Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey (review)

Jews first came to Canada shortly after the British Conquest. Within a generation, they had formed a tiny community in Montreal, with other families living in Trois Rivières and Quebec. Additionally, some Jews were scattered in the hinterland as fur traders. Ezekiel Hart was elected to the Lower Canadian Assembly in 1807 but was prevented from taking his seat because he would not swear an oath as a Christian. Such is the first chapter of Jewish life in Canada as told by Gerald Tulchinsky in Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey.

In this work Tulchinsky, professor emeritus at Queen’s University, has condensed his two-volume history of Canadian Jewry, written in the 1990s. He has reduced some of the material on the first century of Jewish life and has utilized recent secondary sources and previously unused documents in fashioning this study. Jews were one of the first non-French, non-Anglo-Celtic ethnic communities to establish roots in Canada. By 1914, Yiddish was the second language in Toronto and the third one in Montreal and Winnipeg. Jews lived in every province and were found in all cities, most towns, and in rural communities, especially on the Prairies. Although they never represented more than 1.5 per cent of Canada’s population, they have contributed disproportionately to scholarship, the arts, professions, philanthropy, and business.

Tulchinsky is a serious scholar, fluent in French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. He has a keen eye for the tenor of Canada’s Jews, which brings the reader in touch with the difficulties of adaptation, from the Anglicized early settlers to the penurious immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century to the brutalized survivors of the Holocaust. He is adept at telling the story of a community that has faced anti-Semitism from numerous corners of Canadian society and from the anti-immigrant prejudice that prevented European Jews from finding a haven from the yoke of the Third Reich.

This work shows Tulchinsky’s interest in economic developments. We find copious information on the early commercial interests of the Quebec settlers. The travails of immigrant workers in the shmatte shops, the clothing factories in Toronto and Montreal, receive a full treatment. Further, Tulchinsky’s interest in external affairs provides us with ground-breaking scholarship in two areas: the contribution of Canadian Jews to the Second World War, in the military and at home; and the origins and growth of Zionism and support for the state of Israel. Here Tulchinsky is most at home, having served in the military and having lived in Israel as a young and dedicated Zionist.

We also commend Tulchinsky from not producing a filio-pietistic account. He does not gloss over the community’s deep religious, political, and economic divisions. Exploitative factory owners are not spared, and the stillbirth of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1919 is recounted. Tulchinsky does not exaggerate the community’s wartime contribution, nor does he gloat about the Jewish prominence in a variety of fields. This is a balanced account of an immigrant population (the most recent immigrants having arrived from the Soviet Union, Israel, and North Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s) struggling to adapt in a nation that was Christian and Anglo-French. Unlike other immigrants, the Jews did not have a homeland to which they could return or one for which they longed. Canada has been a haven for more than a century, albeit one that has not been entirely welcoming.

One would have hoped that Tulchinsky would have personalized more of this account. We are not brought into the homes, synagogues, and union halls. The lives of Jewish women and especially youth require more development. We also have a few tedious accounts, such as the struggle for acceptance of Jewish schools in the public system in Montreal.

There is also an imbalance in the presentation. The period between 1890 and 1945, while undeniably central in the establishment and evolution of Canada’s Jews...