PRIDE VERSUS PREJUDICE: JEWISH DOCTORS AND LAWYERS IN ENGLAND 1890-1990

By John Cooper

Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 37.50

Geoffrey Bindman

This is a work of commendable industry, which surveys in great detail the entry and progress in the medical and legal professions of doctors and lawyers of Jewish origin.

Jewish immigration, like that of other groups, and the responses to it, are of great historical and sociological interest.

Anti-Semitism seems not to have been a barrier to the advancement of the relatively small number of Jewish lawyers in Victorian times.

Sir George Jessel (Master of the Rolls, 1873-1881) and later Rufus Isaacs (Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading, 1913-1919, who later became Viceroy of India) came from old, assimilated Anglo-Jewish families.

In the 20th century, after much larger numbers of Jews sought refuge in Britain from persecution in continental Europe, anti-Semitism reared its ugly head and continued to be practised widely by solicitors' firms and barristers' chambers, notwithstanding the terrible lesson of the Holocaust.

It certainly survived at least until the 1950s, for in 1956 I spurned an offer of articles by a prominent firm in my home town of Newcastle when the senior partner told me that his colleagues (excluding of course himself) would never admit a Jew to their partnership.

John Cooper describes the same attitude among firms in the City of London at that time, which led young Jewish lawyers to start their own firms, several of which have achieved eminence in the commercial world.

Yet I have a certain unease about the book as a whole.

It is overloaded with descriptions of the successful careers of individual doctors and lawyers.

Their 'Jewishness' varies considerably.

Many observe neither religion nor custom.

Some have adopted, or were even born into, other faiths.

What, other than a highly dubious 'ethnicity', do they have in common with each other?

The focus on personalities gives the book a flavour of self-congratulation which detracts from the value of its scholarship.

Geoffrey Bindman is the senior partner of London-based Bindman & Partners and recently won the Gazette Centenary Award for lifetime achievement in human rights