A few years ago, I was having a conversation with the novelist Linda Grant. I forget what it was about but obviously something related to Jewishness came up.

“Well, of course, you’d understand, being Jewish,” she said.

“Um, actually, I’m not.”

“Nonsense. Where did you grow up?”

“London.”

“No, where in London?”

“St John’s Wood and East Finchley.”

“I rest my case.”

We had already established that I was not overly fond of physical exercise, liked few things more than sitting down in a comfy chair with a good book, and was a terrible dancer. I have interviewed Howard Jacobson on stage four times, once for Jewish Book Week.

She also had had the opportunity over many years to observe my physiognomy which, it is undeniable, veers some distance from the accepted Anglo-Saxon/northern European model. (Everyone assumes my nose, which is really quite large, is Jewish.

It is not. I inherited it from my maternal grandmother, and what with that, and her parsimony, her Jewish in-laws called her — mocking two stereotypes at once — “the Yiddisher Britisher”.) And there’s also the matter of my name.

For it is a Jewish name, and not just because it has a Z in it. Lezards — and everyone with that surname is related — have been Jewish since the year dot, like, I suppose, almost all Jews.

There is a war grave of a great-great-uncle with a Star of David on it (Captain Arthur G, 1916). My great-uncle, Julien “Lizzie” Lezard, was signed up under the code name “Cathedral” for a dangerous mission behind enemy lines during World War II. He said “Synagogue” would have been better.

But, a generation later, my father wasn’t having any of this. He said he was only quarter-Jewish; he later somehow amended this to an eighth. He said that “Lezard” was from the Basque “lissard”, which means an antelope. It isn’t and it doesn’t. Never mind.

He was very anti-religious, and once, towards the end of his life, when you might be expected to start looking for loopholes in the Four Last Things, we were listening to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. “This would be absolutely wonderful,” he whispered to me, “if there weren’t so much religious nonsense in it.”

So there it is. The phenomenon of that quirk of matrilinearity, by which a Jewish person can have a non-Jewish surname, is shared among the famous by Stephen Fry, Will Self and Christopher Hitchens.

When Hitchens found out that he was, in fact, Jewish, he revelled in it. Taken to a very fancy American club which had a strict policy on how many Jews it was prepared to admit to membership, ie none, he called the manager over, and pointed to the menu. “Look here,” he said, “this isn’t good enough. I want to see the kosher menu.”

But until today, I have always felt a bit uneasy claiming any kind of Jewishness, even though I have been very flattered when Jews have said that I can. Not so happy when non-Jews say it, even if it is meant well, which it isn’t always. I was told, at school, unforgettably, that I was good enough for the… I’m not going to finish that sentence, but you can tell where it’s going.

Many years later, I checked: were I to be transplanted to the era of the Nuremberg Laws, I would, technically, not have been good enough for the etc. But you know what? I wouldn’t have liked to hang around long enough to find out.

Anyway, today I learned from my editor, when we were talking about this piece, that according to Reform and Liberal Judaism I am perfectly capable of claiming Jewishness; and as far as the State of Israel goes, I am good enough for it.

I am not sure what I am going to do with this new-found gift; for it is a gift. The first thing I think I can do will be to start telling Jewish jokes with a clear conscience.

And by Jewish jokes I mean jokes like the one about the shipwrecked Jewish mariner who built two synagogues on his desert island before being rescued. (You know the one. “Oh the second synagogue?

That’s the one I don’t go to.”) The next thing I think I’ll do — unless someone says I can’t — is tell my children that they, too, are now Jewish. I think — for I am writing this before the actual date — I shall save it for when we are all sitting by the Christmas tree which, I imagine, we’ll have up until the Twelfth Night.

Nicholas Lezard is a writer and literary critic for a wide range of publications, and writes the ‘Down and Out’ column for the New Statesman. His books include ‘Bitter Experience Has Taught Me’ and ‘It Gets Worse’