Jewish turns to law – whether as a profession, a means of social mobility and integration, or a venue where emancipatory claims could be formulated or put forward to negotiate the challenges of modernity – remain largely unexplored in legal-historical research. There is no denying the rich insights displayed by biographies, prosopographies, institutional histories, and works focusing on particular case studies written over the past three decades or so; yet browsing through the catalogues of Jewish personal or institutional archives recording the past two centuries reveals that this richness serves to obfuscate many more lives (in particular of those who have not reached the status of luminaries), associations, foci of advocacy, legal strategies, court cases, or lawmaking enterprises. At the same time, studies of Jewish legal responses to the rise of National Socialism have recently inclined towards international law, international institutions, and international advocacy action. While certain episodes of Jewish legal activism at the national level are well-documented, many others remain under-researched (9).David Fraser’s meticulously researched comparative legal history represents an important contribution to these lacunas in the extant literature. It narrates not only a range of what may be described as Jewish ‘legal self-defence’ across various jurisdictions but also how Jewish individuals and institutions communicated across national borders to share information, knowledge and advice when responding to the rise of the antisemitism of the 1930s. Throughout the book, action and reaction are juxtaposed to frame Jewish legal advocacy as a local, but also inter- and trans-national, response to a local and inter- and trans-national threat. To that end, Fraser first carefully recreates the thick socio-political contexts, discourses, and imaginations of Catholic police officers, conservative nationalists, journalists, army veterans, fringe and mainstream politicians, and professionals of the ‘Antisemitic international’ (11) to foreground a ‘socio-legal comparative history of … Jewish attempts in the 1930s “Anglosphere” to counter the rise in fascist and Nazi antisemitism’ (1). To that end, the first two chapters (2–3) provide a convenient, compact comparative survey of some of the features of the ‘Antisemitic international’: its tropes, texts – in particular, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – German ties, circulation, agents, the networks they formed, and their modus operandi. These chapters also reflect on the challenges, choices, and pitfalls of Jewish legal resistance in jurisdictions outside the Anglosphere.
To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here.
DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500220
No comments:
Post a Comment