Real Life Da Vinci Code

My Rome based friend, Roy Doliner, wrote a book on the “The Sistine Secrets”. Basically, he exposes secret Jewish symbolism on the ceiling of the holy of holies of the Vatican. Michelangelo, of course, painted the Sistine chapel and there are about 4,000,000 people who visit it annually. What are Jewish symbols doing in a Michelangelo work? Why would he paint them in the Vatican? Why aren’t there any Christian symbols or scenes from the gospels on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel? In their book, Roy and his co-author, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, take us on a real life Da Vinci Code adventure.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the impact of the conversos and the 1492 expulsion of the Jews of Spain on the world. The fact is that we are only now beginning to understand the consequences of this mass expulsion on the rest of the world. The “conversos” were those Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity during the Inquisition. As it turns out, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was from a converso family. Basically, he is the father of secular modernity, so we are still influenced by his converso experiences in ways that we cannot even imagine. It now also seems that Christopher Columbus was from a converso family and that his voyage to the New World was financed entirely by conversos such as Luis de Santangel, the finance minister of Spain. We now learn that Michelangelo was taught religion and philosophy by Pico della Mirandola. Pico was taught Kabbalah i.e., Jewish mysticism, by a converso. In this way, part of the wisdom of the Jews of Spain made its way into the most famous artwork in the world, painted by the greatest artist who ever lived.

Click here to read more about this.

Click here to listen to Roy on a radio program.