Isaac Isaacs

Origins and early life

Isaac Alfred Isaacs was born in Melbourne on 6 August 1855, the son of Alfred Isaacs, a Jewish tailor who had emigrated from Mława in Russian Poland, and of Rebecca Abrahams, a Jew born in London; he grew up in the gold-rush towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth, in poverty, and remained a member of the Jewish community all his life — the first Jew to hold the highest offices of the Australian state, as this fiche records, though in his last years he opposed political Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state with a vehemence that divided Australian Jewry, and this fiche says so.

He read law at night while working as a clerk, was called to the bar in 1880 and elected to the Victorian parliament in 1892.

Work and career

He became Attorney-General of Victoria, and sat in the conventions of 1897 and 1898 that drafted the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, of which he was one of the authors.

Recognition

Elected to the first federal parliaments, Attorney-General of the Commonwealth in 1905, he was appointed to the High Court in 1906 and served on it for twenty-five years, a centralist whose judgments — above all the Engineers' case of 1920 — enlarged the powers of the national government over the states, and Chief Justice of Australia from 1930.

Later years

In 1931 the Labor prime minister James Scullin insisted, against the reluctance of King George V, that the King's representative in Australia should for the first time be an Australian, and named him Governor-General; he served until 1936, refusing the salary during the Depression, and died in Melbourne on 11 February 1948, at ninety-two.