Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, inherited a kingdom tearing itself apart over — what else? — religion. Her father had famously broken with the Pope to get a divorce, setting off a chain reaction of Protestant-Catholic kerfuffles that Elizabeth spent her entire reign artfully navigating. One might say she had a knack for avoiding definitive answers, especially concerning her marital status.

Despite — or perhaps because of — her staunch Protestantism, Elizabeth was remarkably pragmatic about religious dissent, at least compared to her predecessors. She just wanted everyone to chill out and obey her, which, frankly, is a reasonable expectation for a monarch. Her reign, known as the Elizabethan era, is remembered for flourishing arts, Drake circumnavigating the globe, and the Spanish Armada getting rather thoroughly thrashed.

As for her Jewish connections, well, there aren't any. England had officially expelled its Jewish population centuries before she took the throne, and Elizabeth didn't exactly issue a "welcome back" decree. She had bigger fish to fry, like ensuring no one tried to depose her for a Catholic cousin, or finding suitable (and suitably unthreatening) suitors.

So, while Elizabeth I was undoubtedly a monumental figure in British history, and a woman who proved she didn't need a man to run a country, she remains firmly in the "Not a Jew" camp. Unless, of course, you count the sheer kvell-worthiness of keeping England solvent and relatively stable for four decades as a form of latent Jewish mothering, which, honestly, is a stretch even for us.