During the late Victorian age and the Edwardian era it was possible for a few Jews from patrician or wealthy merchant families to rise to the top of the Bar, or the front rank of the medical profession, while retaining a Jewish identity. Examples include doctors such as Ernest Hart and, more emphatically, Gustave Schorstein and Bertram Abrahams, and lawyers such as George Jessel, Arthur Cohen, and Rufus Isaacs in the earlier phases of his career. But until 1914 the total number of Jewish professionals in England was small, with no more than ninety or 100 doctors practising in London and perhaps a slightly smaller number of Jewish barristers. At the same time there were prominent members of these professions, such as the surgeon Sir Felix Semon or the international lawyer Judah Philip Benjamin, who were only marginally Jewish; others again, such as the eminent solicitor the first Sir George Lewis, were Jewish, but preferred mixing with non-Jewish artists and writers, neither emphasizing their Jewishness nor denying it. As these Jewish doctors and lawyers were relatively few in number and acculturated, they posed no threat to their non-Jewish colleagues, and their progress in their chosen profession was accepted without demur.

Between the two world wars English society was much less open than in the late Victorian and Edwardian years. This was a time of heavy unemployment and economic malaise, disfigured by sharpening antisemitism which did not abate until a decade after the Second World War. The massive influx into the medical profession of children of east European Jewish immigrants started during the First World War, when, with so many young men absent on active service, women and Jews were admitted into the medical schools in larger numbers than hitherto. Nevertheless, despite Professor Kushner's caveats about the children of the immigrants finding ‘formal and informal barriers’ being imposed during the 1930s and 1940s to impede their entry into the professions because of increasing antisemitism, I could not find much evidence of this. On the contrary, during the inter-war period a rising number of Jewish students enrolled in the London and provincial medical schools. Many of the earliest recruits to the medical profession in England were the sons of rabbis or other officials of the Jewish community, the heirs of the educated minority, and they served as role models for their schoolfriends.