Jewish heads of state/government

[Wendell_Wagner]

A couple of notes:

Benjamin Disraeli was baptised as a baby as an Anglican. He was never in any religious sense Jewish. His father ceased to attend synagogue about the time that Benjamin was baptised, but he didn’t become an Anglican himself. It’s not clear to me what Disraeli’s mother’s beliefs were, although she was also ethnically Jewish.

There have been two Jewish mayors of Dublin.

The idea that Hitler has some Jewish ancestry is considered unlikely.

[Governor_Quinn]

Simone Veil served as President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, but that post is more alone the lines of a parliamentary speaker than a head of state or government.

[Horatio_Hellpop]

@AHunter3

How about the Khazars? Wouldn’t that count?

Sure, especially since the Kuzari was a convert–he specifically and deliberately chose Judaism over Christianity.

[Chez_Guevara]

@Wendell Wagner

Benjamin Disraeli was baptised as a baby as an Anglican. He was never in any religious sense Jewish.

Disraeli was 13 when he was baptised into the Anglican church.

How he performed his religious devotions prior to this is unclear to me.

[Governor_Quinn]

Having failed to make the edit window…

A couple of examples of heads of government are David Saul Marshall, Chief Minister of Singapore in 1955-1956, and Luigi Luzzati, Prime Minister of Italy from 1910 to 1911.

Mikhail Fradkov, Russian Prime Minister from 2004 to 2007, is of Jewish ancestry, but I haven’t found a citation as to his personal practices.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Chez Guevara writes:

> Disraeli was 13 when he was baptised into the Anglican church.

Thanks. I should have read the Wikipedia entry more carefully. In any case, his change to being an Anglican was a decision by his father to move up in English society rather than a true religious conversion by Disraeli himself. His father decided several years before Disraeli’s baptism to send him to Anglican schools. His father had some dispute with his synagogue, so he decided that he and his family would quit attending it. He then had Disraeli baptised, although he didn’t get baptised himself. My only point was that Disraeli becoming an Anglican was closer to being a decision by his father, while Disraeli was still a child, to move into mainstream English society than to a conscious decision by Disraeli as an adult to change religions.

[psychonaut]

I thought I’d resurrect this thread of mine to discuss a particular head of state who’s been in the news a lot lately: Volodymyr Zelensky. He’s frequently referred to as “Jewish”, though it’s not clear to me whether this describes only his ethnic background or also his religion. Does anyone know whether Zelensky currently practises Judaism or is a member of any particular religious congregation?

[Kimstu]

Here’s a recent article:

When asked about what his actual Jewishness has meant to him, Zelensky has been blasé. In an interview in 2020, he said he came from “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family,” adding that “most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious.” What this hides, though, is the reality that Jewish identity didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, because it couldn’t. To be a Jew from the time of Stalin onward was to have a stamp in your internal passport that marked you as such (just as a Ukrainian or Latvian national identity was also indicated). There was very little opportunity for Jewish community, religious practice, or even bare-bones cultural expression. Unlike Ukrainians and Latvians who had national homelands within the Soviet empire where some degree of culture and language were permitted as long as it stuck to the Communist party line, Jews had nothing of the sort. Synagogues were mostly shut down or crawling with KGB informants. Until the late 1980s, gathering for something as innocuous as a Passover seder was practically a subversive act, and teaching Hebrew was simply not allowed.

By the time Zelensky came of age, three or four generations of Soviet Jews had experienced their Jewish identity as a hollow thing, nothing but a black mark on a passport and a sense of peoplehood born of exclusion and a second-class status. […]

Two intersecting trends took place over the past 20 years, both of which transformed the status of Jews in Ukraine. First, the end of the Soviet Union allowed some air to enter Jewish communal life for those who remained. In the eastern-Ukrainian city of Dnipro, not far from where Zelensky grew up, there are now 10 synagogues and a gargantuan community center called Menorah, opened in 2012, that reportedly serves 40,000 people a day—even though there are only 60,000 Jews in Dnipro. By 2019, a Pew Research Center poll found Ukraine the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries.

I don’t personally know how authoritative or debatable any of those assertions might be (other than the ones that provide actual cites), but there they are for what they’re worth.

[Loach]

That was the article I was just about to post.

[psychonaut]

I see—so he’s probably not Jewish according to the parameters of this question, then. I do personally know a few Jews from the former Soviet Union (including at least one about Zelensky’s age) who are quite religious, so it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for Zelensky to be similarly faithful. Though I assume that he wouldn’t have had any qualms about saying so if this were really the case.

[md-2000]

@jimmmy

I want to be really careful of this because all Neo-Nazi literature of the past half century contains this as “fact” & I want to beat yje next poster on it to the punch but

Lenin was of one-quarter Jewish ethnic ancestry. His maternal grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew who was later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.

A great, great deal has anti-semitically been made of this (& of Trotsky’s jewishness) – if Lenin had any Jewish “identity” it has not documented. Lenin also had as much Volga German ancestry through his mother, who had a Lutheran religious identity. Much less has been made of this.

I recall reading some article discussing Trotsky’s writings. At one point he mentions he deliberately turned down (or failed to pursue) the leadership of the Soviet Union because too many anti-Semites were already claiming communism was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and having a Jewish person in the top job would only add fuel to that fire. This of course did not stop Stalin from acting out his own insecurities.

[Keeve]

Please note the word “or” in this excerpt from the OP:

@psychonaut

has there ever been a head of state or head of government

Recent posts have mentioned President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s current head of state.

According to this article from the New York Times , Ukraine’s current head of government, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, is also Jewish, and that therefore, Ukraine is “the only country outside of Israel where the heads of state and government are Jewish”, in other words, both of them.

[Slithy_Tove]

Does Disney Corp. qualify as a nation-state yet?

[Czarcasm]

The full quote is “Has there ever been a head of state or head of government who actively practised Judaism?” (italics mine). Do they both actively practice Judaism?

[DPRK]

@alphaboi867

@psychonaut

Excepting the modern state of Israel,…

Israel’s never had a non-Jewish President or Prime Minister, have they?

Ben-Gurion was an atheist, wasn’t he? Though to this day there are openly religious parties in Israel, so the hard-core communists/atheists were not successful in excluding them.

[Alessan]

@DPRK

Ben-Gurion was an atheist, wasn’t he? Though to this day there are openly religious parties in Israel, so the hard-core communists/atheists were not successful in excluding them.

Israeli Jews don’t have to practice Judaism. It comes to us naturally.

[md-2000]

@Alessan

Israeli Jews don’t have to practice Judaism. It comes to us naturally.

Actually, it comes to Israelis due to proportional representation and single issue fundamentalist parties. Fortunately, my experience was that at least the Palestinian taxi drivers are working Sabbaths. And beef bacon tastes almost as good.

[Schnitte]

Wikipedia has a handy list on this very topic: List of Jewish heads of state and government - Wikipedia

It doesn’t fit the OP’s requirements perfectly because it doesn’t distinguish between Jewish by ethnicity and practising the religion.

[Loach]

@Alessan

@DPRK

Ben-Gurion was an atheist, wasn’t he? Though to this day there are openly religious parties in Israel, so the hard-core communists/atheists were not successful in excluding them.

Israeli Jews don’t have to practice Judaism. It comes to us naturally.

Because of this thread I tried to look up if Netanyahu is religious. Wikipedia says he was born to secular Jewish parents but other than seeing one of his ex-wives converted to marry him (which could have been a political move) I’m not seeing much on his beliefs.