WHEREAS refugee doctors were given the opportunity of taking up their profession again because of urgent wartime needs, German Jewish lawyers faced a much more difficult task in attempting to integrate themselves into the British legal system. Barristers with German accents felt unwelcome, so that few refugees tried to make a career at the English Bar. Refugees could not become solicitors unless they were naturalized, something that was difficult to achieve during the war, and only a small number qualified as solicitors after the war, as the English common law and Continental legal systems were so divergent. Nevertheless, some German Jewish lawyers settled in England and helped to create and staff the international restitution organizations; others opened practices which specialized in these claims or joined law firms as clerks to handle such work. As these lawyers found a wholly new way of reactivating their legal skills and of protecting the rights of other refugees, I thought that they merited inclusion in this chapter.

The migration of German lawyers in the 1930s was preceded by an earlier upheaval among Russian Jewish professionals. On the whole, the ethos of the Russian Bar under the tsarist regime of the late nineteenth century was more liberal and more tolerant than that of the population at large. In 1896, 389 out of 2,149 Russian lawyers (18.1 per cent) were Jewish, and of lawyers in training 42.6 per cent were Jewish. However, in the 1890s the tsarist regime imposed a quota of 10 per cent as the percentage of Jews who could be admitted to the Russian Bar, citing in defence the alleged morally dubious qualities of the Jew. The Russian Journal of Civil and Criminal Law claimed in 1889 that ‘Jewish lawyers are more talented, have more knowledge and are more attentive to their duties than the Russians; they defend their clients by all means … and that competition with Jews is dangerous and even impossible for them [the Russians].’ Because of the restrictions imposed on Jews practising at the Russian Bar, one of the most talented jurists of the period, A. Y. Passover (1840‒1910), qualified for the English Bar, though he reluctantly decided to return to Russia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917‒18, however, many Jewish luminaries of the Bar dispersed overseas, principally to the United States and France, but also in some cases to England.