If there were ever a cliché about Jews, it’s our long-standing affinity for the law. From the wisdom of Solomon down through the centuries, Jews have embraced the law of the land where they live in disproportionate numbers. If we have the misfortune to fall foul of the law, it’s highly likely that some, if not many officers of the court will be Jews.
Two of English law’s most genial practitioners are Jewish lawyers Henry Milner, a criminal defence solicitor, and Nigel Lithman QC, a recently retired judge. Each has a book out, Milner’s a cheerful legal romp called Murder at the Bailey, which follows his 2020 memoir, No Lawyers in Heaven. Lithman’s book, Nothing Like the Truth, traces his 40-plus years as a barrister before spending four years on the bench.
The two men know each other and, in fact, Lithman tells me, he once led Milner’s son Jonas, himself a criminal barrister, in a trading standards case. (Milner says he once instructed both Lithman and his son in a murder case: as was once famously said by Buckingham Palace, recollections may differ).
Both Milner and Lithman, each a Londoner by birth, have years of experience at their fingertips — and both have interesting Jewish arcs to their lives, not immediately apparent in their legal work.
Milner, for example, was educated at Carmel College, the now defunct Jewish public school in Oxfordshire. He doesn’t say whether being an Old Carmeli was adequate preparation for his future career, spent almost exclusively among the badlands of South London criminals, defending such lowlives as those alleged to be responsible for the notorious Brink’s-Mat robbery. (Brink’s-Mat was a spectacular robbery of £26 million which took place in November 1983 at the Heathrow trading estate. The haul — equivalent to more than £100 million today — included gold bars, diamonds and cash, much of which has never been recovered, and was said to be the crime of the century.)
For his part, Lithman claims that he fell into law by default: after reading Oriental Studies and then spending six months at the Hebrew University, during which time he failed to be recruited by Mossad, he returned to Britain to consider what to do next. “The law ran in my family”, he writes. “Those who couldn’t stand the sight of blood [his father was a consultant anaesthetist] became lawyers”. So the law it was: and while rising in his profession — he became chair of the Criminal Bar Association and led his colleagues to the Bar’s first strike — he also became chair of Highgate United Synagogue, of which he speaks with warm affection.
Readers of Milner’s novel might — or might not — be advised to read his memoir first, as he plunders some of his real-life cases to provide the pacy enjoyment of Murder at the Bailey. It’s the outdoor equivalent of one of those locked-room mysteries, as right from the off the main protagonist is seen in broad daylight shooting an evil loan shark right outside the doors of the Old Bailey.
No spoilers as to how the intrepid lawyers convince the jury that he should go free.
And lurking in the novel is a junior defence barrister, young Daniel Jacobsen, who might just bear a resemblance to Jonas Milner. At any rate, Milner père says that his son shares his keenness for Sherlock Holmes and helped him with the chapter on using Sherlockian methods of deduction.
In fact, Milner had seven chapters of his thriller ready to go before it even occurred to him to write a memoir. At his agent’s suggestion he put the fiction in a drawer while writing his autobiography.
Once the pandemic began, and the courts were no longer sitting, he had another go. With what is, apparently, a trademark grin, he confesses that he “couldn’t resist” transferring words originally spoken by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, into the mouth of his very dodgy South London fictional criminal, Big Jake.
Milner — who is still in practice, though working these days from home — began his life as a criminal defence lawyer with Nathan Vengroff, a West End solicitor who was a former head of Mizrachi and the Zionist Federation, and a rabbi to boot.
After two years with Vengroff, he branched out on his own, and in a lucky break in 1976 succeeded in getting a career criminal, Mickey Davies, off the hook over a robbery at the Daily Express. Davies’s unlikely acquittal was Milner’s key to the place he calls “Criminalia” — over the years, word-of-mouth among the professionally light of hand brought him many clients.
He claims that almost every sit-down with a client begins with the words “To tell you the truth, Mr Milner” — and then proceeds to say anything but.
Though many of his clients were career criminals, he’s also done his fair share of representing strictly Orthodox Jews. A favourite story is of a client from Belgium, caught apparently smuggling in to Britain five kilos of cocaine, hidden in his car. “He claimed he didn’t know it was there and that he was going to visit a friend in Gateshead yeshiva.” Found amid the cocaine was a bag from a kosher bakery in Antwerp. Milner thought there was no hope.
“We had a good barrister, and he was acquitted. After the case, I said to him, you’re lucky we didn’t have a Jewish prosecutor. He said, what do you mean? I said, well, your case was that you were going to Gateshead to stay with a friend for a few days. But I think you were getting back on that boat [to Europe] the same day. What do you mean, he said? And I said, there was something missing from your luggage”. That, of course, was the man’s set of tefillin, which would have been necessary had he been spending more than a day away from home. His client smiled, and Milner grins remembering it. “He knew exactly what I was talking about.”
As much as Milner had, and continues to have, fun in his time as a criminal lawyer, so too did Nigel Lithman QC, in his long career as a barrister and then on the bench. In Nothing Like the Truth he unpicks cases for the reader and examines the phenomenon of what he calls “Judge-itis” — a condition in which judges occasionally over-preen themselves and do not deliver the qualities which Lithman deems essential for both barristers and judges — kindness and politeness.
Neither costs much but Lithman believes that it is vital to give a defendant the fairest crack of the whip. As a judge, he says, “if you are polite and courteous to the defendant (and the rest of the court), that respect is generally repaid. There is a breed of judge that goes the other way, though they are fewer and fewer. These are the judges who feel they have carte blanche to treat those before them, badly. But that says more about them, than those over whom they are presiding. In my career, I had acquired certain people skills, and that was one reason why I went to the bench, to exercise a degree of care and compassion. It’s always much more pleasurable not to send someone to prison, than to send someone to prison”.
That’s not to say that Lithman is a soft touch. “In my four years on the bench I did a series of gang warfare cases, county lines drug cases involving guns — and in one case I ended up distributing 84 years of prison among the defendants.” The Court of Appeal agreed with his sentencing.
Like Milner, Lithman has never made any secret of being Jewish. In fact, his very last case at the Bar, before becoming a judge, was awash with Jews: the defendant, Lithman as the lead counsel, his junior counsel and the instructing solicitor. Despite potential prejudice and stereotyping, he was acquitted — it was a bank fraud charge — thus supporting Lithman’s innate trust in the jury system, because the jury, he says, sensed his client’s “inner decency”.
Lithman has a distinguished ancestor on his mother’s side of the family: Naftali Herz Imber, who wrote the lyrics to Hatikva. He describes himself as strongly Zionist, and he and his wife have a second home in Zichron Ya’akov in northern Israel.
Though he was first drawn to the Bar with the idea of “fighting for someone’s liberty”, his sense is that a successful barrister “has to have a flair for reading the mood of the court. To an extent the dramatic [behaviour by a barrister] can detract from that. It’s quite a rigorous exercise of the mind, to keep up with what’s going on in court and to manipulate it and turn it in particular directions”.
He’s not ready to put his finger definitively on what attracts so many Jews to the law, though he concedes that every case “has a Hillel on one side and a Shammai on the other”. Sometimes, Lithman thinks, the best course is to stay quiet while drama rages elsewhere in court.
Just the same, Lithman plainly loved what he achieved. A self-confessed mischief-maker both in and out of court, he says: “Yes, I was a cheeky schoolboy who grew into a cheeky junior barrister, a cheeky QC —and I became a cheeky judge”.

Murder at the Bailey by Henry Milner is published by Biteback at £9.99

Nothing Like the Truth by Nigel Lithman QC is published by Whitefox at £9.99