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This chapter examines Jews in the English judiciary from 1945 to 1990. Until the late 1960s, no Jew could become a High Court judge unless he belonged to the Anglo-Jewish elite, which differed little in educational attainments and lifestyle from the rest of the English upper class, even if he was exceptionally able. Starting in 1968, during the last years of Harold Wilson's Labour administration, Lord Chancellor Gerald Gardiner began to appoint Jewish barristers from middle-class backgrounds and of east European family origin to the High Court bench. These men had for the most part been educated in local grammar schools and redbrick universities. This policy was continued both by the Conservative Heath government and by Labour administrations in the 1970s. The chapter then assesses how Jewish these High Court judges were in their personal affiliation.

This chapter traces French legal reforms in the early decades of the Protectorate and their impact on Jews' legal strategies. Colonial administrators attempted to harden the jurisdictional boundaries separating Morocco's different legal orders in order to prevent forum shopping and promote the rationalization of the government. In doing so, they reduced the jurisdiction of Jewish and shariʻa courts. The French were not able to implement their legal reforms immediately; both Jews and Muslims initially resisted these far-reaching changes. Nonetheless, the colonial authorities eventually succeeded at imposing firm jurisdictional boundaries among different legal institutions. Yet these reforms had unintended negative consequences for Morocco's Jews—consequences that proved particularly hard to swallow given France's promises to emancipate the country's religious minority.

This chapter assesses the age of the ‘Court Jew’ (1650–1713), which marked the zenith of Jewish influence in early modern Europe. The remarkable role of the Jews in European affairs at that time rested on the solid foundations laid during the Thirty Years War. By 1650, a scattered but socially closely intertwined élite of provisioners and financiers had emerged who were simultaneously agents of states and the effective leaders of Europe's Jewish communities. Sometimes, they showed a strong sense of commitment to one particular government, but this was, in fact, both unusual and untypical. Generally, Jewish court factors, or Hoffaktoren as they were known in Germany, lived outside the states which they served. Not infrequently, they acted for several governments at once. Most typical of all, the close collaboration and interdependence between them, interlocking with the correspondence between kehillot in different countries, made their activity more thoroughly international and specifically Jewish than the banking and contracting of later times. Assuredly, the system centred on Germany, Austria, and Holland, but it ramified far beyond these limits, exerting an appreciable influence also on affairs in Spain, Portugal, the Spanish Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Italy, England, and Ireland.

This chapter reviews the book Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (2015), edited by Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder. Jewish Honor Courts is a collection of essays that examines Jewish honor courts within the wider context of retribution and punishment of collaborators with the enemy across postwar Europe. Established by Jewish communities in various European locales, Jewish honor courts were intended to try and sentence Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in a court of their Jewish peers. The book also covers the Israeli trials, known as “kapo trials,” and describes the cooperation between Jews and state prosecutors in bringing Jewish collaborators before the bar of justice. The trials of three individuals are discussed: Stella Goldschlag, Alfred Merbaum, and Hirsch Barenblat.

This chapter explores how David Oppenheim's library offered him a means to assert superiority over his rabbinic colleagues on account of his ability to marshal and manage an ever-growing body of documentation and knowledge. Oppenheim's library was a product of the emergent pan-European development and provided him with a vehicle for shaping his place in the religious and social culture of the early modern period. His library-as-archive contributed to administering the autonomous life of early modern Jews in Moravia and Bohemia, across the German lands, and into the Jewish courts of Italy. By amassing, archiving, and mobilizing information, Oppenheim used his collection to interweave personal prestige with institutional practice. Indeed, acquired with family wealth, and symbolic of courtly influence, the library was used by both Oppenheim and a constituency of rabbinic and communal leaders to shape the legal, ritual, and daily lives of an even wider array of ordinary Jews in early modern Europe.

This chapter looks at Dan Porat's important book, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators (2019). The focus of Porat's book is the so-called kapo trials that were conducted in Israel between 1951 and 1972. Many of the defendants were not alleged former kapos in Nazi concentration camps but rather former Judenrat (Jewish Council) members and Jewish policemen in ghettos. The legislative authority for the kapo trials derived from the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law promulgated by the Knesset in 1950. This is the law on the basis of which Adolf Eichmann was tried and convicted in Jerusalem in 1961. But, as Porat points out, when the Knesset debated and then passed the legislation, first and foremost in legislators' minds were survivors in Israel who were suspected of cooperation with the Nazis. Unlike the proceedings in Jewish honor courts, which resorted to deontological criteria — that is, whether the accused had a duty to refrain from lending a hand to the Nazis' persecution and murder of other Jews — the Israeli trials, conducted under state authority, were bound by the rules of criminal law to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.