Anthony Blair – better known as Tony Blair – is one of the most controversial British Prime Ministers in history: slavishly neo-conservative (and like many neo-conservatives; Blair was a ‘former communist’), extremely pro-Israel/pro-Zionism and in many ways the originator of the modern phase of the Great Replacement in Britain.
However, a charge that has reared its head again in recent weeks is that while Blair might have seemed to be – along with former US President George W. Bush and current US President Donald Trump – an especially contemptable Shabbos goy; he was in fact of jewish ancestry like some of his successors as British Prime Ministers David Cameron (1) and Boris Johnson. (2)
This charge is based almost entirely on one member of Blair’s ancestry and no other.
Specifically, his maternal grandmother Sarah Lipsett. (3)
For example, a X/Twitter user named ‘DickMackintosh’ used a screenshot of Google’s A.I. search feature to ‘prove that Tony Blair was of partial jewish ancestry because Sarah Lipsett was the descendent of a German jew’. (4)
The problem with this is that the LLM ‘DickMackintosh’ is using didn’t actually read what we know correctly nor has it done any checking (since it isn’t actually ‘artificial intelligence’ but rather a glorified automated search engine).
One T. Dowling has composed a useful genealogy of Blair that can help us unpick this claim: (5)
They then added the following notes on Blair’s genealogy:
‘Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 6 May 1953, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair (née Corscadden). Leo Blair, the illegitimate son of two English actors, had been adopted as a baby by Glasgow shipyard worker James Blair and his wife, Mary. Hazel Corscadden was the daughter of George Corscadden, a butcher and Orangeman who moved to Glasgow in 1916 but returned to (and later died in) Ballyshannon in 1923, where his wife, Sarah Margaret (née Lipsett), gave birth to Blair’s mother, Hazel, above her family’s grocery shop. The Lipsett family in Donegal supposedly originated with a German Jewish immigrant to Ireland prior to the 18th century. George Corscadden was from a family of Protestant farmers in County Donegal, Ireland, who descended from Scottish settlers who took their family name from Garscadden, now part of Glasgow.’ (6)
The key bit is:
‘The Lipsett family in Donegal supposedly originated with a German Jewish immigrant to Ireland prior to the 18th century.’ (7)
The key bit here is ‘supposedly’.
The problem with this argument you see is there is no actual origin for the surname ‘Lipsett’ in Germany and while it appears in County Donegal sometime in the 1600s; a little bit of critical thinking informs us the source isn’t likely to be a ‘jewish immigrant from Germany’ but rather the English and Scottish immigrants that were beginning to colonise Ireland in large numbers in the 1500s and 1600s which eventually triggered Oliver Cromwell’s famous invasion and quasi-war of extermination against the Irish between 1650 and 1653.
The reason for this you see is that the ‘origin of the surname Lipsett’ while often claimed to be jewish, because of the fact that jews began to adopt it later as an anglicization of their actual names like ‘Lipschutz’ (for example the American jewish sociologist Seymour Lipsett). Its actual origin is English as ‘Surname Database’ explains:
‘This is an old surname which has been recorded since at least the end of the 16th Century. It is probably a developed form of the medieval “hypet”, one William Hypet being recorded in the Sussex Pipe Rolls of 1296. The name is therefore a patronymic and a development of the old English “Lippa”, a nickname for a talkative person, plus the medieval French “petit”, a shortened to “et” to give “son of Lipp” or “Little Lipp”. The intrusive “s” is dialectal to aid pronunciation. The name recordings include Susana Lipsett who married Richard Atkeyson on July 31st 1670 at the famous church of St. Mary-le-Bone, London, whilst the variant spellings of Libbett is recorded in Warwickshire, when Mary Libbett (also recorded at Libit) married Richard Hancocke at St. Martins church, Birmingham November 20th 1703. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of John Lypset, which was dated May 17th 1607, married Elizabeth Jupe at the church of St. Mary Abbotts, Kensington, during the reign of King James 1 of England and V1 of Scotland, 1603 – 1625. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to “develop” often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.’ (8)
While ‘Ancestry’ adds that it is:
‘English: habitational name from Lupsett in Wakefield (Yorkshire).
The placename may derive from a Middle English byname Lupe + Middle English heved ‘headland hill top’ (Old English hēafod).’ (9)
The first jewish use of the surname Lipsett in Ireland occurs circa 1906 when a jewish playwright from Lithuania named Edward Raphael Lipschitz anglicized his surname to Edward Raphael Lipsett aping the existing Anglo-Irish surname ‘Lipsett’. (10) If ‘Lipsett’ was already primarily associated with jews then it is unlikely that Lipschitz would have chosen it as a way to anglicise his name circa 1906, because it would have defeated the object of his changing his name to anglicise it in the first place!
In fact, the surname Lipsett has several significant figures of Anglo-Irish origin bearing it (for example Major General Louis Lipsett) and there is no evidence that any of them have ever been thought of as having been jewish at all.
Indeed, the niche field that covers the history of the jews of Ireland apparently knows nothing about the ‘jewish Lipsetts of Donegal’ either. (11)
The point is simply that ‘Lipsett’ is not a ‘jewish surname from Ireland’ but an Anglo-Irish surname adopted by jews largely circa 1900 and as we have no actual evidence that Sarah Lipsett – Tony Blair’s maternal grandmother – was jewish but rather was simply surnamed ‘Lipsett’. We have to conclude that – unless additional evidence is presented – Tony Blair is not in fact jewish, because there is no evidence whatsoever that his maternal grandmother Sarah Lipsett was.
References
(1) https://www.thejc.com/news/david-cameron-his-jewish-roots-ryklrl1t
(2) https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-jewish-things-to-know-about-boris-johnson/
(3) https://bushandblairbonesmeniwarcrimes.blogspot.com/2012/01/tony-blair-of-jewish-descent.html
(4) https://x .com/DickMackintosh/status/2019537942101073999
(5) https://en.geneastar.org/genealogy/blaira/tony-blair
(6) Idem.
(7) Idem.
(8) https://surnamedb.com/Surname/Lipsett
(9) https://www.ancestry.co.uk/last-name-meaning/lipsett
(10) Louis Hyman, 1972, ‘The Jews of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to the Year 1910’, 1st Edition, Israel Universities Press: Jerusalem, pp. 176; 333
(11) Cf. Ibid. also Bernard Shillman, 1945, ‘A Short History of the Jews in Ireland’, 1st Edition, Cahill: Dublin
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