Boris Johnson writes to the JC… because he’s more Jewish than we thought

Boris Johnson has written to the JC to say he is more Jewish than an article published seven years ago claimed. The former prime minister sent a letter after finding a JC story from 2019 which deemed him to be “five per cent Jewish”. Now Johnson has gently challenged the JC’s calculation, saying he had should have been awarded 12.5 per cent. The article had been written as he and Jeremy Hunt were vying to be Conservative leader and in a light-hearted vein assessed both men’s Jewish credentials.

The five per cent verdict for Johnson came after considering his ancestry, including his mother’s great-grandfather Elias Avery Lowe being Jewish. Hunt’s assessment included his memory of attending a Chassidic wedding, and he earned a modest “two per cent Jewish for chutzpah”. Now, writing “in a spirit of pure curiosity rather than complaint,” Johnson has written to the JC that having the “wholly Jewish” Lowe as his grandmother's father “would make me one-eighth or 12.5 per cent Jewish by my maths”.

He added: “Or am I misunderstanding some key algorithm of Jewishness known only to the Jewish Chronicle?” Lowe was born in Russia in 1879 and became a distinguished academic in the US. He went on to become a prominent expert on ancient manuscripts at Princeton University and was a friend of Albert Einstein. His daughter, Frances Beatrice Lowe, was Johnson's maternal grandmother. She married James Fawcett, and their daughter Charlotte Johnson Wahl became the former prime minister's mother.

The JC’s article was published on 5 July 2019 and examined the then-Conservative leader's family background. It noted that, although Johnson was Anglican and had Muslim ancestry through his Turkish paternal great-grandfather’s side, there was a Jewish connection through his mother's family. In the article, genealogist Doreen Berger suggested that Lowe might have been descended from Rabbi Elijah Ragoler, a Lithuanian rabbi born in 1794, pointing to the shared surname between the rabbi and Sarah Ragoler, Lowe's mother.

Rabbi Ragoler was an opponent of Reform Judaism and was known for his interest in Latin and Greek, a hobby shared by his potential descendant in Johnson Johnson has previously shown an interest in his Jewish connections. He spent time on a kibbutz as a teenager and has spoken about his positive feelings towards the Jewish community. In a 2007 interview with the JC, he said: “I feel Jewish when I feel the Jewish people are threatened, or under attack, that's when it sort of comes out.”