Bruce Lee – the martial arts icon – is not someone that I would have immediately fingered as having jewish ancestry, but Matthew Polly’s biography ‘Bruce Lee: A Life’ has suggested that this is indeed case.
To quote the Jewish Daily Forward’s synopsis of Polly’s assertion:
‘It was long known that Lee had European ancestry; Lee himself believed that he was part German. And in fact, early in his life in Hong Kong, he faced discrimination by other martial arts students who refused to train with him because he wasn’t “pure” Chinese.
Polly, however, has dug up the truth about Lee’s maternal great-grandfather. Mozes Hartog Bosman was the son of a kosher butcher in Rotterdam. Deciding the life of a shochet was not for him, Bosman boarded a ship heading east, where he eventually wound up as the Dutch ambassador to Hong Kong. As was the practice, Bosman bought himself a Chinese concubine, with whom he had six children. When he went bankrupt, however, he abandoned them, moved to California, changed his name, remarried and never looked back.
Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, Bosman’s six sons grew up to become the richest men in Hong Kong. (I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide if this was due to their yidishe kops.) Bruce Lee’s grandfather, Ho Kom Tong, was so rich that he had a wife, a secret British mistress, 13 concubines, and 30 children, one of whom was named Grace Ho. Grace married a famous Cantonese opera actor, Li Hoi Chuen, and they had five children, the fourth of whom was named Bruce.
Actually, he was named Lee Jun-fan; Bruce Lee was the name he adopted when he returned to the land of his birthplace at age 18 to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied acting.’ (1)
Polly’s assertion that Bruce Lee had a jewish maternal great-grandfather is likely valid – the research looks solid enough having checked the footnotes – but what is worth noting here is that Lee would not be classed as jewish by either the Israeli Law of Return or Judaism’s religious laws, because the jewish ancestry is both too distant to be valid and has also not been transmitted correctly (i.e. Bosman’s concubine was not jewish).
This means that while Lee was genetically part-jewish – and note how quick the jews are to claim that Bosman’s children’s success was because Bosman was jewish – he would not have been regarded as such by any recognised jewish authority or definition of jewishness.
So yes, Bruce was part-jewish, but wouldn’t have been considered jewish by jews.
References
(1) https://forward.com/culture/402501/wait-bruce-lee-was-jewish/