Sir Terence Etherton is not just the third Jew in succession to become the head of civil justice for England and Wales. He is the fifth Jewish Master of the Rolls out of the past six if you include Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who is Jewish by descent though not by affiliation.

Sir Terence's Jewishness was obvious from the striking photograph republished by The Times last week to mark his promotion from head of the Chancery Division to the second most senior judge in England and Wales.

The picture showed him at West London Synagogue, where he has served as a warden, in tallit and kipah. He was photographed in 2014 when he married his former civil partner Andrew Stone, making Sir Terence the first Master of the Rolls to have a husband in the 730-year recorded history of the office.

Terry Etherton, as most people call him, is an energetic 64-year-old. After St Paul's and Cambridge he was selected for the British international fencing team and qualified for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. But, like many others, he boycotted the games in protest against the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

Judges of his seniority must find time to hear appeals while coping with a huge burden of administration. Sitting in court will be the easy bit: he can choose his cases and the judges he sits with. But the particular challenge he faces is to contain and, ideally, reduce the backlog of appeals. To do that, he wants to raise the appeal threshold slightly.

In his in-tray when he takes over in October will be a major report on the civil courts of England and Wales, commissioned by the current Master of the Rolls, Lord Dyson. This is expected to recommend major restructuring and the creation of an online court to allow "civil disputes of modest value and complexity to be justly resolved without the incurring of the disproportionate cost of legal representation".

Delivering the Gray's Inn Reading in 2014, Sir Terence said the law had moved a huge distance in barely half a century but that did not necessarily mean "the unqualified triumph of secularism over religion".

But he dismissed a suggestion by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey that a specialist panel of judges with "proven sensitivity and understanding of religious issues" should be designated to hear cases engaging religious rights.

Joshua Rozenberg is an acclaimed legal journalist and presenter of the BBC's 'Law in Action' programme