I just read that a historian who set out to prove that Leonardo DaVinci was not Jewish ended up instead proving that in fact he was born to a Jewish teenager named Caterina, who was captured by the Tatars and sold into slavery. Around 1439 she was shipped across the Black Sea to Constantinople, then sold to Venetian merchants and taken to Venice, then on to Florence by about 1442, in the household of Donato and Ginevra. Donato had traded in the Levant and the Black Sea and already used Circassian slaves in textile work. In Florence she did household and workshop service and was rented out as a wet nurse. The Tablet article says she was also used as a sex slave, and that she already had children by the time Piero “borrowed” her as a nurse for his daughter and then freed her after Leonardo’s birth. She would have been about 15. The historian Carlo Vecce found an emancipation act in the Florence State Archives dated November 2, 1452, about six and a half months after Leonardo’s birth on April 15, 1452. It was drafted and signed by Leonardo’s father, the notary Piero da Vinci, acting as solicitor. It frees a woman named Caterina, described in Latin as filia Jacobi eius schiava seu serva de partibus Circassie: “daughter of Jacob, his slave or servant from the parts of Circassia.” Apparently, Circassian women were especially sought after. “Caterina” was a name often given on forced conversion to Christianity. “The most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.” His background: Carlo Vecce is a historian and philologist. He is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” and a specialist in Renaissance literature and civilization. His doctorate, at the Catholic University of Milan, was on that field. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Commissione Vinciana, the official body for Leonardo studies, and he has edited Leonardo manuscripts — the Libro di pittura (Codex Urbinas) and the Codex Arundel — plus a Leonardo biography and a reconstruction of Leonardo’s library. In 2023 he was named a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei in the class of moral sciences, under philology and linguistics.