Recently I happened to be reminded of the famous Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova and while I was going a bit of reading about her out of sheer curiosity. I happened to notice that she is alleged by some authors to have had a jewish father.
That man was Lazar Polyakov; who was a powerful jewish banker in Moscow between the 1880s and early 1900s. The basis of this assertion is made evident in the Wikipedia article, which predictably assumes it is likely to be true without the evidence for doing so. (1)
I disagree with such a hasty conclusion.
My reasons being that from what I can find there is no actual evidence that Lazar Polyakov claimed he was her father and she never acknowledged him as such. Instead the claim seems to originate from rumour and gossip regurgitated by contemporary newspapers such as 'The St. Petersburg Gazette'. (2)
Her mother Lyubov Feodorovna was a laundress who had two husbands. The first of whom - who we only know as Pavel - (3) died when Anna was two years old. (4) The second Matvey Pavlov adopted Anna when she was three years old from whence she derived her famous surname. (5)
Anna herself rejected the claim that Polyakov was her father and asserted categorically that she was daughter of her mother's first husband Pavel. (6) This is a far more reasonable and intellectually tenable position than claiming she was the product of her mother's affair with a noted jewish banker in Moscow. Since we have absolutely no evidence other than rumours and gossip after she became famous for the claim of jewish ancestry.
Such claims are common about those whose ancestry is potentially a little shadowy and who later rise to prominence – another frequent subject of this type of claim is Adolf Hitler – since it creates the wiggle room to assert that their rise is due to something else other than their abilities and hard work (for example a jewish conspiracy or some such).
We simply don't have any evidence to suggest that Anna Pavlova had any jewish ancestry whatsoever. Therefore our default position must be that she was the product – as she herself believed – of her mother's first marriage and therefore Russian and not jewish.
References
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Pavlova
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Pavlova#cite_note-1
(3) https://www.biography.com/artists/anna-pavlova#synopsis
(4) http://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Pavlova
(5) https://www.biography.com/artists/anna-pavlova#synopsis
(6) Ibid.