes around his pages, which was the common punctuation practice of Ladino-speaking scribes (Ladino is a Jewish version of the Spanish language, analogous to what the Yiddish language is to German). According to noted historian Cecil Roth, he used an anagram that was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish; some commentators argue that this anagram, which was arranged in a triangular form of dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain, was a ploy to facilitate Columbus’s ability to covertly instruct his children to recite Kaddish for him after his death, which was prohibited in Spain.
Other letters and journals by Columbus are replete with references to Jewish scripture and to dates from the Jewish calendar. He frequently dated things by the Hebrew calendar, a system used nowhere else except by the Jewish community, and he calculated the age of the – world according to the Jewish calendar. He selected many Jews as astrologers, navigators, and translators in his crew, notably Luis de Torres, who served as an interpreter for the governor of Murcia and who, records show, was fluent in Hebrew (as well as Aramaic, Spanish, and Portuguese). Torres was the first man ashore in the “New World” and the first to discover the use of tobacco, and the only synagogue in the Bahamas, established in Freeport in 1972, was named for him. In a card Columbus wrote to a Jewish friend, Luis de Santangel, the treasurer of Aragon, he proudly announced his discovery of America with a fleet manned in part by Jewish sailors.
Moreover, for what it’s worth, his original family name, “Colon,” was well-recognized as a Jewish surname. His father, Domingo de Colon, and others in the family, were weavers – a traditionally Jewish profession at the time and one of the few occupations open to Jews. And his mother’s family commonly included people with Jewish given names, such as Abraham and Jacob. He always carried with him astronomical tables compiled by the celebrated Jewish scholar, Abraham Zacuto, translated into Latin by another Jew, Joseph Vecinlo. In his will, he provided that 10% of his assets be given to provide a dowry for poor girls, a long-time practice unique to Jewish custom at the time – including a provision that it be distributed “in such a way that they do not notice whence it comes,” a characteristically anonymous technique that is a hallmark of Jewish philanthropy.
In addition, many of the people and personalities who supported Columbus before he received the sponsorship of the Spanish kings were of Jewish origin and, in fact, his voyage was mainly funded by two Jewish conversos and a prominent rav: Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, who was treasurer of the Crown of Aragón, and Portuguese Rav Don Isaac Abravanel – and, no, his name is not “Abarbanel” – a noted Bible commentator, philosopher, and prolific Jewish and secular scholar also known as a brilliant financier, diplomat, and statesman who served as the personal agent of King Alfonso V. Historians who support the “Columbus as Jew” theory pointedly ask why a renowned Biblical commentator like R. Abravanel would divert money from his very needy Jewish community and other Jewish activities to finance the dubious foreign expedition of a non-Jew and maintain that this support is sufficient to establish Columbus’s Jewish roots.
Several commentators, including notably famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in Sails of Hope, argue that Columbus’s goal – to sail west to reach the Indies – was less the result of geographical theories than of his faith in certain Biblical texts, specifically the book of Isaiah, from which he frequently cited two verses: “Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them,” (60:9), and “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth” (65:17). Wiesenthal and others claimed that Columbus believed that his voyages had confirmed these prophecies and that he sought to discover land settled by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to serve as a refuge for Spanish Jews such as himself – which would explain why he brought along a Jewish Hebrew translator on his voyages.
Contemporary developments provide even more dramatic evidence indicating that Columbus had Jewish roots.
In 2001, Jose Antonio Lorente, a renowned forensic scientist and professor at the University of Granada, commenced an examination of Columbus’s DNA in bone fragments of his remains in Seville Cathedral. Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, but he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola that is today shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti; his remains were taken there in 1542, then moved to Cuba in 1795, after which it was brought to Seville in Spain in 1898. The Cathedral has long been considered Columbus’s final resting place, but even this is controversial and still subject to debate, although Lorente’s team established beyond any reasonable dispute that the Seville bones were those of Columbus because of a close match with the DNA found in the remains of his son, Hernando, that were kept in the Seville Cathedral. Moreover, Lorente and his fellow scientists and historians, who spent years gaining permission from the Roman Catholic Church to exhume Columbus’s body from the Seville Cathedral, took samples from Columbus’s son Hernando and from Columbus’s second cousin, Diego (Lorente’s studies proved that Diego was actually Columbus’s distant cousin, and not his brother, as had been previously believed), as well as from other relatives.
On October 12, 2024 – which happened to be Yom Kippur – Lorente announced his finding that Columbus was of Sephardic Jewish origin and concluding that “both in the Y chromosome [male] and in the mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.” Y-chromosome genes have been shown to have markers specific to Jewish families, and mitochondrial DNA similarly has a marker that correlates to Jewish origins, so the fact that Columbus’s genes evidence such markers on both the paternal and maternal side is statistically significant. However, it must be emphasized that DNA cannot definitively prove that someone was Jewish, only that he is more or less likely to be Jewish.
Some critics argue that the Alhambra Decree of 1492 precludes any argument that Columbus was Jewish, maintaining that it is highly unlikely that a Sephardic Jew would go on voyages in 1492, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, to convert the New World to the Catholic faith. However, recall that Columbus was a “secret Jew” whose desire to establish a place of refuge for his persecuted co-religionists may have overridden all other considerations, particularly considering the extent of the Spanish persecution of Jews and their expulsion. Moreover, it is beyond dispute that Columbus’s family exhibited unusual tolerance for an open Jewish community in Jamaica.
However, a much larger challenge to the Columbus Jewish narrative is his approval of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile – including specifically their expulsion of Jews – as he recorded in his journals:
I saw the Moorish king come out of the gates of the city and kiss the royal hands of your highnesses, and your highnesses, as Catholic Christians … took thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said parts of India, to see those princes and peoples and lands. [The King and Queen dispatched him] to observe the manner which should be used to bring about their conversion to our holy faith, and ordained that I should not go by land to the eastward, by which way it was the custom to go, but by way of the west, by which down to this day we do not know certainly that anyone has passed.
Therefore, having driven out all the Jews from your realms and lordships in the same month of January, your highnesses commanded me that, with a sufficient fleet, I should go to the said parts of India, and for this accorded me great rewards and ennobled me so that from that time henceforth I might style myself ‘don’ and be high admiral of the ocean sea and viceroy and perpetual governor of the islands and continent which I should discover… and that my eldest son should succeed to the same position, and so on from generation to generation forever.
At the end of the day, notwithstanding the mixed record and passionate claims on both sides of the issue, I would argue that, for our purposes – i.e., determining whether Columbus’s signature is the rarest and most valuable “Jewish” autograph – the totality of the evidence, including the DNA analysis, should be sufficient. We will leave for another day the difficult question of what the most valuable autograph by an Observant Jew is, or by a self-professed Jew. And, I would argue, the increasing vilification of Columbus as a barbarian genocidal monster and colonizer fits comfortably into the growing antisemitism in the United States and the growing evidence that Columbus was Jewish.
