In Jewish communal life my role is usually the agreeable one. Books, culture, where to get the best herring; the safe end of the Jewish conversation, if you like. Only recently I was on stage at Jewish Book Week with Maureen Lipman discussing the life of Mel Brooks, which confirmed that whatever dramatic talents I may possess are best left firmly to others. But Jewish history occasionally insists on asking harder questions. And this is one of those moments.
For Jews, questions about how power is structured in a society rarely feel abstract. Our collective memory has been shaped by places that looked stable, cultured and civilised until, suddenly, they were not. Which is why I found myself last week doing something that sat rather uneasily with me: writing to Members of Parliament about proposed changes to jury trials.
I am not, by instinct, an activist. My professional life usually requires something rather different. Holding people in power to account, asking questions, testing arguments against fairness and evidence. My own view is rarely the point. But occasionally the argument itself touches something deeper.
The reform now approved in principle would allow certain criminal offences carrying sentences of up to three years imprisonment to be tried by a judge sitting alone rather than before a jury. The reassurance offered is that these are “only” three-year offences. But three years is not a minor matter in a human life. And constitutional safeguards are not measured by the size of the penalty.
Of course the criminal courts are under immense pressure. Cases have piled up for years. Victims are waiting far too long for justice. Anyone who has spent time around the legal system knows reform is necessary. But not every reform is equal.
Removing juries from criminal trials may sound like an administrative adjustment. In reality it alters something deeper: the balance between citizen and state. Trial by jury is not simply a procedural detail. It is a constitutional principle.
When the state accuses someone of a crime, the judgment does not belong entirely to the state itself. Ordinary citizens sit in the room and decide whether the power of government has been exercised justly. A judge represents the state, a jury represents the public whom the law exists to protect. That is the point.
Britain famously does not rely on a single written constitution to protect liberty. Our freedoms live instead in institutions slowly built over centuries: the presumption of innocence, an independent judiciary and trial by jury. Each of them places a restraint on power. And the difficulty of removing those restraints is not an inconvenience. It is the design. Constitutions are not built for the governments we trust. They exist for the day power falls into the hands of someone we do not.
Jewish history leaves you unusually alert to that truth. Not because every political reform is sinister. And certainly not because those proposing this change deserve their motives caricatured. But because Jewish memory carries a long familiarity with how civic safeguards begin to thin. Rarely dramatically; a practical reform here, a sensible efficiency there. Something temporary. Something administrative. Something that seems perfectly reasonable at the time. Until slowly, almost invisibly, the distance between citizen and state begins to shrink.
For example, imagine the victim of an aggravated antisemitic assault standing in court, bruised and frightened, hoping that ordinary citizens in the jury box will understand what happened and why it mattered, bringing the common sense, moral judgment and quiet power of the community.
My grandfather survived the Shoah. What he admired most about Britain was not that it was perfect. It was that the system contained safeguards that placed limits on the power of the state. Trial by jury was one of them.
The Torah insists repeatedly that justice must protect the vulnerable: the stranger, the widow, the poor. “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” That justice requires more than good intentions from those in authority. It requires structures that distribute power rather than concentrate it. That is what juries do.
Some years ago I was visiting the Konzerthaus in Vienna and noticed the date: November 9. I asked what had been performed there on that date in 1938. The guide returned from the archive with the programme and the critics reviews from the following morning’s newspapers.
It had been, by all accounts, a magnificent evening. Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. Karl Böhm conducting. Critics praised the authority of the performance. The discipline of the tempo. A cultured night of fine music.
That same night synagogues were burning across Germany and Austria. Kristallnacht had begun.
The point is not that every argument about law leads to catastrophe. It is that catastrophe rarely announces itself at the beginning.
Inside the concert hall that November evening in Vienna the music was magnificent. A great night had been had by all. Outside, the windows of synagogues were already beginning to shatter.
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