UNTIL the 1950s and 1960s it was uncommon for Jews to reach the higher levels of the English judiciary. True, there were outstanding individuals from the older Anglo-Jewish families, such as George Jessel and Rufus Isaacs, who graced the benches of the High Court; but none had ever been joined by a Jewish colleague. At first it seemed that this pattern was to be repeated when Lionel Leonard Cohen (1888‒1973) was appointed as a judge in the Chancery Division of the High Court in 1943—another solitary Jew on the High Court benches. Descended from Levi Barent Cohen (1747‒1808), the ancestor of the Anglo-Jewish ‘Cousinhood’, and a member of one of Anglo-Jewry's most illustrious families, with ties to the Rothschilds and Montefiores, Lionel Cohen was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in history in 1909 and in law in the following year, and was called to the Bar in 1913. After service in the army during the First World War he joined the chambers of Alfred Topham, a leading specialist in company law, and soon acquired a considerable practice of his own; he was elevated to the rank of King's Counsel in 1929. ‘He was the first Jew to be appointed as a puisne judge, then the first Jew to become a Lord Justice of Appeal [in 1946] and finally the first to be made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary [in 1951].’ On this last promotion to the House of Lords, the highest court in the land, he was made a life peer. Although Cohen retired as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1960, he still sat in the House of Lords from time to time, hearing cases, until 1967. According to Sir Raymond Evershed, Cohen was ‘ “the greatest living exponent of English law on corporations”, possessing all the qualities required in his most eminent position: integrity of mind, accuracy of thought and expression, and distrust of the catchword’.

Cohen was precluded from making a greater contribution to English law as a judge by his extensive role in public life and his involvement in the affairs of the Jewish community.