Juifs et réalités juives au Québec ed. by Pierre Anctil and Gary Caldwell (review)

HUMANITIES 489 immigrants from France in the period 1608-60 and tables illustrating their linguistic distribution cannot provide sufficient explanation for the direction taken by the French language in Canada. Barbaud proposes a predictive model based on woman's central role in the dynamics of language diffusion, I un modele predictif qui fasse porter l'essentiel de la dynamiquede l'assimilation sur les epaules des femmes d'antan' (p 142). Based on detailed information about the speakers' background, this proposed recursive model defines the language spoken by father and mother, predicting from it the variety of language spoken by their daughter who, as mother, will provide the linguistic input for the next generation. By the application of his model, Barbaud explains rather convincingly the homogeneous character of contemporary Canadian French. Itremains to be seen whether the model is sophisticated and sure enough to predict the future evolution of a multidialectal, bi- or multilingual society. This is a book that is both informative and challenging. One can only regret that it has not been translated into English, and hope that it soon will be. (SUZANNE WHALEN) Pierre Anctil and Gary Caldwell, editors. Juifs et realites juives au Quebec Serie II, Les communautes ethnoculturelles, no. 7 Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture. 371. $13.00 paper In recent years, the Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture has been producing important research tools - bibliographies and surveys of research, as well as innovative studies - examining various facets of the cultural institutions in Quebec. One of the most active areas of publication has been the field of ethnocultural studies of minority groups within Quebec. The first volume in this series, an annotated bibliography by David Rome and others, Les Juifs du Quebec, which served as an introductory study, is now fleshed out with this new anthology by Pierre Anctil and Gary Caldwell. As the editors point out in the Introduction, their intention is not to produce original research on the sociology of Jewish culture in Quebec, but to provide a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the question in a single comprehensive volume. But this study is novel within its context, for it makes available for the first time in French and within a university milieu the results of much research undertaken by the Quebec Jewish community itself. Surprising as it may seem to an outsider from a position where the QuebecJewish community seems closely identified with bilingualism, the gap between francophone Quebecker and the Jewish community is great, caused in part by an anti-Semitic strain in Quebec nationalism (subject of 490 LETTERS IN CANADA 1984 detailed analysis in Gary Caldwell's essay) and in part by the inward turning of the Jewish community. Moreover, in Quebec this latter has adopted English as its lingua franca, linkingitwith the Jewish community elsewhere in North America. It is this complex situation, that of minority within a minority, which the editors wish to explore. Much ofthe work on the Jewish community in Montreal (for that is where almost the entire community is located) has been carried out within broad sociological studies oftheJewish community inCanada as a whole, oftencontrasted to that of the United States. The narrower Quebec focus is an important innovation in this present study, especially in Morton Weinfeld's overview of the community where he highlights its difference from other North American Jewish centres, namely the fact that it is composed of a largenumberofFrench-speakingSephardicJews, immigrants from North Africa. As Weinfeld perceives it, Jewish identity is based on the knowledge of a Jewish cultural repertoire and on Jews' more or less solid links with their religion and people. For this reason, the editors attach great importance to the essays on Jewish culture and parallel ones on Quebecois culture which establish the nature of the mutual impact of these communities on each other. These essays, more specifically the historical survey ofJewish writers from Montreal by Pierre Anctil and the analysis of the image of the Jew in Quebec literature by Ben-Z. Shek, will be my focus in this review. (Another one will centre on the book as sociological study.) Surprisingly, however, given the effort at exploring interrelationships and building bridges, there is...