Boris Johnson — politician with roots in the Russian Empire
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York in June 1964 and has described himself as a one-man melting pot. The description is not far off: the family tree holds Ottoman, English, Anglo-Swiss, German and Russian-Jewish strands within four generations.
The Russian line runs through his mother. His maternal great-grandfather was Elias Avery Lowe (1879-1969), born in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family - the sources disagree on where, with English-language accounts giving Moscow and Lithuanian ones the shtetl of Zemaiciu Kalvarija, then in the Kovno Governorate. The family emigrated to New York when he was a boy, in 1889 by his own later passport application and 1892 by other accounts, and were naturalised in 1900.
He went to Cornell, then to Germany, where he took a doctorate in 1908 under Ludwig Traube, and became one of the foremost palaeographers of the century - the scholar of early Latin manuscript hands, later a lecturer at Oxford and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1911 he married Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter of Pennsylvania, who became the English translator of Thomas Mann and the reason most of the English-speaking world read him at all. They settled in Oxford.
Their daughter Frances married James Fawcett, a barrister who worked on the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and sat on the European Commission of Human Rights from 1962 to 1984, for which he was knighted. The Fawcetts' daughter Charlotte, a painter, married Stanley Johnson in 1963; their eldest child is Boris Johnson.
The paternal side is unrelated to Russia but explains the surname's oddity. His great-grandfather Ali Kemal was an Ottoman journalist and briefly interior minister, killed by a mob at Ankara in 1922; his widow and children took the name Johnson in England.
Johnson read classics at Oxford, worked as a journalist, and edited The Spectator until 2005. He entered the Commons in 2001, was Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2019 to September 2022.
He confirmed the Jewish side of his ancestry in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle in 2007, and in April 2026 visited Cornell University to see the archive of his great-grandfather's papers. The connection is at the great-grandparental level, from a family that left the Russian Empire in the emigration of the 1880s and 90s, and is documented through passport applications and university records rather than family tradition.
"Great-grandfather's family left the Russian Empire for New York, 1889-92"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Zemaiciu Kalvarija or Moscow (disputed)
He confirmed the Jewish side of his ancestry in a 2007 Jewish Chronicle interview, and in April 2026 visited Cornell to see his great-grandfather's archive. The line is documented through passport applications and university records rather than family tradition.
Great-grandson of the palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe (1879-1969), born in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family. Sources disagree on the place: English-language accounts give Moscow, Lithuanian ones the shtetl of Zemaiciu Kalvarija in the Kovno Governorate. The family emigrated to New York in 1889 or 1892 and naturalised in 1900. Lowe married the Thomas Mann translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter; their daughter Frances married Sir James Fawcett, and the Fawcetts' daughter Charlotte was Johnson's mother.
.svg?width=900)
Zemaiciu Kalvarija or Moscow (disputed). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.