President Donald Trump has been deep in negotiations in recent weeks with his counterparts in Mexico (Claudia Sheinbaum) and Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelenskyy). It is remarkable that both are Jewish. From sheer numbers, one would not expect either Mexico , a country with roughly 130 million people and only about 60,0000  Jews, or Ukraine, a country of roughly 38 million with about 80,000 Jews (counting the definition of Jew generously to include many people of mixed heritage) to have a Jewish head of state. If this remarkable statistical anomaly was confined to Mexico, it would be mere trivia. Yet, a survey of the past century reveals Jewish leaders from New Zealand to Guyana, from Singapore to Switzerland, from Australia to Austria. This is astonishing, considering that all those countries also have relatively small Jewish populations.

The remarkable success of Jewish leaders is a question that defies easy explanation. Yet, this is too important a question to leave to antisemites. The parochial explanation most Jews would instinctively favour is that a culture created by rigid Talmudic education prizing literacy and skill at debate provides the skills political leaders need. A tight-knit community providing collective support helps, too.

However, Jewish global leaders are frequently raised outside the faith and culture, often by parents who have themselves rejected any connection to Judaism in any serious or organised sense. It is true that there have been occasions when Jewish communal networks aided the acquisition of political power – the so-called ‘Cousinhood’ of Jews in the aristocracy of the British Empire is a good example – but these were merely powerful men, whose jurisdiction stopped at colonial governorships.

Most of the truly successful Jewish leaders, who reached the highest position in government were either raised in another faith by convert parents – Benjamin Disraeli or the New Zealand prime minister Francis Bell, for example – or in a purely secular milieu by parents who favoured politics over any religious connections – like Sheinbaum herself or the former French prime minister Pierre Mendès France. The strict atheism of the Iron Curtain gave rise to a generation of ethnically Jewish leaders, including Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with no affiliation to Jewishness beyond what was once inscribed on their Soviet identity cards.

Occasionally, leaders raised in the Jewish community abandoned a sense of Jewish belonging as young adults. The early 20th-century Italian prime minister Luigi Luzzatti left the Jewish community as a teenager and later tried to claim (astutely from a political point of view) that he rejected affiliation with the Jewish community in favour of a universalist theism transcending both Judaism and the Catholic Church (neither of which were then especially popular in Italy).

Even Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was raised in a family whose only religious expression was an annual Christmas tree.

Indeed, the only Jewish leaders outside of Israel and the United States who actively cultivate a connection with the Jewish faith as adults are the odd cases of converts. These include the Belizean politician (and rapper turned yeshiva bochur) Moses ‘Shyne’ Barrow, who was recently trounced in that country’s elections, or the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, who periodically claims he is converting to Judaism.

Thus, Judaism, both as a religion and a culture, cannot explain the success of Jews in leading countries. Instead, the Jewish politicians who manage to succeed do so often precisely because of the lack of any substantial Jewish identity.

The vacuum produced by the acute absence of any communal affiliation seems to create a need to find some other identity and ideology to fill the absence. This is often filled by either the pursuit of socialist politics – which is a handy substitute for religion and community – or by an especially strong and proud identification with their country of birth and a desire to be as involved in its society and politics as possible. European Jewish communities, particularly before the Second World War, sought to cast themselves as being merely (say) French citizens of the Jewish faith rather than citizens of a non-existent Israelite polity living in France.

The truly successful Jewish leaders rejected the ‘of the Jewish faith’ part and instead devoted themselves to the first, national part of the formula with vigour. It is this intense dedication to the national ideal – and the refusal to accept any notion of minority status – that explains in part the success of Jews in charge. In a world where national identity replaced religion, fervent patriotism, with accompanying political zeal, became the way to obtain the ticket into polite society that, in earlier centuries, was achieved by conversion to Christianity. This was in many ways a survival strategy, to escape the precarious position of being part of an unwanted minority, and instead live freely as an integral part of the nation state.

In this approach, American exceptionalism figures positively, particularly in the postwar period. As the sociologist Will Herberg observed, the United States embraced Judaism as one of the three core, American-as-apple-pie, national religious identities in the postwar period. It thus became an integral part of the national fabric. Jews no longer had to choose between membership in the constituent nation and their tradition; the two had merged.

To a much lesser extent, a similar phenomenon can also be seen in tolerant countries with a pluralist framework – witness, in the United Kingdom, Jewish peers such as Lord Wolfson of Tredegar wearing the kippah to swear allegiance to the King at the start of each Parliament.

Elsewhere, a radical anti-Jewishness and zeal for nationalism typified the successful Jewish politician. The best example of this phenomenon is Bruno Kreisky, founding father of modern Austria and, for 13 years, its social democratic federal chancellor (making him, after Adolf Hitler, the 20th-century’s most influential Austrian politician).

Kreisky was raised with both (moderate) Judaism and socialism, ultimately choosing the latter while at university. From that moment on, his identity as an Austrian completely overshadowed his identity as a Jew. Although he survived Nazi rule by escaping to neutral Sweden, he would later cast this as a matter of political escape rather than refuge from a tyrannical regime which regarded his Jewish ancestry as far worse a defect than his leftist politics. On returning to Austria after the war, Kreisky negotiated Austria’s independence (managing to avoid its planned partition along the German model), enshrined Austria’s neutrality in the Cold War as a constitutional principle, and created the modern Austrian welfare state.

Fully embracing a model of Austrianness that rejected any connection to Jewishness, Kreisky was happy to defer any sense of national reckoning with the complicity of Austria and the Austrians in the Shoah, and brought former Nazis into government. When criticised by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Kreisky started a long defamation battle, determined to protect the national honour of Austria and without any care for the fact that he himself had nearly been a victim of the Nazis (as some of his extended family were). The only time Kreisky ever claimed Jewishness as an identity was when he used it as a shield in defence of his decision to bring ex-Nazis into government. In other words, it was a rhetorical trick he could use. In his heart though, he was so thoroughly Austrian that there was no room for any other identity.

One consequence of this phenomenon is that successful Jewish politicians have been intense anti-Zionists. Kreisky went so far as to compare Zionism to Nazism (even as he sat at the cabinet table with actual Nazis). In extreme cases, pogroms were overseen by Jewish leaders, most infamously in the case of the Hungarian communist Mátyás Rákosi.

Even Jewish leaders who maintained a Jewish identity, like Australia’s chief justice and governor general, Isaac Isaacs, aggressively rejected Zionism. Isaacs’ logic was typical: identity with any nation other than Australia might undermine his life’s project of being accepted into the political community. Instead, He championed Australian nationalism, including playing a major role in creating the white Australia policy. It is thus unsurprising that Claudia Sheinbaum, too, is an anti-Zionist.

Thus, it is not Jewishness but anti-Jewishness – both in the vileness of antisemitism and in the understandable desire of Jews to escape small cloistered communities – that drives the success of Jewish politicians. When Sheinbaum’s parents moved from the traditionally Jewish neighbourhoods of western Mexico City to pursue a life centred around the capital’s National Autonomous University of Mexico, they created the conditions in which both Mexican identity and leftist politics became the central driving force of Sheinbaum’s life. Sheinbaum never rebelled or left Judaism (that was her parents), but rather found other activities to define her life and give it meaning, pursuing them with passion and dedication.

Similarly, Zelenskyy was raised not in the bosom of Ukrainian Jewish culture in Odesa, but caught between competing national identities – Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian – in Kryvyi Rih, where he found comedy as a path to acceptance (and, in an odd series of events, later to political leadership). The passion for belonging by children of secular Jews, raised in the liminal uncertainty of their identity and fitting fully into neither Gentile nor Jewish worlds, has produced many leaders across a variety of fields: Albert Einstein, Stanley Kubrick, and Isaac Asimov, to name but three, all fit this profile.

This conclusion will disappoint the two groups who care most about why Jews do so disproportionately well in politics: antisemites and Jews. There is no point reasoning with the former group, but, for the latter, myself included, it is a difficult conundrum. It would be comforting to think that the genius of Jewish politicians is the long descent of tradition as far back as Davidic guile and Solomonic wisdom. Instead, outside of countries where Jewishness is established either officially (Israel) or sociologically (the US), it is the struggle to escape Jewish identity that produces political success in the subsequent generation. So long as there are tiny Jewish communities in otherwise hostile countries, this pattern will recur. Sheinbaum and Zelenskyy’s political futures may be cloudy, but Jews’ aptitude for reaching unlikely political heights seem as bright as ever.