[Boris] Johnson, on the other hand, not only has the virtue of being almost the polar opposite of Red Ken [Livingstone], but is also a trenchant supporter of Israel, an enemy of politically correct anti-Zionism and immensely proud of his own Jewish ancestry — the Henley MP’s great grandfather, Elias Avery Lowe, being the Moscow-born son of a shmutter merchant. “I feel Jewish when I feel the Jewish people are threatened or under attack, that’s when it sort of comes out,” he declares. “When I suddenly get a whiff of antisemitism, it’s then that you feel angry and protective.”
While Rachel, Boris and their two younger brothers have some Jewish ancestry on their mother’s side — their maternal great-grandfather, says Rachel, was a rabbi from Lithuania — their Jewish identity, inasmuch as they have or ever had one (Boris identifies as an Anglican) comes by way of their father, Stanley Johnson.
A non-Jew with royal British and Turkish heritage in his ancestral mix, Stanley, divorced from his children’s mother — the painter Charlotte Johnson — remarried a woman from a well-known Anglo-Jewish family: Jenny, the stepdaughter of philanthropist Zionist businessman Teddy Sieff, who had served as chairman of Marks and Spencer and once survived an assassination attempt by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal.
Johnson’s royal British and Turkish heritage is described in an article about his great grandfather, Ali Kemal Bey, a Donmeh Jew.
In time, [Ali] Kemal developed an ‘Ottomanist’ ideology. He argued for a free and multicultural Ottoman Empire, united under a civic Ottoman identity rather than ethnic nationalism. He had been vocal about the Empire’s treatment of its minorities such as the Armenians. Kemal’s family wealth afforded him the luxuries of travel, and London quickly became a favorite destination. He met his first wife, a British woman named Winifred Brun in one such sojourn. By the time she died while giving birth in 1910 to Osman Kemal Wilfred Johnson—Boris Johnson’s grandfather (are you connecting the dots now?)—the situation in Kemal’s native Constantinople was changing rapidly.