An Unfortunate Coincidence

Didi Herman is Professor of Law & Social Change at the University of Kent, UK. She has published widely on the subject of Jews, Jewishness and English law, and is also the author of Rights of Passage: Struggles for Lesbian and Gay Legal Equality, (University of Toronto Press, 1994), The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right, (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and, with Doris Buss, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right's International Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

Didi Hermans brilliant and original An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law breaks new ground in the history of the representation as well as the social status of the Jews in the modern world. Examining the case law in English civil (rather than criminal) law, Herman spins a complex tale of how 19th century ideas of the Jews as a race come to be embedded in English common law. While not surprising in the context of the late 19th century, where the anxiety about Jewish difference was universally defined within the parameters of scientific racism, what is staggering about Hermans account is how these views continue, quite unreflected, into the 21st century and into the realm of civil rights. This is a major book, not only on British Jewry and its history, but also in the history of law.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. 'An Unfortunate Coincidence': Race, Nation, and Character ; 3. If Only I Knew: Race and Faith in the Law of Trusts ; 4. 'She is and Will Forever Remain a Jew': Children and the Courts ; 5. 'We Live in the Age of the Holocaust of the Jews' ; 6. 'The Wandering Jew Has No Nation': Jewishness and Race Relations Law ; 7. 'The Christian Church Will Admit Children Regardless of Who Their Parents Are': The Jewish Free School Case and Other Final Thoughts