AN UNFORTUNATE COINCIDENCE: JEWS, JEWISHNESS, AND ENGLISH LAW by DIDI HERMAN
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2011.00552.x |
| Author | DAVID FRASER |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
Book Reviews
AN UNFORTUNATE COINCIDENCE: JEWS, JEWISHNESS, AND
ENGLISH LAW by DIDI HERMAN
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, xiv + 193 pp.,
£34.95)
Tony Kushner in his recent study of Anglo-Jewry has argued that
By acknowledging and accepting that all places . .. are, amongst other things,
`virtually Jewish', we can at least start to challenge the ethnic and racial
certainties that are continuing and intensifying in the twenty-first century.
1
One of those places which has always been `virtually Jewish', as Didi
Herman reminds us in An Unfortunate Coincidence, is English law. From
leading legal textbooks to judicial consciousness, this Jewish fact has been
ignored, obfuscated, and elided or else deployed in normatively questionable
ways. The publication of An Unfortunate Coincidence means that the reality
of a Jewish presence in English law, however complicated and subtle our
understandings must now become, can never again be avoided. The narrative
of English law has become more difficult to grasp, but more exciting and
forever enriched by Herman's masterful work.
Didi Herman has written a brilliant, insightful, and extremely nuanced
book, as its subtitle indicates, on `Jews, Jewishness and English law'. In this
physically slim, but intellectually jam-packed volume, she details in a
careful, contextually sensitive fashion, the twisted and often complex paths
followed by English courts in their various encounters with `Jews'. Her
analysis highlights, underlines, and deconstructs the ways in which the cases
she studies, in a variety of fields, from trusts, to criminal law, from family
and child welfare cases, to anti-discrimination claims, have created, defined,
and often essentialized Jews and Jewishness throughout the twentieth
century and into our current epoch. Herman also elucidates the mirror
images of such emplotments and their key place in English law. For every
Jew, there is a Christian; for each foreign Jew, there is England and
Englishness; and for every uncomprehending `foreign' Jewish party to a
case, there is the certainty and the civilization of English law. This
relationship is constructed not just, or even primarily, through express and
explicit pronouncements, but by a complex semiotics of legal discourse
which this work unmasks in a painstakingly elaborated and sensitive fashion.
449
ß2011 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2011 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1 T. Kushner, Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, locality and memory (2009).
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