Histoire des Juifs du Québec by Pierre Anctil (review)

Pierre Anctil's Histoire des Juifs du Québec represents the culmination of four decades of the author's scholarly work on Jews in Quebec. It is a remarkable book from two perspectives. The first is that it stands as the first comprehensive, single-authored, scholarly history of the Jews in the province of Quebec. The second is that it is written in French and aimed at a francophone audience.

Here is why this is remarkable. There exist several good scholarly works covering much the same subject-matter as Anctil's Histoire des Juifs du Québec. A distinguished example is the late Gerald Tulchinsky's Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (2008). However, these works were written in English, by Jewish Canadians, and had as their subject the Jews of Canada, of which the story of Jews in Montreal and Quebec represents an extremely important part. Thus Anctil's concentration on Montreal and Quebec, to the practical exclusion of the rest of Canada, is something new on the scholarly scene.

Also, Anctil, a product of both Quebec's Quiet Revolution and the simultaneous evolution of the Roman Catholic Church's attitude toward Jews following Vatican II, is neither Jewish nor anglophone. He is a Québécois scholar who has sought to understand and describe the many ways in which the centuries-old presence of Jews in Montreal has made a significant difference in the evolution of Quebec as a whole. Like all authors, he hopes his book will find the widest possible audience. Nevertheless, he clearly understands that, in its present linguistic garb, it is primarily addressed to an audience of Quebec francophones, and is only secondarily directed to scholars of Canadian Jewish studies, many of whom are bilingual but nearly all of whom write primarily in English and are naturally oriented to the English-language scholarship in their field.

The result is that Anctil's Histoire des Juifs du Québec presents the reader with its own unique perspective on the significance of the Jewish presence in Quebec and, in particular, the often fraught historical relationship between Jews and French Canadians. Anctil is aware, painfully so, that French Canadians have been widely portrayed as more virulent antisemites than Anglo-Canadians. He certainly does not deny the existence of French Canadian antisemitism in the early and mid-twentieth century, when the burgeoning Jewish community of Montreal encountered a rapidly urbanizing French Canadian proletariat in Quebec's metropolis. However Anctil believes that much of the antisemitism to be found in Quebec in that era was the result of the Catholic Church's traditional anti-Jewish teachings. Another important element in that story is the lack of meaningful interaction between French Canadians and Jews caused by the effective closure of the French Catholic school system to Jews and the Jewish community's clear linguistic and cultural goal of assimilation to anglophone Quebec.

However, there is more to Anctil's take on antisemitism in Quebec than that. Anctil clearly feels that much of the popular attribution of antisemitism to French Quebec stems from a tendency in English Canada to blame French Canada for an antisemitism that it itself practiced, though perhaps not quite as openly. This is not a new situation. One could trace this back to the observation of the celebrated Montreal Jewish writer and journalist, A. M. Klein, in his 1944 essay "The Tactics of Race Hatred." Klein wrote, "editorial writers go out of their way to give the impression that the entire province of Quebec is a domain of intolerance.… This is simply not the truth and one has a right to question the motive of such wholesale prosecution … either the pious defence of a discriminated minority is being used as an instrument of denigration against the French-Canadian minority; or the crusader … is pointing to Quebec antisemitism only to draw attention off his own. Anctil's interpretation of Quebec antisemitism will almost certainly be the subject of lively academic discussion, in both English and...