Summary
Mordechai Eliash, as Lahav presents him: the Ukraine-born, Berlin- and London-educated Jerusalem lawyer under whom Simon Agranat clerked in 1930–1931, legal counsel to the Yishuv’s aspiring self-rule institutions, at once Westernised and rooted in Eastern European yiddishkeit, whose home was a centre of Jerusalem high society for British officials, Arab aristocracy and Yishuv leaders alike (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 730-760).
Details
- Agranat, clerking in Eliash’s two-room Habashim Street office, checked pending court files every other day against the Ottoman-legacy corruption Eliash warned him of, copied the Supreme Court rulings the office received in carbon, and formed his friendship with the junior lawyer Isaac Olshan (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 740-790).
- For an Annals article commissioned from Eliash, Agranat drafted a thirty-one-page memorandum validating the Rutenberg electricity concession under Article 11 of the Mandate; the editor dropped the subject under pressure for balanced Arab representation, leaving Eliash, in Agranat’s later quip, unhappy “that his name did not appear on an article he did not write” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 690-730).
- In Farouqi v. Ayoub Eliash acted for the Arab Ayoub family although he represented many Jews injured in the 1929 riots and official Zionist institutions — an instance, for Lahav, of the legal system as one of the few places Jews and Arabs interacted as equals (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 738-790).
- Eliash offered Agranat a junior partnership with a raise and independent appellate work; Agranat declined, fearing to remain in the master’s shadow (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 780-800).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Norman Bentwich