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‘An Unfortunate Coincidence’: Jews and Jewishness in Twentieth‐century English Judicial Discourse
Author(s) -
Herman Didi
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of law and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.263
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1467-6478
pISSN - 0263-323X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2006.00358.x
Subject(s) - narrative , antisemitism , rhetorical question , reading (process) , construct (python library) , sociology , history , literature , law , judaism , art , political science , archaeology , computer science , programming language
This paper explores the neglected area of representations of Jews and Jewishness in English legal cases. In considering judicial knowledge of ‘the Jew’, I ask three primary questions. First, how do English judges understand and represent ‘the Jew’ and in relation to what material factors do these understandings and representations change? Second, how do English judges construct racial knowledge, what rhetorical technologies are fashioned and deployed? Third, are the effects of contemporary judicial racializations of Jewishness different in substance from earlier ones? The purpose of this paper is to study the encounter between English judges and ‘the Jew’ in the twentieth century, eschewing a reading that centres ‘antisemitism’ or ‘discrimination’ in favour of one that focuses on the complex and contradictory narratives in these judgments and the kinds of work these narratives do.