Interlude 1 compares the history of legal education and research in India and Palestine. In each territory, British rule fostered Western-style legal education systems, and local scholars critically engaged with English and Continental theories, applying them to their religious legal traditions. In both places, cultural nationalism shaped the study of religious law. Yet there were also major differences between the two places: Indian scholars, influenced primarily by Henry Maine’s historical approach, examined the evolution of religious law without advocating its revival. Jewish scholars, by contrast, drew on the ideas of the German Historical School and the successful revival of the Hebrew language to advance a program of modernizing Jewish law for use in a future Jewish state. Factors such as Hindu law’s association with the problematic notion of caste explain why efforts to use religious law as a foundation for modern secular national legal life were more pronounced among the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine.

The epilogue discusses the post-independence history of legal nationalism in India and Israel. It traces its decline and recent resurgence. In the years following Indian and Israeli independence, leaders such as Nehru and Ben-Gurion sought to preserve the anglicized legal system inherited from the colonial period, and revivalist legal projects failed to materialize. From the late twentieth century onward, however, legal nationalism re-emerged. In India, Hindu nationalist politicians belonging to the BJP have called for “decolonizing” Indian law. In Israel, right-wing politicians from the Likud Party and religious parties have pressed for an expanded role for Jewish law in state law. Both movements reflect global illiberal currents that sometimes depict Western liberalism as opposed to non-Western traditions. The early twentieth-century scholars examined in this book did not treat Western and non-Western law, institutions, and values as inherently incompatible. Their nuanced scholarship emphasized similarities between Hindu and Jewish law and modern liberal and democratic values. The overlooked writings of these legal thinkers of colonial India and Mandatory Palestine remain relevant today.