WERE Jews more active litigants in the English civil courts in the 1920s and 1930s than the bulk of the population, and did they appear more frequently in some of the criminal courts than is commonly believed? To both these questions, the answer appears to be yes. Did this hyperactivity in the law courts generate work for an increasing number of Jewish counsel and solicitors, and thus contribute to the expansion of the number of Jews in the legal profession during the 1930s? Again, the answer would have to be in the affirmative— but in this case a somewhat more qualified yes.

Woolfe Summerfield, an Anglo-Jewish barrister writing in 1924, asserted that immigrant Jews from eastern Europe were much more prone to resort to litigation than the more Anglicized sections of the Jewish community, although some of this litigation was concealed from public view because it was dealt with by a network of communal institutions set up to arbitrate in cases of dispute between Jews. Sometimes Jews went to Jewish courts run by rabbis; also, the Defence Committee of the Board of Deputies tried to keep cases out of the public domain by arbitration and by persuading parties to settle out of court. During the years between the two world wars Jews were more usually merchants, agents, and dealers rather than manufacturers and artisans. ‘Thus it is indisputable’, Summerfield remarked, ‘that a very large proportion of those engaged in such businesses as money-lenders, credit drapers, suppliers of furniture and other commodities on the hire-purchase systems, are Jews. These types of business transactions involve the giving of credit over a period [of time] to the poorer members of the public in most cases.’ When the payment of instalments fell into arrears, as it commonly did, Jewish claimants resorted to the county courts.