I dealt with Chris' deeds last year. [MISSED THIS 10/14/21: Fynn-Paul "The myth of the ‘stolen country’".] This year, let's look at his family. Some claim him for the Tribe.
Since 2002, at least, researchers have been looking at the man's family DNA. Periodically the case rises up in media. It never goes anywhere. My only conclusion is that the DNA doesn't help any hobby-horse. The Sephardim aren't like us Ashkenazim whose DNA can be spotted a mile off; they're more Moroccan-tinged Spaniards like the, er, Galicians. But in Iberia, if someone's DNA is Aragonese: you do know he is not Jewish.
We are left with some loose ends - Chris' Spanish was accented, with Judaisms in certain Ladino turns of phrase; he didn't care to share genealogy. When Chris found himself in a Genovese prison he (finally) bandied about that he was a fellow Ligurian. But nobody there knew who he was, and nobody had raised the issue beforehand - not Chris, not Genovese diplomats.
But the accent is Aragonese, even Catalan; the opposite of the more Moorish tongues along the Atlantic and Granada (then still Muslim, if tributary). And as Jared Taylor helpfully reminds us the religion is Catholic to a fault. As for the Ladino, consider how Yiddischkeit has entered common New York speech or even the speech of my generation brought up on MAD magazine and Mel Brooks.
If Chris was, in fact, Catalan: to European bigots that might well be enough. Spaniards were aware of the Catalan language as an outlier in Iberian Romance, further off than Portuguese. Castilians deemed the region as a debateable land with southern France - the peninsula was fresh off a war over the succession. As for Italy, the 1490s AD was the de Borgia age. Many Italians had learnt to distrust the Catalans.
Let's go with that this guy was Northwest Mediterranean Mystery Meat. Father Catalan; mother perhaps Piedmont.
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