A History of Antisemitism in Canada by Ira Robinson (review)

The Canadian Jewish community dates back to the mid-eighteenth century. In this disturbing book Robinson explores the history of the anti-Semitism it has experienced in both Anglophone and Francophone Canada from the earliest settlement to the present day.

Robinson begins with a brief discussion of the origins of the term anti-Semitism followed by a brief history of the Jewish communities of medieval and early modern France and England. He then traces the emergence of the Canadian Jewish community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jews and Protestants were excluded from French Canada. This changed after the British conquest of French Canada in 1759. Some of the earliest British settlers in post-conquest Quebec were Jewish merchants. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century Canada's Jewish community remained very small, not exceeding 1,000 in Quebec and Ontario until the 1861 Canadian census. Anti-Semitism remained at a relatively low level until the late nineteenth century notwithstanding for example some privately expressed anti-Jewish sentiment recorded by the R.G. Dun credit-rating company.

Robinson suggests anti-Semitism began to intensify after 1867 as the Jewish community expanded significantly in size with an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe. Montreal was at that time Canada's largest city and thus it attracted a large proportion of these migrants. The migrants mostly chose to learn English and send their children to Anglophone Protestant schools. This led to a backlash from French Canadian nationalists who had adopted the anti-Semitic ideology associated with a French reactionary Roman Catholic intellectual movement. Anti-Semitism was also present in Anglophone Canada but unlike in Quebec it was generally expressed in private.

Robinson suggests that the period from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War represents the zenith of Canadian anti-Semitism. Its manifestations included physical harassment, discrimination in Canadian universities, exclusion from professions such as medicine, social exclusion, and anti-Jewish retail and business boycotts. There were exceptions such as the Universitié de Montréal which defended the presence of the, albeit relatively small, Jewish presence on campus in the face of protests from Francophone Roman Catholic students and a number of French Canadian politicians. There were also numerous pro-Nazi groups in 1930s Canada, although they never presented a unified or effective political threat. Robinson suggests perhaps the most notorious anti-Semitic act ever committed in Canada was the arson attack on the new Quebec City synagogue in May 1944.

In the last part of his book, which covers the period since the Second World War, Robinson shows that there was a gradual diminution of the various manifestations of anti-Semitism and that by the 1990s they were mostly marginal phenomena. However, new manifestations emerged in the form of Holocaust Denial and anti-Zionism. Robinson concludes by reflecting that Jewish Canadians and their supporters have not succeeded in eradicating anti-Semitism from Canadian society in part because Canada protects the right to free speech.