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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Michael Brown
Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, established to foster their renaissance in the ancient Jewish homeland. As such, it was oriented towards the land of Israel and grounded in the theological, liturgical, and historical centrality of that land to Judaism. But if both the future and the past of Zionism were unified from the start, its present never has been. Early on, Zionists recognized that the achievement of their aims within Israel required the nurturing and strengthening of Jewish life outside the country, a process that became known as gegenwartsarbeit, work in and for the present. Each Jewish community would have to interpret Zionism for itself and seek realization of the ultimate goal in its own ways. Inevitably, Zionism would play out differently in each country.
As might be expected, almost from its inception, Canadian Zionism exhibited unique features that distinguished it from American and British Zionism and from the movement elsewhere. The functions it served for the Jewish community were singular; the ways it was influenced by gentile Canadians were not unique but still unusual. A study of Zionism in Canada, then, leads beyond the movement, towards an understanding of the Canadian Jewish experience and, perhaps, of the country as a whole.
Ironically, Christianity played a major role in setting the scene for Canadian Zionism. From the beginning of the Reformation, the Protestants’ eagerness to return to Christian roots and free themselves of the “distortions of popery” led them back to the Hebrew Bible. Often they saw their personal and communal experiences as having been foreshadowed in those of the ancient Israelites. As was true in other Protestant countries, interest in the language, history, and people of the Holy Land became a prominent feature of life in English Canada. In the nineteenth century, people in all the English-speaking countries often knew the geography of the Holy Land better than that of their own country, as the biblical names they gave to cities and towns indicate. In Ontario, for example, there are two Salems and a Mount Salem, a Jaffa, a Sharon, and a Bethany. There is another Bethany in Manitoba, as well as a Bethel, and an Eden. In Nova Scotia, there are towns named Hebron, Goshen, Jordan Falls, Jordan Bay, and East Jordan, and there is a River Jordan in British Columbia.
Nineteenth-century Canadian authors often turned to the Bible for inspiration, and, of course, the Bible itself was regular avocational reading fare for large numbers of people. The first issue of the Mercantile Journal of Quebec, on September 4, 1816, included an anonymous article entitled, “Jerusalem, Sketch of the Most Ancient City in the World.” Early Canadian school books exhorted youngsters to cherish the Holy Land. The Fourth Book of Lessons for the Use of Schools (1845), for example, described the Holy Land as a place with
a record of events such as have not come to pass in any other land, monuments of belief denied to all other nations, hopes not elsewhere cherished, but which nevertheless are connected with the destiny of the whole human race and stretch forward to the consummation of all terrestrial things.1
In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Heavysege penned ponderous verse dramas on biblical themes, such as Jephthah’s Daughter and Saul, a play in fifteen acts written over twelve years beginning in 1857. He also wrote shorter poems, including “Sonnets: Jezebel,” published in 1867. Montreal clergyman John Douglas Borthwick issued an anthology of poems based on the Bible, The Harp of Canaan, which had, by 1871, gone into a second edition. More scholarly were the works of John William Dawson, the long-time president of McGill University. Dawson lectured all over North America including Harvard University, where he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa commencement oration in 1875, the same year that he published Nature and the Bible.
Holy Land pilgrim literature was one of the most popular literary genres in the years before movies, radio, and television. It served simultaneously as an expression of piety and as a vehicle of escape. Many of these books were written by clergymen. Pilgrim works that circulated widely in English Canada include A Few Months in the East, or, A Glimpse of the Red, the Dead, and the Black Seas (1861) by J. Bell Forsyth; Letters from East Longitudes (1875) by Thomas Stirson Jarvis; Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land (1908) by Henry Van Dyke, a maverick Presbyterian minister and Princeton University literature professor; Under the Grey Olives (1927) by Marian Keith, the pen name of Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, wife of Reverend Donald Campbell MacGregor, a Toronto Presbyterian minister; and The Bethlehem Road (1933) by Reverend Herbert Henry Bingham, minister of Toronto’s fashionable Walmer Road Baptist Church.
One of the oddest Canadian manifestations of Christian enthusiasm for the Holy Land and for Jewish restoration was the British Israel religious sect. Since the advent of Christianity people have searched for the “lost ten tribes of Israel,” those Israelites carried off by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, never again to appear on the stage of history. Most scholars now assume the “lost” tribes were assimilated by the Assyrians. Fundamentalist Christians, however, have had a hard time coming to terms with that notion and believe that the literal fulfilment of biblical prophecies, necessary for the Second Coming of Jesus, depends upon those tribes being found. Many Europeans and North Americans have thought the First Nations to be the lost tribes of Israel. The British (or Anglo) Israelites believed that the Anglo-Saxon peoples were their descendants.
The first person to proclaim widely the connection between ancient Israel and contemporary Britons was the self-styled “nephew of the Almighty,” Richard Brothers. Born in Placentia, Newfoundland in 1757, Brothers served in the British navy and was later incarcerated as a lunatic.2 Regardless of his state of mind, or perhaps because of it, Brothers was believed by many to be among the Anglo-Saxon descendants of the ancient Israelites.3 Brothers himself believed certain prominent Britons to be of Davidic lineage, which would give them messianic credentials in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Among them was Sir Gilbert Elliot, first earl of Minto and the great-grandfather of the fourth earl, who served as governor general of Canada from 1898 to 1904.
One eccentric native of British North America who accepted Brothers’ claims was Henry Wentworth Monk.4 As a child, Monk was sent into “exile” in England for schooling. He felt the separation from family and friends in Canada keenly, comparing it to the Jews’ exile from their homeland. Eventually, Monk was restored to his home; he sought a similar return for Jews, his “fellow Israelites.”5
Monk preached the British Israel doctrine widely in North America and Britain. At a utopian colony on the shores of Lake Erie, he met Laurence Oliphant, one of the earliest British proponents of mass Jewish settlement in Palestine, who was later active in Russian-Jewish relief. Monk corresponded with American proto-Zionists Mordecai Manuel Noah and Warder Cresson about the fate of the Jews, and in 1873, he founded the Palestine Restoration Fund to buy vacant land in the Holy Land for Jewish settlement. Monk foresaw - as would Theodor Herzl somewhat later - a Palestine, peopled and governed by Jews, that would serve the world as a model state.6 In 1855, Monk began to talk of himself as “the third Isaiah” and devoted considerable energy to the establishment of a world organization of nations to ensure peace on earth. That peace, he argued, could only be achieved when justice was done to the Jews. (Almost a century later, the Social Credit premier of Alberta, William Aberhart, expressed a similar conviction.)7
Between 1880 and 1890, the British Israelites directed much of their activity to the Jews. Monk led a British campaign to end war, the starting point of which was to be the elimination of antisemitism. Britain would acquire Palestine for the Jews, and a Bank of Israel would finance resettlement. In the wake of the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s, Monk proposed the establishment of a Jewish National Fund to assist in resettlement, especially in Palestine. The model of biracial harmony that he held up to potential followers was the Dominion of Canada. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant leader of Revisionist Zionism and the ideological ancestor of the Likud Party, would later espouse that notion, as well.8 The Russian pogroms of 1891 spurred Monk to suggest to Queen Victoria that she invite all persecuted Jews to settle in England, an idea supported by the Ottawa Journal and other Canadian papers. Monk’s last manifesto, Stand Up, O Jerusalem, that the Land of Israel may soon become like the Garden of Eden, “The Joy of the Whole Earth,” now that the “Federation of the World” and “Parliament of Man” has at last become an Imperative Necessity, appeared in 1896. Once again, the visionary pleaded for the return of the Jews to their homeland under his own leadership and British tutelage.9 At the turn of the century, it was estimated that there were some two million adherents of British Israel in North America and Great Britain, and the movement seemed to be on the way to becoming part of the mainstream of Protestant Christianity.
As exotic as the British Israelites in the array of Canadian-Christian enthusiasts of the Holy Land who set the scene for Zionism were two apostate Jews. One was Charles Freshman, an erstwhile rabbi who became a Lutheran minister. Freshman declared in his book, The Jews and the Israelites (1870), that he had come to believe in the restoration of the Jews even before their conversion to Christianity.10 The other was Isaac Hellmuth, a Polish Jew who became an Anglican while living in England. In Canada, Hellmuth rose to the position of bishop of Huron, in London, Ontario, where he was instrumental in founding Huron College, now affiliated with the University of Western Ontario.11 It is probably not a coincidence that Judea for the Jews under a Joint Protectorate of the Great Powers of Europe (1876) was written by a priest serving in Hellmuth’s diocese, Reverend Dr. J.W. Beaumont.
Between the 1850s and the 1930s, Canadian interest in the Holy Land and in Jewish restoration was also stoked by mainstream Christians, both evangelicals and liberals. Canadians attended the series of International Prophetic Conferences held in the United States from 1878, at which the restoration of the Jews to Palestine was a regular agenda item.12 Prominent American evangelists, such as Dwight L. Moody, preached in Canada on the subjects of the Holy Land and Jewish restoration, and on the conversion of the Jews.13 A Canadian, Reverend Albert Thompson, served as pastor of the American Church in Jerusalem until he was expelled by the Turks during World War I. When he returned to North America, Thompson went on the lecture circuit to inform fellow Christians about “the Jewish colonies” in the Holy Land, which were “turning the wilderness into a very garden of the Lord” and thus preparing the way for restoration and the Second Coming of Jesus.14 Charles Alexander Brodie Brockwell was an Anglican clergyman who taught Hebrew and Semitic languages at McGill University from 1906 to 1937. He served as a catalyst on campus for interest in the Holy Land and spoke at off-campus Zionist events - sometimes in Hebrew - encouraging both Christians and Jews to study Jewish culture and the Hebrew language.
It was not only Protestant piety that engaged many Canadians’ interest in the Holy Land and Jewish restoration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another factor was the patriotism and loyalty of many Anglo-Canadians for their mother country; Britain had become increasingly involved with Palestine over the years.15 In 1917, Britain issued the proclamation of support for a renascent Jewish homeland in Palestine known as the Balfour Declaration after Arthur Balfour, the foreign minister at the time. In 1922, the League of Nations conferred upon Britain the mandate for Palestine that gave international sanction to the Balfour Declaration.
Here, too, accounts of Holy Land travels played a role. Eöthen, or Traces of Travel by British writer Alexander Kinglake was popular enough in Canada in 1871 to enjoy a separate Canadian edition. Also widely read were the reports of the American writers, Mark Twain and Herman Melville. In 1876 a best-selling English novel with the subject of Jewish restoration, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, was published in separate editions in Montreal and Toronto, as well as in England and the United States, and the New Dominion Monthly excerpted the book at length, calling it “the great novel of the year.”16 A Canadian novelist, Montrealer Mary Ellen Ross, picked up on Eliot’s theme two years later in The Legend of the Holy Stone, which praises Jews as “by far the most remarkable of all the earth’s tribes,” and Jerusalem Jews as people who extend “brotherly welcome” and support to co-religionists despite their own straitened circumstances.17
As might be expected, politicians and other public figures - most of them exemplars of British patriotism in this period - reflected the widespread interest in the Holy Land in English Canada. In the turn-of-the-century years and beyond, they registered support for the new Zionist movement, as did the daily press. In the 1870s, William Henry Draper and John Hawkins Hagerty, both of whom served as chief justice of Ontario, were regular subscribers to the Palestine Exploration Fund, as was Reverend Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist clergyman who was the first president of Victoria College, now part of the University of Toronto, and the long-time chief superintendent of education for the province of Ontario. The bursar of the Exploration Fund in Canada in the 1870s was G. W. Allan, mayor of Toronto for a brief term, chancellor of Trinity College, now also part of the University of Toronto, member of the Senate of Canada, founding member and sometime president of the Royal Canadian Institute, and, for over twenty years, president of the Upper Canada Bible Society.18
When the convention of the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada was held in Toronto in 1906, it was addressed by the mayor of the city, a prominent University of Toronto professor, and a member of the federal parliament. The next year, the convention was held in Ottawa. Two government ministers graced the programme, assuring the delegates that “Zionism had the support of the [Dominion] Government.”19 In a letter of greeting to Clarence De Sola, president of the Federation, Ontario lieutenant governor Sir William Mortimer Clark expressed confidence that
nothing will be permitted to divert your people from their efforts at bringing about the repatriation and the preservation of their nationality. All schemes of foreign colonisation only tend to the disintegration of your race. I congratulate you on having associated yourself with the Zionist movement. It is a cause which must prevail, for the gift of Palestine to your nation by the Almighty was absolute, and “He that scattered Israel will gather them” in due time.20
In the interwar years, Dominion politicians paid frequent lip service to the Zionist cause, which was now British government policy (although by the late 1930s, Britain would back away from its commitment). In 1925, on the occasion of the dedication of the new Hebrew University, Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservative Party, echoed traditional English-Canadian views on the Holy Land and Jewish restoration. “Of all the results” of World War I, he said, “none is more important and more fertile in human history than the re-conquest of Palestine and the rededication of that country to the Jewish people.” Meighen went on to hope that “Jews in Canada [would] take a proper pride in this great event and that the sons of generations to come may go back to the land of their destiny.”21 In 1934, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett opened the annual United Palestine Appeal with a coast-to-coast radio broadcast in which he reiterated the conviction that the Balfour Declaration and the conquest of Palestine by the British in World War I represented the beginning of the fulfilment of biblical prophecies.22 During the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Roebuck was a Liberal member of the Ontario and then the federal Parliament, minister of labour and attorney general of the Ontario legislature, and a federal senator. Roebuck’s liberal convictions made him a champion of minorities including the Jews, many of whom lived in the riding he represented. A self-defined “Christian Zionist,” Roebuck addressed Zionist gatherings in Canada and New York, advocated in Ottawa for Zionism, and, in 1944, arranged for Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Jewish Congress, to meet with Prime Minister Mackenzie King in a futile attempt to win King’s support for Zionism.23
In those same years, Zionism’s most visible supporter in Canada was John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir. Governor general from 1936 to 1940, Buchan came to Canada committed to the Zionist cause. As a member of the British Parliament, he had served a term as chair of the House of Commons Pro-Palestine Committee. In Canada, both he and his wife spoke publicly in favour of Zionism, lending the cause the cachet of the Crown. Occasionally, he, too, tried to act as an intermediary with the British and Canadian governments.24
The high point of Canadian interest in the Holy Land in the period under review came in 1917, when the British captured the country from the Turks. That the victory occurred close to Christmas heightened emotions. Newspaper reports from the period are instructive. Many focus on the repatriation of the Holy Land by Christendom. At the same time, however, reports like the one in the sensationalist Montreal Star supported Jewish settlement there and even the establishment of a Jewish state.25
While enthusiasm for the Holy Land and for Zionism was widespread in Canada in the pre-1948 period, it would be a mistake to think that the fervour was universal. There were those on the political left, among them more than a few Jews, who were opposed ideologically to all nationalism - including Zionism.26 And the populist Social Credit movement in Alberta in the interwar period was a breeding ground of both anti-Zionism and antisemitism, although some of its most prominent leaders, such as William Aberhart and Ernest Manning, tried to steer the movement away from overt prejudice.27 British patriotism, Protestant piety, interest in the Holy Land, and concern for Jews may have been intertwined for many, but for others, Christian anti-Judaism, Anglo-Saxon Protestant snobbery, racist notions, and fear of the “other” proved stronger. Some antisemites, such as Lord Tweedsmuir and Premier Bennett, supported Zionism, perhaps as a means for keeping Jews out of Canada; others, like Prime Minister Mackenzie King, opposed it. Even people who were generally friendly to Jews sometimes saw Zionism as a means for diverting Jews from Canadian shores, as the remarks of Arthur Meighen quoted earlier suggest.
Among French Canadians in these years, anti-Judaism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism were popular and widespread. Religion, along with European heritage and connections, played as significant a role as they did in English Canada. In France, Jews were much more the outsiders than they were in Britain, and the Roman Catholic Church did not cherish its roots in the Hebrew Bible or in ancient Israel. Backing for Zionism, then, did not come naturally in the francophone world.28
Much pilgrim literature in French Canada was also written by clerics and offers a window onto attitudes about the Jewish homeland and the Jews themselves. These works include G.L. Abbé’s La Terre Sainte où lieux célèbres dans l’histoire sainte (1841); Abbé Léon Gingras’s l’Orient, où voyage en Egypte, en Arabie, en Terre Sainte, en Turkie, et en Grèce (1847); Abbé Léon Provancher’s De Québec à Jérusalem (1884); Abbé J.F.C. de la Planche’s le Pèlerin de Terre Sainte (1887); Abbé Jean François Dupuis’s Rome et Jérusalem (1895); Abbé Henri Cimon’s Aux vieux pays (1895, 1917); Abbé Frédéric de Ghyvelde’s Album de Terre Sainte (1905); and Frère Joseph A. l’Archévêque’s Vers la Terre Sainte (1911) and Premier pèlerinage officiel des canadiens en Terre Sainte sous la direction spirituelle du très Révérend Père Mathieu-Marie de l’ordre des Frères Mineurs (1922).
In its approach to the connection between Jews and the Holy Land, l’Archévêque’s writing is representative. He describes Holy Land Jews as people with “crooked noses… stooped backs… [and] ghastly faces.” L’Archévêque anticipated remarks of Charles de Gaulle some fifty years later, asserting that “any true Jew” has but one “happiness,” one thing to live for: “to dominate.”29 Antonio Huot, another Roman Catholic priest, went a step farther. In his book, La question juive (1914), he attempted to substantiate the charge that Jews practiced ritual murder. In the 1920s, he published a newspaper account of his trip to the Holy Land in which he claimed that the Zionist settlers were all communists, a “fact” for which he adduced clear evidence - the red-tile roofs of the houses of Jerusalem Jews.30 During the Nazi era, a number of French-Canadian nationalist leaders suggested that Zionism was a way to solve “the Jewish problem,” and not only in Europe. Some went so far as to suggest the mandatory deportation of Jews to Palestine and the denial of citizenship to those who insisted on remaining behind.31
What is likely to happen in a supportive environment needs no explanation. A hostile environment, on the other hand, acts unpredictably on people who encounter it. Sometimes Jews react to hostility by attempting to accelerate the assimilation process. Sometimes they stiffen their backs and assert their identity. Predictably, Canadian Zionism drew nourishment from the generally supportive atmosphere in English Canada and in the mother country. Less predictably, the hostility of both French Canadians and significant numbers of English Canadians also nourished the movement.
Until well after World War II, Quebec nationalism was exclusivist in terms of religion (Catholic), national origin (France), and language (French). Anglo-Canadian nationalism was more open and pluralistic, although not completely so. The latter viewed Canada as a Christian country, but Protestantism was divided into a number of denominations, and some English Canadians were Catholics. Similarly, the predominating and most highly valued national origin in Canada was British, but Britons might be English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish - a few were even Jewish - and foreigners could become (almost) British by “adoption.” English was the language of the country, but it could be learned. Clearly Jews had a better chance of integrating into English Canada than into French Canada. But they were never entirely welcome in either. At times of dissension between the two founding peoples, both groups became less tolerant of difference, less accommodating to those who did not fit the mould. And such conflicts were not infrequent. Beginning in 1885 with the execution of rebel leader Louis Riel, who became a folk hero to French Canadians, a series of skirmishes between the two nationalities over the language question in the West and later in Ontario, the Jesuits’ Estates Act of 1889, the spillover of the Dreyfus Affair in France, the Boer War, and other issues, heightened tensions between them. Pressure continued to mount until Canada’s entry into World War I and beyond, with both French- and English-Canadian nationalism reaching a peak during the first decade of Herzlian Zionism. Never during those years did any one all-encompassing idea of Canadian nationality, which might have included Jews and other “outsider” groups, emerge in the Dominion. One Jewish observer remarked in 1883 that it sometimes seemed as though the only thing uniting French and English Canadians was a common hatred of Jews.32 In 1907, the Canadian government’s representative at the Irish International Exhibition in London actually declared that “the Jews in Canada could not be viewed as permanent settlers.”33
As a result, Jews turned inward. Unable to fully embrace either French-Canadian or English-Canadian nationalism, they looked to Jewish nationalism - that is, to Zionism. The phenomenon was not unknown elsewhere. In the pre-World War I era, Zionism exhibited extraordinary strength in Belgium, South Africa, and Canada, three bi-national states in which Jews found themselves squeezed between the two large, founding national groups. In 1927, Shmarya Levin, the great Zionist orator, wrote to Menahem Ussishkin, the president of the Jewish National Fund, that there were “two small countries” that then stood in the “front ranks” of the Zionist movement: Canada and South Africa. “Would that God had been more merciful,” he remarked with his customary humour, and “scattered us in more countries like those two.”34
The land of Israel had already become an important concern to Canada’s few Jews - just 2,443 in 1881 - in the earliest days of the proto-Zionist Hibbat Zion movement. In the 1880s, there were only two North American members of the elitist Benei Moshe Society founded by Ahad HaAm, and one of them was Montrealer Lazarus Cohen. Residents of that city contributed funds to the Hibbat Zion and in 1887 formed a short-lived group of their own under the leadership of lexicographer and Hebrew teacher Alexander Harkavy. Five years later, a branch of New York’s Shavey Zion society had been established in Montreal. Canadians invested money with the Shavey Zion for the purchase of land in Palestine, and a few attempted settlement. The project, however, was stillborn.
Within months of the first Zionist Congress held in Switzerland in 1897, Agudath Zion societies sprang up in Montreal and Toronto. Within a year, Zionist groups had also emerged in Winnipeg, Kingston, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Quebec, and the national Federation of Zionist Societies in Canada, with over 500 members, united them in 1899. The first Canadian women’s Zionist group, Toronto’s Daughters of Zion, was also founded in 1899. By World War I, Canadian Zionism was vigorous and variegated. Special interest groups included the Zion Cadets and the Queen Esther Cadets for boys and girls; the Zion Literary Club for teenage boys; the Jewish Endeavour Sewing School in Toronto; the Zion Athletic Club in Montreal; the Jewish National Fund; the Po’ale Zion labour party; Mizrachi, the Orthodox Zionist group; the Farband labour Zionist fraternal order; Young Judaea, the youth movement; and Zeta Beta Tau fraternity for university students. Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist group made its way into Canada during the war, although after a short time the Canadians affiliated with the European Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), rather than with the Americans.
Clarence de Sola, a patrician Montreal Jew whose father and brother were rabbis, became the first president of the Federation, proving himself remarkably adept at enrolling members and raising money for the Jewish Colonial Trust in the largely immigrant community. Thanks to the attention he paid to large donors, the Federation was able to raise significant sums in support of settlement activities in Palestine.
De Sola was an outspoken British patriot and a proud bearer of his Sephardic lineage. A champion of Canada, he never tired of reminding European and American Zionist leaders that Canadians were much more successful than Americans at enlisting Jews for Zionism. His rather pompous, stuffy, overbearing, late-Victorian leadership style proved his undoing in 1919, when the rank and file deposed him. In the two decades that he led the Federation, however, it became the first Jewish organization in the country to have nationwide representation. Moreover, when de Sola attended the fourth Zionist Congress held in London in 1900, the Canadian Federation became something of a presence on the world Zionist scene. Canadians had previously been represented by British Zionists or by travellers who happened to be visiting in Europe.35
That de Sola identified unabashedly with the Zionist cause is telling evidence of Canadian Jews’ inability to enter fully into the life and culture of the two founding nationalities. But at the same time, it reflects the extent to which interest in the Holy Land and in a Jewish restoration there was respectable among gentile English Canadians. In the United States and other countries of immigration, in contrast, Zionism often appealed more to newcomers and to those whose stake in society was limited. In Europe, too, assimilating Jews usually shunned the Zionist movement in these years.
In Canada, however, many prosperous, acculturated Jews affiliated with the Zionist movement, even taking on leadership positions. Alfred D. Benjamin, an Australian-English Jew who served from 1886 to 1900 as president of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, the synagogue of choice in that city for acculturating Jews, also served on the national council of the Federation of Zionist Societies. Edmund Scheuer, the chief advocate of Reform Judaism at Holy Blossom in the turn-of-the-century years, headed the Zionist Jewish Free School for girls in Toronto, although he was not otherwise an active Zionist. After a short interregnum, Archibald Freiman followed De Sola as president of the Federation, now renamed the Zionist Organization of Canada (ZOC), and founded a Zionist dynasty. Freiman was born in eastern Europe, but had become a wealthy department store owner in Ottawa who mingled with the Canadian elite, including the prime minister. His wife, Lillian, served as president of Hadassah/WIZO from 1919 until her death in 1940, and his son, Lawrence, later served two terms as president of the ZOC.36 During the early 1920s, even industrialist Sir Mortimer Davis, Montreal’s wealthiest, most prominent Jew and the first Jewish Canadian to be knighted, belonged to the ZOC. After his death, part of Davis’s fortune was used to establish the prestigious Lady Davis Fellowships, tenurable at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Technion in Haifa.
Although American reforming rabbis and lay people tended to remain aloof from Zionism, all of Holy Blossom Temple’s rabbis were supporters of the movement until the advent of Maurice Eisendrath in the 1930s. In Montreal, Reformers were less enthusiastic, but Rabbi Nathan Gordon and later Rabbi Harry Joshua Stern, both of Temple Emanu-El, were active in Zionist ranks. The latter exhibited some sympathy for militant Zionist Revisionism over the years. At the other end of the religious spectrum in Montreal, Rabbi Meldola de Sola, brother of Clarence and rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, was both an outspoken polemicist for Orthodoxy and a Zionist. Equally energetic on behalf of Zionism were the Conservative rabbis of Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, Bernard M. Kaplan and Herman Abramowitz.
Among the immigrant Jews of eastern European origin, there was some opposition to Zionism from socialists and communists, as noted earlier. In other countries, reservations were expressed on theological grounds by many in the Orthodox camp as well. In Canada, that was quite uncommon in these years. Among the prominent immigrant Orthodox rabbis who endorsed the movement were Israel Kahanovich, the chief rabbi of Winnipeg, Jacob Gordon of Toronto, and Aaron Mordecai Ashinsky of Montreal.
In addition to its broad appeal, Canadian Zionism was distinguished in the early decades of the twentieth century for its intensity. Western European and North American Zionism has generally been philanthropic, focusing on the collection of funds to help indigent or oppressed, mostly eastern European, Jews to settle in the land of Israel. This was especially the case with United States Jewry, which has consistently exhibited the lowest aliyah rate of any Jewish community of free emigration in the world.37
Clarence de Sola led Canadian Zionists in this direction, and, to a degree, his successors followed suit. Perhaps the most stunning result was the raising of one million dollars in the 1920s, with the help of Toronto manufacturer David Dunkelman, for the purchase of the Hefer Plain. Canadian Zionists, however, did not limit themselves to fundraising. Much more readily than Americans, they have been willing to consider aliyah, personal fulfilment of the Zionist dream through emigration to Israel.
Pre-World War I group settlement experiments included not only the abortive attempt of the Montreal Shavey Zion mentioned earlier, but also the efforts of Winnipeg Jews to found a colony.38 During the war, some three hundred Jews living in Canada enlisted in the Jewish Legion, recruited in Britain, Canada, and the United States to fight with the British Army in its Palestine campaign. Among the Canadian soldiers was a young Montrealer, Bernard Joseph, the former president of Canadian Young Judaea. After being demobilized, Joseph returned to Montreal and completed his law degree at McGill. He then returned to Palestine where, as Dov Yosef, he served on the executive of the Jewish Agency and as its treasurer, as military governor of Jerusalem during the War of Independence, and, subsequently, as a cabinet minister in several governments.
Unlike Joseph, most of the Canadian Legionnaires returned to Canada and remained there. The British made it difficult to settle in Palestine and the Zionist establishment did not have the resources to offer substantial assistance. In subsequent years, however, Canadians did join the growing yishuv, as the new Jewish community in Palestine was called. By 1934, Palestine “was becoming a living reality” for members of Canadian Young Judaea, a number of whom applied for “pioneer” certificates of immigration in that year.39 For western Canadians, who lived in small communities separated from one another by great distances, aliyah held special attraction in these years.40
Among the high profile Canadian Jews who settled for a time in the yishuv in the interwar years was Ben Dunkelman, whose father, David, is mentioned above. His mother, Rose, held leadership positions in Hadassah/WIZO and, in the 1930s, brought Meyer Weisgal to Canada to edit the Jewish Standard, which she founded as a vehicle to fight the anti-Zionism of Rabbi Eisendrath of Holy Blossom Temple and his followers. The young Dunkelman spent considerable time in Palestine and purchased land near Ashdod to establish a settlement. During the War of Independence, he returned to Israel and served with distinction in the armed forces of the new state.41 Another member of the Canadian Jewish elite who took up residence in the yishuv is Sylva Gelber, who had been a columnist for the Jewish Standard. The daughter of a prominent Toronto family, Gelber became the first graduate of the Va’ad Leumi School of Social Work (now the faculty of social work of the Hebrew University) and then worked as a family counsellor and probation officer, as a medical social worker at Hadassah Hospital, and in a position with the government of the Palestine Department of Labour. In 1948, she returned to Canada. Her uncle, Edward Gelber, served for six years as president of the ZOC before going to Israel on aliyah in 1956 with his family.42
One further distinguishing characteristic of Canadian Zionism in the pre-1948 era deserves mention here: during that period the ZOC became the representative organization of Canadian Jewry and the main force uniting Jews across the Dominion. These were roles that the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) would begin to assume in the 1930s, although B’nai Brith and some other organizations remained independent. No organization in the United States has ever succeeded in uniting the community to such an extent, but, from the turn of the twentieth century until the rise of the Nazis in Europe forced the reordering of Jewish community priorities everywhere, the ZOC did so very successfully in Canada. This was one more indicator of the unique vitality of the movement in its Canadian setting and of the ubiquity of Zionist commitment in the country.
Although Zionism suffered something of a decline in many countries after its World War I peak, in Canada it remained robust. Some of the community’s most creative people were enlisted in the service of the movement, and its institutions proliferated to meet new needs and interests. A.M. Klein, one of the country’s finest English-language poets, was national education director of Young Judaea and from 1928 to 1932 edited its monthly paper, the Judaean. Hananiah Meir Caiserman, a Labour Zionist and general secretary of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1919 to 1950, was an excellent administrator and a man of wise judgement on all community matters, who worked to maintain the Zionist orientation of the Congress. The Histadrut Campaign, the Pioneer Women, and the Habonim youth movement were established in Canada in these years by Labour Zionists, who also ran training farms for future settlers in the yishuv. Right-wing Zionists established Revisionist groups in Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere. The Mizrachi Orthodox Zionists founded the Mizrachi Women’s Organization of Canada (later called Emunah Women), and, somewhat later, founded an agricultural training farm in Ontario. The Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, which would prove to be among the most effective Zionist fundraising organizations and a model for other institutions, was established in 1937. Young Judaea opened its first summer camp in 1942, and the Keren HaTarbut emerged in the early 1940s to disseminate the culture and language of the yishuv.
The situation of Canadian Jews worsened in the 1930s and further deteriorated during the World War II years. Increasing antisemitism and even sympathy for Nazi ideology increased throughout the country, although it was more pronounced in French Canada. One consequence of this was that immigration all but closed during the 1920s and 1930s.43 And then Britain began backing away from its commitment to the Jews for a homeland in Palestine. While the Balfour Declaration was British policy, supporting Zionism was a way of expressing loyalty to Britain. But from at least the mid 1930s, Britain seemed to favour the Arabs. Supporting Zionism suddenly became an expression of opposition to Britain and required some delicate balancing, especially during World War II.
In 1941, all major Zionist groups in Canada, except the Revisionists, formed the United Zionist Council of Canada (UZC), so that lobbying, propaganda work, and fundraising could be conducted more effectively. With the backing of the UZC, two public lobbying bodies were established in 1944: the Christian Council for Palestine, aimed at the clergy and directed by Henry Janes, a Toronto public relations consultant, and the Canadian Palestine Committee directed by Herbert Mowat, a former Anglican priest in Toronto who was well connected to the English-Canadian elite. Mowat made headway with propaganda in English Canada, but neither group succeeded in moving the King government towards support for Zionism. Despite widespread English-Canadian sympathy with Britain during the war, Canadian Jews gradually drew away from Britain and began to look to outspoken American Zionists, such as Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, for world leadership.
Despite the changed Canadian context, many of the developments that had served to nourish Canadian Zionism over the years continued to do so during the years of struggle for Israeli independence. Jews had still not gained insider status in the country and still tended to turn inward towards support for Zionist goals. On the other hand, prominent English-Canadian gentiles, such as Senator Arthur Roebuck and Herbert Mowat, continued to exhibit interest in Palestine and sympathy for the notion of Jewish restoration, fostering support for Zionism. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, fundraising was more successful than ever, and former opponents of Zionism came to see it as essential to the continuity of the Jewish people. This was particularly true while Canada’s doors remained closed to Jews.44 More than three hundred Canadians, many of them World War II veterans, such as Ben Dunkelman, served in Mahal, the overseas volunteer unit of the Israeli army. At the UN in New York, Lionel Gelber, Sylva’s brother, acted as advisor to the Jewish Agency delegation. Ivan C. Rand, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, served on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). He favoured partition of the country and probably influenced Canada’s hesitant decision to recognize Israel in the spring of 1949.45 At the close of the period under review, Zionism continued, as it had earlier, to be not only a vehicle for the support of Israel, but also for the fortification of Jewish life in Canada itself.