Canada, a hotbed of racism and antisemitism, a country full of bigots and xenophobes? Who could believe that of the apparently humane, welcoming, culturally diverse nation to America's north?
Yet for the first one hundred years of its existence, from the 1860s to the 1960s, Canada was just that, a country governed by racist anti-immigration laws that divided the world into preferred races—white, Christian Europeans who were always welcome in Canada—and the nonpreferred races—the rest of the world—who were officially barred.
For most of this period, Jews, who were allowed in from time to time, were the pariahs of Canadian society, demeaned, despised, and discriminated against. Most jobs were barred to them, no hospital appointments for Jewish doctors, no Jewish professors or judges, restrictive covenants in many neighbourhoods preventing sales to Jews, restrictions on Jewish students in universities and professional schools throughout the country. Worse, antisemitism so blanketed Canadian society that Canadian governments shut their doors to Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s just when European Jewry were most in need of a haven. Of all the democracies, of all the immigration countries, Canada had the worst record in providing a sanctuary for Jews escaping the Nazi death machine.
Why was Canada so antisemitic?
For answers we can now turn to a new, comprehensive study by Professor Ira Robinson, chair of Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His History of Antisemitism in Canada is a well-written synthetic overview of the growth, and, yes, the decline of anti-Jewish hatred in Canada.
His is a classic Jewish good news, bad news story. The good? That antisemitism is in decline in Canada and has been for the past fifty years; that for Canadian Jews today, life has never been better—Jews are the most integrated, well-educated, well-off community in the country. The bad? That Canadian Jews don't think so. They believe that antisemitism is getting worse, that their newly achieved acceptance is being chipped away, and that their traditional partners and supporters are slipping away.
And of course, this being a Jewish story, both are true. As Robinson points out, antisemitism in Canada is still a problem, but far less so than in most other places in the world.
In fact, antisemitism in Canada began before there was a Canada. The first European settlers, the French, established the royal colony of New France. And for its 150 years of existence, from the early 1600s to 1760, when it fell to the British, the colony officially barred Jews and other minorities from settling. A royal proclamation assured that New France would be forever Judenrein.
Under the British, the colony of Canada was open to Jewish immigrants. Few came. Most preferred the temperate climate of the United States. Only with the murderous pogroms in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and the flight of hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe did large numbers of Jews arrive in Canada.
And with them, as Robinson points out, they brought the seeds of a new antisemitism. Jews were seen as “inassimilable,” stark examples of the “mongrel” races that were increasingly making their way to Canada. Scientific racism or political antisemitism, as Robinson argues, made its debut in Canada at this time. There was a widespread feeling throughout the country that Jews did not belong. Canada was expecting to be a country of farmers and homesteaders, and few believed Jews could farm. Immigrants who were not agriculturalists were expected to work in the woods, mines, and fisheries, or join the construction gangs needed to fuel the great Canadian boom.
No Canadian leaders felt Jews could follow these paths; they were perceived as city people in a country hoping to build up its rural base, as peddlers and shopkeepers in a country that wanted loggers and miners. Robinson describes in harrowing detail the impact on Canada's fledgling Jewish community of this anti-Jewish feeling that smothered the country.
Perhaps the strongest part of the book is Robinson's contrast between antisemitism in Quebec and the rest of the country. While he believes that antisemitism in English Canada is no longer much of an issue, he argues, correctly, that the issue is still alive—and worrisome—in French Canada. For this he blames the actively anti-Jewish teaching of the Roman Catholic Church over the past two centuries. Though the power of the church has receded, its teachings clearly have not. They still resonate in the countryside.
Timely as well is Robinson's chapter on the use—really the misuse—of Zionism and Israel by the enemies of the Jewish people. Israel has become the collective Jew amongst the nations. There is a widespread attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize the Jewish state and the Jewish people. The charge heard so often on campuses and in left-wing circles is that Zionism is racism. This is the basest sort of antisemitism—it implies the denial of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish statehood, the denial of rights granted to every other people on earth. Robinson believes that as long as there is conflict in the Middle East, the Canadian Jewish community will remain the target of antisemites.
Though it is not the first study of antisemitism in Canada, it is the most sweeping book on the topic. While he uses few archival materials, Robinson seems to have consulted every published source of any relevance. The result is a masterful, easily readable, lucid analysis of the phenomenon.
This is a book not only to be read but to be savoured.
