From Immigration To Integration
The Canadian Jewish Experience:
A Millennium Edition
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From Immigration To IntegrationThe Canadian Jewish Experience:
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Richard Menkis
Talk to students in English Canada today, and you are sure to find out from any number of them that Canada is characterized by a tolerant multiculturalism, and that Canada is not the assimilatory melting pot of the United States, but a mosaic where self-definitions are legitimized and celebrated. But multiculturalism as an official policy, and as a term expressing a pluralism that respects the differences of minorities, is of relatively recent vintage in Canadian history. In 1971 Pierre Elliott Trudeau declared multiculturalism a federal policy, reflecting the political will of the federal government to find a way to appease the English and French “facts” as well as the other ethnic groups wishing to assert their identities and protect their rights individually and collectively. In 1987 the government passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, to enshrine these principles in law.1
For some, Canadian multiculturalism represents a wondrous feat of alchemy, transforming the dross of prejudice and racial and ethno-religious strife into the gold of a healthy pluralism. For others, multiculturalism is a fool’s gold, a glittering superficiality that promotes divisiveness, threatens individual rights, and is sure to have disastrous consequences for the state and its citizens. Others dismiss it as a new form of perpetuating privilege by glossing over deep-seated inequalities in Canadian society.2
This argument over multiculturalism, its meaning and desirability, is only the most recent debate over how Canada should manage the problem of diversity.3 Since the beginnings of European settlement in the region that would become Canada, the French (mostly Catholic) and Anglo-Celts (mostly Protestant) - themselves extensions of the diasporas of their respective empires4 - struggled with each other and with other ethnic groups to determine how the people of Canada should share political, cultural, and economic power. This essay examines how the Jews were affected by this process, and participated in it, from the earliest days of European settlement to the period just after World War II.5
New France was created with the ideal of being a French and Catholic enclave in North America in order to entrench French colonial aims in the region. In 1627, the French Crown ceded the colony to a semi-private interest, the Company of Hundred Associates. In exchange for a host of economic benefits, the Company was expected to encourage settlement and to establish an administrative structure for the region. Only Catholics, however, were to enter. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the French Crown took control of the colony from the Company. However, the official aim of restricting immigration to Catholics persisted, and was reinforced by various intolerant policies implemented in France and abroad in 1685.
From the unusual case of Esther Brandeau, we can see the impact of these policies. In 1738 this young Jewish woman from the Sephardic community of St. Esprit, the Jewish district of Bayonne, arrived in Quebec, dressed as a boy, on the ship, the St. Michel. Once apprehended, she was given the “choice” of either converting to Catholicism or being returned to France. After some wavering in her answer - or perhaps manipulation of the situation? - the royal representative in New France sent her back, in exasperation: “Her conduct is so fickle, that at different times she has been as much receptive as hostile to the instructions that zealous ecclesiastics have given her; I have no alternative but to send her away.”7
Some conversos, descendants of Iberian Jews who had converted to Christianity in Spain or Portugal, did settle in the French colonies north of the Thirteen Colonies, such as Louisbourg.8 We also know of Protestants in New France, mostly traders who lived in the colony for a short time, but never established families there because their legal status was tenuous. In short, the colony’s framework was Catholic, and professing Jews did not find their way there.9
The English also looked to expand into the New World, and to extend their commercial and political empire. Unlike the French, England saw Jews as useful settlers. In 1740 Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which openly invited Jews and dissenting Protestants to go to the colonies. The act extended to them the possibility of naturalization after seven years, and even - if interpreted liberally - the possibility of taking office.10
With the English presence, the Jewish settlements in Canada grew modestly. The first congregation was incorporated in 1768, and Jews assumed a remarkable range of political offices, benefitting from a liberal reading of the Plantation Act. Occasionally, however, the Jews in the English colonies were exposed to a less benevolent interpretation of their status. At the end of the eighteenth century in Upper Canada, the chief justice of Upper Canada stated quite simply - and quite to the contrary of the usual practice - that Jews could not own land. The judge was possibly drawing on a minority English position that saw the restrictive legal status of the Jews in the Middle Ages as still in force. Whatever the reasoning, the judgment was essentially reversed within the decade.
More significantly, some politicians in the early nineteenth century successfully questioned the political status of the Jew when the well-heeled Ezekiel Hart was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada. The French looked to increase the power of the elected assembly by decreasing the powers of non-elected colonial officials, and wanted to establish a firm foothold for themselves in the assembly. As such, they resented the election of Hart as a pro-British member and excluded him on the grounds that he took an illegal oath, one that he modified to make it palatable to him as a Jew. The governor dissolved the assembly and called for another election. Once again Hart won, but was again refused the right to sit, this time because he took the Christian oath and was not Christian. In short, his problem was that he was Jewish and viewed as English. Although a political battle between English and French, the occasion also reveals that the opponents of Hart had an arsenal of anti-Jewish arguments. The leader of the Parti canadien, Pierre Bédard, drew on the language of French opponents of emancipation. Bédard claimed that the Jews were not deserving of full political rights, because they could not be citizens when they are waiting for their messiah to take them away. Other attacks in Le Canadien were simply scurrilous.
A little over two decades later, leading French-Canadian politicians took a diametrically opposed position. By the 1820s, French-Canadian professionals and the bourgeoisie sought greater and greater self-expression in the assembly, while British officials became more and more autocratic and dismissive of those efforts, which in turn led to an increasingly firm republicanism among those who identified themselves as patriotes. Their republicanism expressed itself in the desire to give more power to the assembly, and, to an extent, wrest power away from the clergy, whether in the realm of controlling the civil lists that were the basis for taxation, or in matters of education. After the 1830 uprisings in France, patriotes identified themselves with those who rose up to defend the ideals of the French Revolution.
During this time, when patriotes and others were attempting to redefine social, political, and religious relations in Lower Canada, the matter of Jewish civil and political disabilities came up once again. In 1828, the Jews of Lower Canada petitioned and received the right to maintain their own vital statistics and the right to hold property for communal purposes. The French-Canadian majority had no problem with the matter, and pressed for it as they had for dissenting Protestants in the years before.11 Resistance came, however, from the British authorities, and the matter was proclaimed as law only in January, 1831.
Even more significantly, the Jews pressed for full political rights. They hoped to reverse the ignominy of the Hart Affair, not to mention more recent obstacles to their participation in political life. Under the guidance of the patriotes, including Louis-Joseph Papineau and Denis-Benjamin Viger, as well as English Canadians who were discontented with the political landscape, the legislature passed a bill promising that Jews would suffer no political disabilities in Lower Canada. The bill was passed in 1831, and was given royal assent in 1832 as “an Act to declare persons professing the Jewish Religion entitled to all the rights and privileges of other subjects of His Majesty in this Province.” Although it may appear to have done little more than legitimize the liberal interpretation of the Plantation Act of 1740, it was a legal reassurance that was evidently needed and appreciated by Jews. Just to be absolutely certain, after several Jews were concerned that they still might not be protected, a legislative committee headed by another French Canadian, René Kimber, confirmed the rights of the Jews. The legal protections reiterated in the 1832 Act would never again be seriously challenged.
What did change, however, was the relationship between church and state in Quebec after the failed rebellions of 1837 and 1838. Various officials in the Roman Catholic Church, who despised the republican ideals of the patriotes and had been strong supporters of the Crown, impressed the British with their utility in subduing the population and the sincerity of their support. The Crown restored the Church to a position of authority that it had not held for almost half a century. Moreover, the Church appealed to more and more of the inhabitants of French Canada, by opposing some of the harsher measures of the British government, and because of the increasingly popular mass devotions that swept through Quebec in the 1840s.
As a result of this revival, the Church had an increasingly powerful voice in Quebec society. Many in the hierarchy felt justified in their own reactions to the patriotes by what they were now hearing from the Continent. Increasingly, voices within the Church, especially during the papacy of Pius IX (1846-78), called for an ultramontane outlook - a renewed adherence to Rome and the Pope - both for direction towards centralized ecclesiastical practices, and in reaction to nineteenth-century liberalism. In Quebec, clerics who saw this as the correct direction for Quebec engaged in a sustained attack on liberalism, most notably in the attack against a central institution of French-Canadian liberalism, the Institut canadien, and the left-wing Rouge party.
These attacks were the first rumbles of a new line of attack on the Jews. Various writers drew attention to the Jews, who were indeed the beneficiaries of liberalism in the extension of political and civil rights to them. In one tirade against the Rouges, an author points out that “le Juif, Crémieux” (a strong advocate of a liberal France and of the removal of all disabilities of French Jews) was among those guilty of plundering France. Another Quebec publication, in even more extreme language, called the Jews the allies of infidels, sectarians, and Satan in the way that they promoted so-called progress. These were minor voices in the 1860s, but the comments were harbingers of a later time, when these arguments took on greater vigour and harshness.
Many English Canadians were also more extreme in their promotion of exclusivist positions. After 1837, Protestant denominations became more aggressive in their missionary activities in both French Canada and among the Native people. Moreover, anti-Catholicism took increasing hold in the 1840s and 1850s, as Irish Protestants looked with disdain on Irish Catholics, and the English of Upper Canada feared the impact of the French when they were unified with Lower Canada in 1841.
Despite this growth of sectarian conflict and antiliberalism, Jews in the middle of the nineteenth century suffered from only limited social and economic discrimination. Some agents of the credit-rating agency R.G. Dun did reveal certain anti-Jewish working assumptions (“He is a Jew of the regular type” meant that he was a shady businessman), and occasionally indicated that Jews were suffering financially because of prejudice towards them.12 But these assumptions were often dispelled when faced with actual Jewish behaviour. In 1878, a fire swept through Nanaimo, British Columbia. Without a proper fire department, somebody called out for wet blankets to help slow down the blaze; as the local newspaper later reported on the reaction of the community to two of its citizens, Alex Mayer and John Hirst: “There were loud comments on the generous Jew and the skinflint Englishman.”13
The uneasy balance between Catholics and Protestants and between the French and the English did have an impact. Mutual suspicions, and attempts to protect identities, entered into the framework of Confederation. Section 93 of the British North America (BNA) Act (1867) designated provincial governments as responsible for the education of its inhabitants, but required that all denominational school systems be sustained by public funds. The federal government had the obligation to coerce compliance.14 The BNA Act did not offer, however, any assurances for those groups whose schools were not officially recognized. As a result, this brokered arrangement only offered privileges to Catholics and Protestants, and offered little sense of participation to non-Christians, including Jews. While it may have had little impact on the small Jewish communities of the time, it did enshrine a differential treatment that would create real hardships and hostility, as we shall soon see in Quebec.
Although few Jews were present in Canada at the time of Confederation, what happened in this period is crucial in understanding the subsequent history of the Jews: it established the basic framework. Jews had achieved civil and political rights. They could vote, they had access to the courts, and they had the right to hold office. Henry Nathan, a Jew from British Columbia, was elected to sit in the House of Commons in 1870. Historians of Canadian antisemitism have often pointed out that Jews knew it was worse elsewhere.
In the wake of Confederation, and with the need to populate Canada, various groups articulated visions of Canada that emphasized the dangers of rampant diversity. These discussions became especially acute when observers noted how many more inhabitants would be needed to till the soil, work in the mines, harvest lumber, or engage in the back-breaking creation of roads and railroads. There was a need for immigrants, but what kind?15 What should Canada do with this diversity? In the last decades of the nineteenth century and beyond, new ideologies and circumstances swirled together as Canadians determined the future of their young country.
The demographic character of Canada changed dramatically between 1881 and 1911. During that time, the Canadian Jewish population grew from about 2,000 to almost 75,000.16 About three-quarters of the Jews were concentrated in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. In those same thirty years, Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian immigrants (mostly Sikhs) came to the west coast; Ukrainians and Russians (including Mennonites) settled in large numbers on the Prairies; and Italians fleeing economic hardship settled in Ontario and Quebec. The French and British “charter” groups were by far the majority; however, in addition to feeling increasingly hostile towards each other, they looked with concern, confusion and - more often than not - disdain, at the changes taking place. In overlapping ways, religious and racialized language provided the framework for managing these changes.
A consideration of attitudes towards Jews in French Canada during this period requires some evaluation of the place of Catholicism in Quebec. From the time of Confederation until the end of World War II, the Catholic hierarchy in Quebec was a major player in defining the cultural environment and exercised great influence in all matters relating to education in the province. Clerics sought to influence public policy in other ways, but did not have unrestricted access to the federal or provincial political arena. Furthermore, the Catholic Church was hardly monolithic. During his tenure as archbishop of Quebec between 1870 and 1891, for example, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau was in a running battle with ultramontanists over the definition of the relationship between church and state, both in Quebec and outside.
But clerical and nationalist advocates of ultramontanism were a vigorous and vocal lot. They sought to “protect” the Catholic Church in general, and the French Canadians in particular, from the “dangers” of liberalism and secularization. In what would become an important motif, various clerics and nationalists (not mutually exclusive categories, of course) drew on the myth that the antagonist to Catholic aspirations was the powerful Judeo-Masonic conspiracy that controlled the press and was behind most of the destructive nineteenth century “isms”: liberalism, radicalism, secular nationalism.17 This was not, as some seem to have argued,18 traditional anti-Judaism, any more than ultramontanism was traditional Catholicism. Both were inventions of the time. The myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy expressed in Catholic terminology a deep-seated hostility towards a group that was imagined to have had dangerous powers in the past and to still have them in the present, both abroad and at home.
Both theories could be used in nationalist discourse to articulate the nationalists’ reactions to what they saw around them and their visions for the future. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jean-Paul Tardivel interpreted the recent history of Canada as a progression of insults against the French people and their church, using as evidence the Riel hanging and the Manitoba school question (1890-97). In his futuristic novel, written in 1895 and set in 1945, he imagined a Divinely-guided separation from Canada and faith-infused patriots withstanding the secret societies from Europe and Freemasons using liberalism to subvert the French people. His imagined Quebec in the novel was victorious, separate, and Catholic. It seems he wanted his real Quebec to be that way as well: during the 1890s, he warned Quebeckers “to be on guard against the Jews, to prevent them from establishing themselves here…. The Jews are a curse, a curse from God.”19
With the increase in Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century, nationalist thinkers assaulted the demographic change as another indication that French-Catholic Quebec was under siege. At one meeting of the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française (ACJCF), a youth group established in 1903 and at the cutting-edge of a socially active nationalism, a speaker declared that the Jews were inassimilable, and that French Canadians should “buy nothing from Jews, for some day soon the money you place in their hands will be used to make the bombs that shatter the foundations of our nationhood.”20
By 1910, the imagined relationship between Jews and Freemasons held enough potency to become a social and ideological drama on the streets of Montreal. In that year Ernesto Nathan was elected mayor of Rome. When he was accused of insulting the Pope, protest rallies were held in both Montreal and Quebec. In addition to fulminating against the anti-pope Nathan, participants at the Montreal rally shouted slogans denouncing the Jews, Freemasons, and emancipation. The Yiddish press reported that after a similar rally in Quebec, “The local Jews are very frightened and have remained in their homes, fearing to go out lest they be attacked.”21 The violence complemented a rhetoric that told the Jews to stay in their place. An even more dramatic association of the Jew with the enemy occurred in 1910 when J. Edouard Plamondon, a notary who was also the editor of the Libre Parole, spoke to a rally of the ACJCF in Quebec City. He accused the Jews of vicious crimes, including ritual murder. The speech stirred the audience to violence. Members of the audience proceeded to break the windows of some local Jewish homes and harass an old Jew on the street. A number of the participants committed themselves to boycotting Jewish merchants.22
As a result of these actions, a Quebec Jewish merchant, Benjamin Ortenberg, took Plamondon to court for libel, with the backing of other Jews in Montreal. He claimed that the Jews had suffered losses in the aftermath of Plamondon’s speech, but in reality challenged Plamondon’s antisemitism. In that 1913 trial, the witnesses for the defence largely defended the views of Plamondon on matters such as ritual murder, repeating by and large the standard antisemitic canards of the influential and antisemitic French journalist Edouard Drumont and his school,23 both in France and in Quebec. The Jewish community lost the case, on the grounds that Plamondon did not libel any one individual; the decision was reversed on appeal. Although Jews must have found eerie the parallels with the contemporary Beilis trial in Russia, Canadian Jews would have known, if only because they had access to the courts, how much the situation was different.
By the time of World War I, conservative nationalists in Quebec had moved from seeing Jews and Judaism as a distant enemy, to articulating hostility against local Jews, ostensibly in defence of the Quebec nation. Without denying the intensity of the Catholic and anti-liberal ideology, the shift also reveals insecurities and concerns that French Canadians felt with the rise in immigration, especially Jewish immigration. The anti-Jewish animus, coupled with hostility towards a Canadian immigration policy that actively favoured Anglo-Saxon settlers, led to intensified hostility in the early twentieth century.
Anglo-Protestants developed a variety of strategies for handling diversity. In the late nineteenth century various Protestant groups agitated for Canada as “His Dominion,” a land where the principles of Protestantism would inform and, in their view, enrich the country. They held especially high hopes for the Canadian West: if they could get this region settled with the “right” kind of immigrant, they perceived the possibility of overwhelming French and Catholic Canada.24
But the “right” kind of immigrants did not always come. In response, Protestants developed a strategy for Canadianization that, ultimately, was contingent on conversion. Missions to non-Protestants at home became commonplace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The missionaries hoped to save more than an individual soul: imbued with the ideals of the Social Gospel, they believed that they were working to save the soul of the country. Churches in the West set up missions to the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians and other immigrant groups. In the Prairies, a host of missions were set up to work among the Ukrainians. In central Canada, the Jews attracted much of the attention. While these missions offered medical or material help to impoverished Jews, missionaries also sought to convince Jews that they would be better Canadians if they converted. Few Jews accepted the invitation, and some used brute force to resist the encroachment of missionaries into Jewish districts. In some ways, missionaries de-emphasized racial characteristics, believing more in the transformative effects of conversion. Nevertheless, the missions were yet another agent for circulating exclusivist views of the place of the Jew in Canadian society and more than one scholar has seen missionary hostility to minorities as a building block of xenophobic, “nativist” attitudes.25
Protestants also expressed their wish to transform Canada by trying to get Canadians to spend their Sabbath away from the temptations of everyday life. In 1906 Sir Wilfrid Laurier acceded to the vigorous lobbying of the Protestant Dominion Lord’s Day Alliance, and introduced the Lord’s Day Act, which became law in 1907. Jewish attempts to secure an exemption for the hardships this would entail (two days without business, both the Jewish Sabbath and the “Lord’s Day”) were in vain. One of the leaders of the Alliance even complained that, “The trouble with Jews everywhere [is that] the Jew is an anachronism in modern society.”26 Despite vigorous arguments, Jews were not able to secure an exemption. Although a far cry from the successful Protestant lobbying of the government to outlaw the potlatch of the First Nations of the West Coast, an exclusivist vision of Canada is evident in both lobbying efforts. The implementation of these laws shows how this vision was incorporated into the state.
The most glaring - and heated - example of the incomplete status of the Jews in Canadian society stemmed from the official recognition of denominational school systems in the British North America Act. In Manitoba, the provincial government of Thomas Greenway considered the province to be British and Protestant. In 1890 it replaced the dual-confessional system with a single, ostensibly nonsectarian, system. The move set off heated exchanges between English Protestants and French Catholics, especially in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. It took much negotiation, the fall of one federal government, and Wilfrid Laurier’s “sunny ways” to arrive at a compromise in 1896.
In this highly charged atmosphere, the question of Jewish participation in the educational system of Quebec reared its head.27 In 1894 Jews were incorporated into the Protestant school system, and some provision was made for religious differences. In the early twentieth century, however, the limits to the deal became evident. In 1901, ten-year-old Jacob Pinsler should have received a scholarship as an outstanding student. The Protestant commissioners, however, turned him down. They pointed out that his father did not pay taxes to the Protestant system, arguing that Jews were there by the Protestants’ good graces, not by right, and that the commissioners could impose whatever conditions they wanted. The Jewish community did not let the matter rest, and took the commission to court. In 1903, the judge ruled that the schools were confessional, Jews did not have any recourse under the law, but the law should be changed. The province did indeed pass a law that year saying that Jewish property owners would pay into the Protestant system, that “all Jewish children would be accepted into the system, and that Jewish students shall be treated as Protestants for all school purposes.”
The commission articulated this view, in part, to extract more money from the provincial government for taking in Jewish students, who were filling more and more classroom seats as Jews from eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers. But the subsequent history of relations with the Protestant commission also makes it clear that Protestants were engaged in a struggle to maintain the Protestant character of the schools. When Jews sought full political participation in the commission, the commissioners saw this as a threat and, in no uncertain terms, told the Jews they were only guests in a system that must remain Protestant. Allowing Jewish commissioners would lead to non-Christians teaching Protestant children, protested a leading commissioner, “[and] it scarcely seems necessary to characterize such an innovation as undesirable.”28 And indeed, Jewish teachers found it nearly impossible to get a job at a Protestant school, at a time when Jewish students constituted one-third of the student body.
In this period, race increasingly became a legitimate category by which to extend or deny privilege to other Canadians, in a hierarchical ordering that also affected Jews. Although the exact meanings and evolution of the term “race” in Canada have yet to find a historian,29 it is certainly accurate that “the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a surprising, sticky constancy in outcomes generated by racial distinction.”30
Much of the racialized language of late-nineteenth-century Europe focused on the Jews.31 Antisemitism was a term that was specifically coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to legitimize a view that the Jews must be opposed politically because, as a race, they posed serious challenges to other races; the Germans themselves were “being skinned alive” by the Jews.32 His view was but a German manifestation of the increasingly hostile view of the Jews. It was shared by Edouard Drumont, who in his La France juive (1886) insisted that France was being victimized and destroyed by Jews. It was also the central theme of one of the most scurrilous and influential antisemitic texts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which presented the Jews as being in a relentless struggle for world domination. In all cases, the authors saw the results as disastrous because the Jews were said to be driven by material and immoral goals.
Few influential Anglo-Canadians were quite this explicit; however, the towering figure of Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was. Smith fiercely believed that the Jews were persecuted because they deserved it, that Jews exercised a monopolistic control over the media, and, above all, that they needed to be watched because they constituted a danger to the nation, mankind, and the “general progress of civilization.”33 Fuelled by a hatred of Disraeli, and receiving a constant stream of publications from England and the Continent that kept him au courant with the latest developments in antisemitic thought, Smith articulated his views for almost thirty years (1878-1906) in high-profile publications and when holding court in Toronto. The only hope for change, in Smith’s view, would be if Jews moved to Palestine, or ceased to exhibit the characteristics of self-centered tribalism, gave up their belief in their chosenness, stopped controlling the press, and stopped engaging in barbaric practices like circumcision. Mackenzie King recalled some years later that Smith saw the Jews as “the poison in the veins of community [and] that in a large percentage of the race there are tendencies and trends which are dangerous indeed.”34 The litany of prejudices suggests that Smith did not believe that the Jews could change, and that he clung to a racial view that saw Jews as the intractable enemy of Anglo-Saxon destiny, as they had been the foe of the French, the German, and the Russian.
Although few were as explicit as Smith, the working assumptions of racial thinking and Anglo-Saxon superiority were hardly unique to him, as changes in immigration policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicated. In 1885, after the Chinese had completed their arduous labours on the railroad, and in response to British Columbia’s repeated requests for restrictions on Chinese immigration, the federal government passed its Act to Restrict and Regulate Chinese Immigration, which consisted largely of an onerous fifty-dollar head tax only on the Chinese. In the first decade of the twentieth century, again under pressure from British Columbia, the head tax was raised. Measures were also introduced against Sikhs, who were prevented from arriving by the “continuous journey” rule. The Japanese were excluded by a “gentleman’s” agreement between Japan and Canada.
At this time, though, the need to settle the land and industrial pressures pushed the government to keep open its borders to Europeans. In 1897, Goldwin Smith wondered whether the racial categories of exclusion did not need to be extended: “What is the use of excluding the Chinaman when we freely admit the Russian Jew?”35 He would have appreciated the government initiatives of the interwar period.
The “Great War” of 1914-18 created serious problems for Canada. Quebeckers smarted from the imposition of conscription. English Canadians looked with disdain at the French Canadians, whom they believed shirked their responsibility by not supporting Canada and Great Britain and even rioting during wartime to protest conscription. Members of minority groups, who fought cheek-by-jowl with Anglo-Saxon Protestants and became comrades on the field, hoped that they would be treated with similar enthusiasm when they returned home. They were not.36 And if these tensions were not enough, after the war Canada was hit, and hit hard, by a “red” scare. In this atmosphere, right-wing, exclusivist outlooks intensified in the interwar period. During the Depression both rhetoric and practices of hostility reached proportions that shocked the Canadian Jewish community as it had never been shocked before or since.
Since many of the discussions of antisemitism in Quebec are so intense, it is necessary to provide some context. For most of this period, the Liberal party was in power and Louis Alexandre Taschereau was the premier (1920-36). The premier attempted to steer a course between the Scylla of an Anglo-dominated federalism, and the Charybdis of a French-Canadian nationalism that increasingly rejected the foundations of the Confederation. The passage was made even more treacherous because the most influential of the nationalist opponents loathed Taschereau and the society that he created, and did not hesitate to let him know their displeasure. In the 1920s, the Action française was the most powerful voice from the nationalist camp.37 With Lionel Groulx in their midst and serving as editor, they articulated a fundamentally different view of Quebec.
One of Taschereau’s goals for Quebec was to further its growth by actively trying to bring in American capital, and thereby encouraging industry. The Action française disagreed vehemently. They envisioned an economy which would balance agriculture and industry. Besides the possibility that industry would lead to more secular unions, Groulx and the others saw that industry would only serve to encourage the growth of cities. Cities, with their evil pleasures, represented for them one of the greatest threats to the moral development of the French Canadian. The Action française did not limit its animosity to Taschereau. In a 1920s spin on the deep seated suspicion of the Jew and Jewish power in society and the media, the Action française charged Jews with partnering with Americans to introduce materialistic values into Quebec. American Jewish filmmakers were identified as the major purveyors of immorality (divorce, free love, birth control, socialism, etc.), because they were only interested in money. In the pages of the paper, there was no difference drawn between the Jewish owner of a corner store and the Hollywood producer.
Obviously, some of the writers of the Action française were fearful of the Jewish urban presence. This fear was fed by the myth of pernicious Jewish power, a staple of the ultramontane right. Groulx was certainly exposed to it early on. In the early twentieth century, while he was in Europe, Groulx wrote to his family members that he was convinced that everything possible should be done to keep the Jews out of Quebec, because he had seen what the Jews and the Freemasons were capable of doing, and was glad that there were some parliamentarians who seemed to have the moral rigour to do so, notably Henri Bourassa.38 In the 1920s, he had one colleague who believed that something needed to be done about the presence of the Jews in the city. Another actually took on the task in true Drumont fashion, trying to unmask Jews who were hiding behind good French-Canadian names.39
Although in the moral city of the Action française the Jew would be seriously restrained, Taschereau sought to make the Jews in Montreal feel that they deserved more of a foothold. In 1924, as one plank in his reformist platform, the premier took on the vexing problem of Jewish involvement in the Protestant school system. Judging from the resulting furor in the press, Taschereau had touched a nerve. A right-wing press with a strong antisemitic outlook saw the move to revamp the confessional system as an example of Jews seeking to undermine Christianity. It only served to reinforce and exaggerate the predisposition to see Jewish plots everywhere. In 1926, Abbé Huot, who had impeccable antisemitic credentials as author of a 1914 tract on ritual murder, insisted that Jews should not get what French Canadians could not get in Manitoba.
In 1930, the provincial government introduced a measure creating a Jewish board that would provide for Jewish participation on the highest decision-making educational body in Quebec, the Quebec Council of Public Instruction. Writers who saw the destruction of French-Canadian society as a result of the machinations of the Jew reiterated their conspiratorial views. Even more significantly, the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Quebec made their objections known. These arguments varied in tone: some shared with the premier the view that it was totally unjust to expect Jews to “send their children to schools of which they cannot approve,”40 but did not wish to see any power sharing on the council. Others were far less sympathetic: They would brook no Jewish infringement on the source of their power. They saw this as a dangerous step towards a society constructed along secular, rather than religious lines.
As a result of this pressure, and because the uptown Jews in control did not push the issue, Taschereau backed off. He repealed the old act. Before he submitted a compromise, he had the leaders of the Church in Quebec examine and approve it. In the resulting bill, Jews were sent back into the Protestant system, and the Jewish board had no power beyond the right to negotiate a deal with the Protestant board. In short, no status on the Quebec Council of Public Instruction and no Jewish school system.
The Catholic character of certain aspects of Quebec society were well-known, and so Jews did not venture into those sectors. Very few Jews registered at the University of Montreal - in 1930-31 the total number was sixty-five, with a fair proportion of these Jews probably in pharmacy, law and, to a lesser extent, medicine - but in the 1930s the very presence of even a few Jews was enough to lead to some very loud complaints that Jews were there at all. In 1932 Samuel Gobeil, the member of parliament from Compton, attacked the University of Montreal both in the House of Commons and in his riding for its openness to Jews, and a number of students agreed that Jews should be totally excluded from the university, although that was not the unanimous opinion of the administration.41 In 1934, the exclusionary mentality once again found expression when French-Canadian interns at the Notre-Dame Hospital, which was affiliated with the University of Montreal’s medical school, went on strike because a Jew named Samuel Rabinovitch had been appointed as an intern. The action spread to four other Catholic hospitals in Montreal, so that seventy-five interns were on strike, and the hospitals could not function. The matter only subsided when Rabinovitch resigned from his position and left the hospital.42
Antisemitism was on the rise. Adrien Arcand, who had been asked by a highly placed member of the hierarchy to help marshal the forces against the school bill, was impressed by the passion that the Jewish issue raised. Antisemitism developed into a lifelong obsession. He became one of the leaders of Nazism in Canada, accepting racial theory, adopting the swastika (albeit with a beaver and maple leaves), and purveying hate literature until his internment during the war. He revelled in his racism and fascism.
Arcand’s fulminations infuriated and frightened Jews. But he was, by and large, a marginal and marginalized figure. Among the most vexing and delicate questions dividing anglophone scholars from their Quebec counterparts is the issue of fascism in the more “mainstream” groups, such as the later incarnations of the Action française. Unfortunately this issue, especially as it centres on Lionel Groulx, has led to vicious discussions and responses; exactly what he wrote and when requires more sustained research.43 It is clear, however, that the actors in the French-Canadian nationalist right inspired rallies that were intensely antisemitic: among the most notorious of these were the meetings of Jeune-Canada. In 1933 the leader of this group, André Laurendeau, organized a meeting to rebuke French-Canadian politicians who showed sympathy for the Jewish plight in Germany. The language was explicitly racist, complaining of Jewish aspirations for world domination and warning that the “Jewish element in Canada represented a power stronger than the voice of blood.”44
The rhetoric in newspapers and speeches continued throughout the thirties. What became particularly frightening was the level of violence. Gerald Tulchinsky has written about repeated acts of violence against Jews, as well as vandalism against synagogues, which took place with little if any assistance or protection from the police. In the 1940s, Quebec City obstructed the building of a synagogue and, on the evening of the dedication, the building was set ablaze. With these events, the rights of the Jews of Quebec were seriously put to the test, not just in discourse, but on the street.
Jews in the rest of Canada also experienced antisemitism in the years between the wars, with the tone and intensity of animosity rising from the twenties into the Depression. The ways in which the antisemitism was expressed in English Canada differed, however, from its expression in Quebec. In French Canada, as we have seen, Jews experienced explicit hostility from the nationalists, who excluded the Jews from their imagined ideal city, and from the Catholic Church, when the Jews were construed as challenging delicate areas of clerical interest, such as schooling. In English Canada, the prejudices were far less explicit, because the anglo majority created a hierarchy that quietly established the underpinnings of various nation-building policies such as immigration, as well as economic, social, and cultural life.
Perhaps the most obvious touchstone of Canadian racial thinking comes through in the immigration regulations enacted in the 1920s. As Harold Troper shows elsewhere in this volume, the Canadian government moved from a policy of allowing immigration, with exceptions, to an explicitly restrictive position, where the only non-sponsored groups that could immigrate without obstacle were agriculturalists and British and American citizens. Otherwise, groups were characterized as to whether they belonged to “races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada.” In order of preference, the policy was designed to accept, albeit reluctantly, northern and western Europeans, then central and eastern Europeans and, finally, southern Europeans and Jews. Jews were not categorized according to the country of their citizenship - they were Jews whether they came from Poland or Italy - and they were placed in the Special Permit Group, with the greatest restrictions of all Europeans. Immigration policy was framed to populate the country with agriculturalists and with the right racial groups. In addition to being overwhelmingly urban, Jews were not of the preferred racial origins, and the government never showed flexibility towards the Jews, as is all too well-known.
The sense of superiority of Anglo-Saxons towards Jews manifested itself in numerous economic settings, as Louis Rosenberg noted in his monumental Canada’s Jews. Employment application forms asking for nationality, racial origin, and religious denomination were coded messages. Some employers did not bother with a code and simply warned that the jobs were for “gentiles only,” or “Christians only.”45 In 1933, a student conducting research on antisemitism in Toronto did indeed find that businessmen would refuse to hire Jews for retail positions because they feared customers or other employees would disapprove. Prejudice was especially deep among businessmen: some 70 per cent refused to have dealings with Jewish firms.46 In reviewing the situation in 1939, Rosenberg insisted that hiring practices kept Jewish teachers from being employed in tax-supported schools, and that “Jewish architects, chartered accountants, technical agriculturalists, civil and mechanical engineers met with almost insuperable obstacles in their chosen professions.” Banks and insurance companies rarely took on Jews as employees, and the major players in commerce and transportation only had token Jewish representation.47
Only the foolhardy or brave pursued lines of work that seemed closed. Jews who wished to be professionals gravitated towards medicine, law, dentistry, and pharmacy, at least partly because these were professions where a sole practitioner stood a decent chance of making a living. Even here, though, professionals ran into trouble. Lawyers had trouble getting jobs on graduation: Bora Laskin had trouble getting a job coming out of Harvard in 1937. Maxwell Cohen expected to run into similar problems when he left Harvard, but as he wrote to a friend, he was optimistic: “I recognize that the Jewish problem in Toronto presents a serious obstacle, but personal interviews might do a little to offset the initial disadvantage of name.”48 Oral testimony from Montreal reveals the same: “It was a well-accepted fact that English firms would not hire Jewish students. Some may have been taken on a volunteer basis, however, with the understanding that they would not be kept beyond the articling stage.”49 Because of the disdain of businessmen, especially those in the large corporations, Jews could not expect to attract large corporate contracts. And finally, Jews did not easily rise within the ranks of the hierarchy of the professional organizations. In one glaring example just after World War II, the Quebec Bar held its conference at a lodge that excluded Jews!50
Doctors faced other difficulties. In addition to the university admission restrictions discussed below, Jews were hard pressed to get internships at any of the Toronto hospitals until 1929, when one of the hospitals - the Toronto General - allowed one Jewish intern a year; other hospitals soon followed suit. Highly accomplished practitioners were denied access to hospitals. One hospital administrator admitted, when asked why Maxwell Bochner, a leading ophthalmologist, could not practice at the Hospital for Sick Children, that “every one of the thirty doctors on staff are [sic] opposed to having a Jew appointed.”51 In their policies of exclusion, therefore, English and French Canada shared some regrettable characteristics.
Canadian universities also reproduced and perpetuated the prejudices against Jews in Canadian society. Jewish members of the faculty were, at best, a rarity. In at least three cases at the University of Toronto in the 1910s and 1920s, candidates were not given full consideration for positions because they were Jewish. One case involved a young man with a lisp. His name was Bernstein; he later changed his name to Lewis B. Namier, and was subsequently recognized as one of the greatest historians of this century.52 When Ernest Sirluck indicated to his father in the mid 1930s that he was considering becoming an academic, the concerned parent pointedly asked him to name one Jewish professor either in Manitoba or elsewhere in Canada. The younger Sirluck could not answer, for the very good reason that there were so few.53
Admission practices and professional placements also reflected and perpetuated the discrimination that was gathering strength in Canadian society as a whole. At McGill, the dean of the faculty of arts, Ira Mackay, began a systematic investigation in early 1925 of the Jewish presence in the faculty. Soon after, he attempted in vain to institute a policy of non-admission of Jews from outside Quebec. He then proposed a policy by which Jews were required to achieve substantially higher grades for admission.54 The administration embraced this suggestion, with definite reductions in Jewish admissions to the faculties of law and arts.55 The University of Toronto’s registrar also monitored Jewish enrolments closely in the 1930s. At least one group, Jewish women studying physiotherapy, were prevented from completing a necessary course in clinical work.56 At the dental school in the early 1940s, Jewish students suspected that the dean disguised discriminatory admissions practices with a dexterity test that proved to him that Jews did not have the necessary manual skills.57 The University of Manitoba’s faculty of medicine practiced its own version of bigotry by internal memorandum. Beginning in 1932, one of the factors in making decisions about candidates was whether they belonged to “preferred” or “non-preferred” categories, the latter including women and Jews and other ethnic minorities. As a result, in the period between 1932 and 1944 the percentage of Jewish students dropped from 28 per cent to 9 per cent of the total enrolment.58
Ira Mackay of McGill clearly expressed the hierarchical world view underpinning the policies of discrimination in English-Canadian schools:
The simple obvious truth is that the Jewish people are of no use to us in this country. Almost all of them adopt one of the four following occupations, namely merchandising, money lending, medicine and law, and we have already far too many of our own people engaged in these occupations and professions at present…. [While I have] the highest regard for the better class of Jews, some of whom are our best citizens…. as a race of men their traditions and practices do not fit in with a high civilisation in a very new country.59 [emphasis added]
The distinction between Jews and the “useful” Canadians clearly placed Jews at a lower social level; the cultural concomitant was that high civilization - ostensibly best embodied at the university - and Jewish culture had nothing in common.
This university-based prejudice was replicated in numerous ways in social life. By the 1910s, hotels began excluding Jews as clientele, as did swimming facilities in Toronto.60 In the interwar years, and especially during the 1930s, the restrictions multiplied as Jews were denied entrance to all manner of tennis, golf, and yachting clubs, and would establish their own parallel institutions. Restrictive covenants were also increasingly a fact of life. Jews who wanted to move from the old neighbourhoods were often told that they could not buy in the newer neighbourhoods. Property owners agreed to place restrictions on who could buy their houses. Occasionally, we hear of a minor success story. In 1929, B’nai Brith wanted to buy property for a summer camp in Gimli, Manitoba. Some property owners got together and started a petition that the land was to be “for gentiles only.” B’nai Brith arranged for J. T. Thorson, member of parliament, to appear before the Gimli council and convince the council to allow the camp.61 There were far too few cases such as this.
In this period, there was no Goldwin Smith to raise his prominent voice consistently to lambaste the Jews. But there were plenty of people who did not hesitate to condemn the Jews for all sorts of crimes. In the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike, they were called the consummate revolutionaries and traitors. One Winnipeg police official believed that “rich Jews meeting in West Kildonan were financial supporters of the strikers… [and were] fulfilling a mission for the higher up Bolsheviks.”62 In the 1920s, the Toronto Telegram pointed out that they were not the right kind of Canadians because they did not work the land, and went to the cities. And there was reason to be alarmed: he was convinced that the Jews were “not creeping in. They are coming by leaps and bounds.… They are not the material out of which to shape a people holding the national spirit.… Not on the frontiers among the pioneers of plough and axe are they found, but in the cities where the low standards of life cheapen all about them.”63
As in Quebec, the viciousness of the antisemitism increased during the Depression. Fascist groups appeared in various locations across western Canada, but the most active was in Winnipeg, where William Whittaker established his Nationalist Party, attracting support, inter alia, from the strongly anti-Soviet Mennonites. Whittaker remained unchallenged as fascist leader in the area, giving speeches and using the press to consistently promote antisemitism and fascism.64 In 1933, swastika clubs tried to enforce a “gentiles only” policy on Balmy Beach in Toronto, which almost resulted in fistfights. Later that year, violence did break out: a baseball game in Toronto’s Christie Pits between an all-Jewish team and a team from St. Peter’s Church ended in a riot after a swastika was unfurled in the crowd. Fascist organizations in Canada continued to grow, often aided by German and Italian consuls.
Fascism remained, however, marginal. In Alberta, with the rise of the Social Credit Party, we have the closest flirtation of actual political power with a mythic world view informed by antisemitism.65 For various historical reasons, populist parties from the left to the right popped up regularly in the Prairies. During the Depression, Alberta was hit particularly hard, and Alberta’s farmers suffered from enormous debts. Social Credit provided a framework for understanding the victimization of the farmers - they were the victims of the banks - and with a basic change in monetary policy, the government could destroy the stranglehold of the banks. The founder of the movement, Major C.H. Douglas, tied the strength of the banks to the international Jewish conspiracy, a deus ex machina as important to Douglas as the Judeo-Masonic conspiracies were to the right-wing ultramontanists in Quebec. Nowhere else in the world did Social Credit take hold as it did in Alberta. In 1935, William Aberhart led the Social Credit party of Alberta to power. After his death, Ernest Manning took over the party and the premiership, and was premier until 1971.
Many of the Alberta followers of Douglas’s Social Credit ideas adopted his deeply antisemitic world view. However, both Aberhart and Manning protested that they were not antisemites, and Aberhart seemed quite shocked and conciliatory when the antisemitism was drawn to his attention. In the early part of his career, Manning simply stated that there was no antisemitism, a fact very much belied by the evidence that Canadian Jewish Congress officials could point to, chapter and verse.66 When Social Credit became a national party in 1945, its leader, Solon Low, and especially the member of parliament from Wetaskiwin, Norman Jaques, placed Douglas’s antisemitic outlook front and centre. In 1947, Norman Jaques even read excerpts of the Protocols into Hansard. In Alberta’s Social Credit party, antisemitism was for many a central plank in their political platform, not to mention part of their Weltanschauung.
The 1930s were the bleakest period for Canada’s Jews. Canadian Jews did try to mobilize by revitalizing the Canadian Jewish Congress, while the Joint Public Relations Committee (JPRC) was established in 1939 as a partnership of Congress and B’nai Brith to respond to domestic antisemitism. Jewish politicians worked together with Jewish groups to try to enact anti-hate legislation. They were successful in Manitoba and unsuccessful in 1930s Ontario. In Quebec the proposed legislation led to more friction, more suspicion that the Jew was trying to take too much power, and was defeated. Jews also tried to work with supportive non-Jews to reverse the tide of hatred. There are certainly cases of valiant Protestant ministers like Claris Silcox or T.T. Shields in English Canada, or Catholics like Father Joseph Paré in Quebec, who committed themselves to the fight. But these Christians themselves realized that they were fighting an impossible battle, and that their voices were either being ignored or shouted down.
The 1930s were not just bleak because of the hatred in Canada, but because of the implications of that hatred. Canadian Jews saw Hitler’s step-by-step campaign of terror, and knew a place had to be found for persecuted Jews. When Mackenzie King decided not to budge on the question of immigration, he was being as politically astute as he was morally bankrupt. There was absolutely no political reason to change immigration policy. The racial categorization that placed the Jews on the bottom of the immigration sweepstakes had never been so widely held as in the 1930s.
How much changed in the years after the war? A Gallup poll conducted in late 1946 indicated that the Jews were still considered undesirables, and that Canadians would be more inclined to welcome Germans over Jews. Only the Japanese were less desirable. Nor did notions of exclusivism change all that rapidly; restrictive covenants were still in place to keep Jews out of certain choice locations. In fact, certain new forms of exclusivism seemed to be on the horizon. During the war, Premier George Drew of Ontario decided that religion would improve the moral fibre of the province’s scholars, and he instituted obligatory prayers in public school classrooms.67
But there were harbingers of new attitudes, and new attempts to dismantle the old mythic constructions of the Jews and prejudices. In Quebec, the older, more exclusivist Catholicism was increasingly challenged by a liberal Catholicism of the sort already recognizable in Father Paré. In a clear indication of new times, a Saint-Paul committee explored correct relations with non-Catholics, and in the late 1940s reproached Catholic authors who published antisemitic pamphlets, and guarded against the reappearance of an antisemitic press.68
In Ontario, the legislature began to implement a series of laws that would protect minorities from the disabilities that were all too common in the interwar period. In 1944, the government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, and seven years later a Fair Employment Act.69 In Alberta, Ernest Manning attempted to purge the antisemites and the antisemitism from his party. He may not have obliterated the voices of hostility, but he certainly pushed the matter harder and deeper than ever before.70 Finally, in 1952, immigration laws were changed to eliminate the racial categories that had been the bane of so many groups, including the Jews. This limited reversal of older patterns was not unique to the Jews. In the immediate postwar period, the Canadian government finally repealed the legislation that denied the Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians the vote.
Economics can explain some of these changes. After the war, Canada was booming. Industrialists clamoured for skilled workers, whatever their background. The impact on Jews was profound: Canadian authorities no longer saw the ideal Canada as agricultural, and the city-dwelling Jews no longer stood out. In Alberta, mythic fears of international commercial interests may have been washed away by the oil beginning to flow from Le Duc.
But these changes also came about because some were horrified by what they had seen happen during the war. Few were as passionate as Justice Keiller Mackay of Ontario. In 1945, he had to rule on a restrictive covenant that stated the house was “not to be sold to Jews or persons of objectionable nationality.” In invalidating the covenant, Mackay pointed to the UN Charter that Canada had signed that prevented discrimination on the basis of race or religion. Moreover, Mackay saw it to be his moral duty to create a cohesive society of minorities, which meant ensuring equality.71 This decision had a profound effect on both Jews and other minorities, and not just in Canada. It certainly marked a striking change in attitude.
So did Gwethalyn Graham’s 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven.72 With painstaking detail, Graham unpacked for all to see the hidden bigotry of the Anglo-Protestant elite in Montreal. She had already complained about antisemitism and restrictions on immigration before the war, but then she was a voice in the wilderness. Earth and High Heaven became a best-seller, won a Governor General’s award and even received a lucrative movie offer. But Graham had included in the story a plotline that resolves mutual hostility by mutual love, intimacy, and marriage. Canadian Jews never had to deal with that much love in a text before, and it augured different challenges for different times.