Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (review)

132 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Lowenstein provides ample evidence ofthat recurring situation with regard to the rise of the Haskalah, while simultaneously pinpointing the inherent dangers to Jewish survival that surfaced with increased conversion among the descendants of the early reformers. Two caveats on the physical book itself. Appropriately, the portrait on the jacket is not ofMendelssohn, but it is of a Mendelssohnian surrogateEphraim Marcus Ephraim. The book's theme might have been better presented with a photo depicting a more communal process of change. Also the print of the text itself is notably small. One problem with Lowenstein's presentation concerns his use of secondary sources. Basically, this is a sweeping presentation constructed step by step from primary archival sources, but such books can be significantly enriched by greater attention to secondary works as well. There is some very important secondary literature-most of it dating back several decades-that deals with related themes, and the reader would have welcomed the opportunity to know how general presentations by Baron, Katz, Shochet, Selma Stern, and Scholem among others stand up to Lowenstein's in-depth analysis. Also, there are extremely few references to other communities such as Frankfurt or Hamburg, and without such comparison the uniqueness of social dynamics within the Berlin community cannot be truly established. The reason for this omission may well be a lack of sophisticated social history of other communities during the early modern period in Germany -a situation that now stands partly corrected with Lowenstein's significant contribution. Future historians of other communities on the threshold of the modern period will already find a model to relate to. And future writers on Berlin Jewry itself during this crucial period will be able to complement the picture with diverse literary materials to still further enrich our understanding of the processes taking place. Robert Liberles Department of History Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community, by Gerald Tulchinsky. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993. 341 pp. $35.00. Gerald Tulchinsky, who is Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, has written a landmark book on the Canadian Jewish Book Reviews 133 community. The book is both a meticulous and detailed history of the important events and institutions that have shaped Canadian Jewish life and an attempt to capture the broader patterns, the contours and flow, of . Canadian Jewish history. Taking Root deals with the period from 1760 to 1920. There are, in my view, three general themes that emerge in Tulchinsky's work. The first is that Canadian Jewish identity is substantially different from that of American Jews. The communities have different origins and have had to navigate in very different waters. The second is that Jews played only marginal roles in Canadian life in the period before 1920. They were bit players far from the central stage. The third is that a diverse and complex community was able to establish impressive institutions and a fervent and creative internal life despite the pain of dislocation, what poet A. M. Klein called "our spaceless boundaries of loss" (p. 278), and what was sometimes harsh antisemitism. While Tulchinsky admits that "there are many significant-almost overpowering-resemblances between the American and Canadian Jewish experiences, and in certain respects the communities are so similar as to be indistinguishable" (p. xv), much of the book dwells on how Canadian Jewry responded to the unique pressures and circumstances of the Canadian environment. The strength of British traditions, the bitterness and the great divide that separated French and English, and the difficulties in particular of adapting to a nineteenth-century Quebec society that cherished what historian Michel Brunet described as "agriculturalism, antistatism and messianism" (p. xvii), are just some of the differences. Barriers to acceptance, let alone assimilation, remained substantial. Moreover, there was no overriding Canadian identity, no grand Canadian concept, with which Canadian Jews could readily identiJY. Where American Jews were drawn into the maelstrom of an energizing, patriotic, and more homogeneous and republican society, Canadian Jews did not easily fit amid so many barriers and ambiguities. What is critical, however, is that the Canadian context...