Ackner, Desmond James Conrad, Baron Ackner (1920–2006), judge, was born at 90 Highbury New Park, Islington, London, on 18 September 1920, the son of an immigrant Viennese dentist, Conrad Ackner, who had a fashionable practice in Wimpole Street, and his wife, (Rosine) Rhoda, née Tuck...
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Alexander, David Lindo (1842–1922), lawyer and Jewish community leader, was born at 6 South Street, London, on 5 October 1842, second son in the large family of solicitor Joshua Alexander and his wife, Jemima (b. 1819), one of eighteen children of David Abarbanel Lindo...
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Peter James Henry Benenson (1921–2005) by Carolyn Djanogly, 1999 © Carolyn Djanogly; collection National Portrait Gallery, London
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Benenson, Peter James Henry (1921–2005), barrister and human rights campaigner, was born on 31 July 1921 at 6 Albert Court, Knightsbridge, London, the only child of Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Josiah Solomon (1885–1930), army officer, and his wife, Flora (1895–1984), daughter of the Jewish Russian banker ...
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J. A. Hamilton
revised by H. C. G. Matthew
Benjamin, Judah Philip (1811–1884), barrister and politician in the United States of America, was born on 11 August 1811. His parents, Philip and Rebecca Benjamin, London shopkeepers, were Sephardic Jews of British nationality, who, in 1807, sailed from England to make their home across the ...
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Hilary L. Rubinstein
Bentwich, Herbert (1856–1932), lawyer and Zionist leader, was born on 11 May 1856 at 57 Church Lane, Whitechapel, London, the youngest of three children (he had a brother and a sister) of Marks, or Mattos (Mattathias), Bentwitch, a jeweller who had immigrated from ...
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Michael Beloff
Beyfus, Gilbert Hugh (1885–1960), barrister, was born on 19 July 1885 at 77 Linden Gardens, Kensington, London, the only son of Alfred Beyfus, a solicitor of 69 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and his wife, Emmie Marguerite Ruth, daughter of Robert Plumsted. Of Germanic Jewish origin on his father's side, he was educated at ...
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See Birk [née Wilson], Alma Lillian, Baroness Birk
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Cohen, Arthur (1829–1914), lawyer, was born in Wyndham Place, Bryanston Square, London, on 18 November 1829, the youngest son of Benjamin Cohen (1789–1867), a prosperous bill broker. His grandfather, Levy Barent Cohen (1740–1808), moved to London from Holland about 1770. Through his mother, ...
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Arthur Cohen (1829–1914) by Sir Frank Short, 1917 (after John Singer Sargent, 1906) © National Portrait Gallery, London
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Cohen, Lionel Leonard, Baron Cohen (1888–1973), judge, was born on 1 March 1888 in London, the only child of Sir Leonard Lionel Cohen KCVO (1858–1938), banker, and his wife, Eliza Henrietta (d. 1935), daughter of Sigismund Schloss, of Bowden, Cheshire. His paternal grandfather sat as MP for ...
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Cohen, Stanley [Stan] (1942–2013), sociologist and criminologist, was born on 23 February 1942 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the eldest son of Ray Cohen, a businessman who had arrived from Lithuania in the wave of immigration in the 1920s and 1930s, and his wife, ...
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Sir Zelman Cowen (1919–2011) by Wes Walters, 2000 © National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Gift of Marc Besen AO and Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE 2000
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Ross Cranston
Cowen, Sir Zelman (1919–2011), legal scholar, governor-general of Australia, and college head, was born Zelman Cohen on 7 October 1919 in St Kilda, Melbourne, the only son of Bernard Cohen, later Cowen (1892–1975), businessman, and his wife Sara, née Granat (1893–1989). In March 1922 his father changed his surname by deed poll. Both families were part of the mass exodus of Jews from tsarist ...
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Tony Honoré
Daube, David (1909–1999), jurist, was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, in Baden, Germany, on 8 February 1909, the younger son of Jakob Daube (1875–1954), a wine merchant, and his wife, Selma, née Ascher, from Nördlingen. Both parents were Orthodox Jews. Throughout his life he remained a loyal Badener and a loyal Jew, rigidly Orthodox in his youth and middle years, though with some relaxation in later life. The family was comfortably off. In ...
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S. M. Cretney
Finer, Sir Morris (1917–1974), judge and social reformer, was born on 12 December 1917 at 24 Underwood Street, Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, the elder son of Charles Finer (1888–1959), master tailor, and his wife, Ray, née Topper (1895–1978). He won scholarships from ...
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Geoffrey D. Paul
Frankel, William (1917–2008), barrister and newspaper editor, was born Woolf Frankel at 1A Eastman Court, Whitechapel, London, on 3 February 1917, the second of three sons of Isaac Frankel, a street trader and synagogue beadle, and his wife, Hannah (Anna), née Lacker. His parents had arrived from the Galician area of ...
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Sir Otto Kahn- Freund (1900–1979) by unknown photographer British Library of Political and Economic Science
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J. K. Barry M. Nicholas
Freund, Sir Otto Kahn- (1900–1979), jurist, was born in Frankfurt am Main on 17 November 1900, the only child of Richard Kahn-Freund, a merchant, and his wife, Carrie Freund. He grew up in a cultured Jewish household and though in religious matters he was agnostic, he himself said that the most important fact in his life had been the awareness of being a Jew. To this he attributed the passion for justice and the concern for the disadvantaged which lay at the root both of his interest in labour law and of his socialist convictions....
