ALTHOUGH the groundwork for the transformation of the position of Jews in the legal profession had been laid prior to the Second World War, the burgeoning careers of many solicitors were interrupted by service in the armed forces and were not resumed until the late 1940s. Practices left in the hands of managing clerks and neighbouring solicitors had run down, and it took a few years of sustained effort to restore many a practice to its former level. However, a group of enterprising Jewish solicitors did more than this: they seized the opportunities that existed in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of post-war rebuilding, the office and housing boom, and the consumer revolution, and some times hitched their fortunes to those of Jewish property entrepreneurs or entered the property market themselves. Others, too, through their financial and legal acumen, became directors of a wide range of companies. During the inter-war period the economic fortunes of British Jews, which had peaked in the Edwardian period, declined, and this was especially true of the old City of London merchant banking families of the Cousinhood. ‘There can be little doubt that the post-war period has seen a considerable revival of the wealth of Britain's Jewish community, and it now seems probable that perhaps 15 per cent to 20 per cent of Britain's wealthiest men and women are Jews’, declared W. D. Rubinstein in 1981; he suggested, moreover, that there was good reason to believe that this was an underestimate.

Since the inter-war period the traditional Jewish trades of tailoring, furniture-making, and shoe-making had been in decline, with a corresponding diversification in the choice of occupation, leading to the creation of a broad-based Jewish middle class. These trends had accelerated in the 1940s and 1950s. Summing up the findings of research in 1962, Lionel Kochan stated that the end of the Second World War