You Know, The Pope Is Also A Catholic

Someone, probably a taxpayer somewhere, has paid for the “discovery” that there are men in Spain with Y chromosomes closely related to those of men in Morocco and the Western Sahara, and to those of men in Sephardic Jewish communities around the world.

have you ever seen any people from those areas only incorporated into Spain in 1492 or not much earlier? How Roman or how Gothic did they look to you? The Moors and the Jews were there for a very long time, and what goes on went on, Islam or no Islam, Judaism or no Judaism, and Catholicism or no Catholicism.

Paella is a variant on a dish found all the way to once-Mughal India and thence around the world (even to my native Saint Helena, where a rice-based, yellowed staple is called “plow”, to rhyme with “snow”). Numerous fiesta practices are clearly North African, analogous to the survival of berry-hanging at Christmas. All those very common “ez” names (Gomez, Fernandez, Gonzalez, Martinez, &c) are really Jewish. And so on, and on, and on.

Who knew?