Exiles from Nowhere: The Jews and the Canadian Elite (review)

Antisemitism in Canada is an interesting and disturbing phenomenon. It has several foundations, and it has ebbed and receded since the first Jews came to Canada from France in 1760, immediately after the British conquest. Antisemitism had its most devastating impact when immigration restrictions were imposed in the late 1920s, and were not reversed during the period of the Third Reich’s attacks and eventual murder of most of European Jewry. Thus, Canada refused to provide a haven in the most dire period of Jewish history. Indeed, the immigration restrictions were not relaxed until 1948, three years after the Holocaust had ended.

Alan Mendelson, a professor emeritus of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, revisits one strand of antisemitism in Canada in Exiles from Nowhere: The Jews and the Canadian Elite. He shines a light on the thread of thought that began in the late nineteenth century among the Anglo-Saxon elite in Ontario and that viewed Jews as a pernicious element weakening the supremacy of Christianity (read British Protestantism) in Canada. The foundations of this hatred stemmed from a strong attachment to Britain, its empire, and its mission to bring Christianity to the downtrodden peoples in Africa and Asia. In this context, the Jew, whether he be Disraeli or a poor immigrant, was the enemy of this project. The Jew was characterized as having no allegiance to his land and having shirked his responsibility to humanity by rejecting Christ.

Mendelson begins his exploration with the work of Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), who was arguably the dominant thinker in Canada in the late nineteenth century. He links Smith to two families, the Grants and the Parkins. George Munro Grant (1835–1902) and George Parkin (1846–1922) were prominent educators whose children, William Grant and Maude Parkin, produced four children, the youngest of whom, George Parkin Grant (1918–1986), became Canada’s most important conservative philosopher in the postwar era. Grant’s nephew, Michael Ignatieff, is the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Along the way, Mendelson weaves in an array of characters, from William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was Canada’s prime minister for twenty-one years, to Arnold Toynbee, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, and Leonard Cohen.

Mendelson’s main contention is that the Anglo-Saxon elite in Ontario fostered a “genteel antisemitism” that was pervasive. He centers his analysis on George Parkin Grant, who was a colleague of Mendelson’s at McMaster University in the late 1970s. Grant is best known as a strong critic of Canada’s loss of cultural and economic independence to the United States. He chronicles this in Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). However, Mendelson does not dwell on this aspect, but rather on Grant’s family influences, his period of study at Oxford in the late 1930s, and his stay in England for much of World War II, and also on the impact of Toynbee (his teacher at Oxford), Heidegger, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Simone Weil on Grant’s world view. We learn about Grant’s initial rapture with the writings of Leo Strauss, of his criticism of Leonard Cohen’s novels, and of his relationship with the Ontario writer Matt Cohen. The book’s title comes from a comment made by Cohen’s father, “that a Jew is a person in exile from nowhere” (312). Mendelson views Grant within the context of “genteel antisemitism,” where one did not publicly attack Jews, but where one wrote, in academic language, of the attack on Christian supremacy. In contrast, Mendelson quotes Goldwin Smith, writing almost a century earlier, in much harsher terms: “A Jew ‘is not an Englishman or Frenchman holding particular theological tenets . . . he is a Jew with a special deity for his own race. The rest of mankind is to him not merely people holding a different creed, but aliens in blood’” (23). Grant, however, tones down the rhetoric, assigning to Leonard Cohen, in Mendelson’s...