Were We Once the Stepchildren in the Canadian Family?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Jewish immigration to Canada is the story, not only of the arrival and settlement of Jews in this country, but also of the way they were treated while attempting to adapt to their new home.

Negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, ranging from mild distaste to intense and pathological antisemitism, have shaped the contours of Canadian Jewish life, particularly in the periods of mass Jewish immigration and extending through the end of World War II and even into the 1950s.

Most Jewish immigration to this country occurred after 1881, and consisted, until the 1950s, primarily of east European Ashkenazim. In 1881, there were just 2,443 Jews in Canada; 40 years later Canada's Jews numbered 126,196.

Clearly, such a large influx of Jews elicited a variety of responses. While many welcomed Jews as hard-working immigrants, for others this immigration had created a "Jewish problem" on Canadian soil.

In the Anglo-Canadian world, Canada was seen as an outpost of British civility; for French Canadians, the upholding of the Catholic faith was a religious imperative. For both, therefore, Jewish immigrants threatened the very fabric of society. Jews were perceived as ethnic and religious undesirables with little economic utility and stood in direct conflict with the social and economic assumptions on which Canadian immigration policy was built.

Wrote Henri Bourassa, the French Canadian intellectual and journalist, in 1906: "The experience of every civilized country is that the Jews are the most undesirable class of people any country can have."

In 1923, the Canadian government closed the door to all unsponsored immigrants from central and eastern Europe except farmers. And then it moved to control those described as belonging "to races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada."

Jews were lumped into a Special Permit group. The only ones permitted into Canada would be those who could obtain special permits exempting them from the new regulations - and this required formal cabinet approval in each individual case.

Not surprisingly, only a trickle of individual Jews entered Canada annually during the next quarter-century. Immigration officials such as F.C. Blair, assistant deputy minister of immigration after 1924 and deputy minister after 1936, would see to that. Even German Jewish doctors willing to serve in Newfoundland's outports were refused admission.

The opposition to Jewish immigration in the '30s and '40s included Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King himself; he worried in private that letting in too many Jews would cause riots and undermine Canadian unity. And in this he reflected prevailing public opinion in this country: polls taken in the years before 1945 showed that, along with Asians, Jews were the least-wanted immigrants.

Quebec had a long and dishonourable tradition of antisemitism, which intensified with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In June 1934, Samuel Rabinovitch, a Jewish medical student who had graduated first in his class at the Université de Montréal, was offered an internship at Notre Dame Hospital. All 14 other interns there walked out in protest, supported by interns from five other Montreal-area Catholic hospitals.

Who could blame them, asked the French-language Le Devoir? It would be repugnant to be treated - even touched - by a Jewish physician.

In the Laurentians, Jews were harassed, taunted and assaulted; hotels and other establishment proudly sported 'Gentiles Only' signs. The Achat chez Nous movement urged French Canadians to buy only from co-religionists and stay away from Jewish shopkeepers who, noted Le Devoir, "have cheating and corruption in their bloodstream."

Not surprisingly, Québécois politicians and clergy led the agitation against further Jewish immigration to Canada. As one Toronto rabbi, Maurice Eisendrath, said in June 1938: "In Quebec antisemitism is a way of life."

Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec after 1936, vigorously opposed the admission of Jewish refugees to Canada. During the 1944 provincial election, he spread stories about a supposed "international Zionist" plot to spirit 100,000 Jews into the province at the end of the war if the provincial Liberals would be returned to power.

Though Quebec was particularly bad, the rest of Canada was not free of anti-Jewish prejudice either.

Social Credit, the Orange Order, the Ku Klux Klan - these and many other groups were rife with antisemitic feeling. Three weeks after winning power in Alberta in 1935, new Social Credit Premier William Aberhart travelled to Detroit to discuss economics with Father Charles Coughlin, an antisemitic Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts attracted millions of listeners.

Other Social Crediters spouted nonsense about "Jewish High Finance." Especially notorious was Norman Jaques, federal MP for Wetaskiwin from 1935 to 1949. He propounded Jewish conspiracy theories and in 1943 attempted to read from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the House of Commons.

Throughout Canada, quotas and restrictions were a way of life, and anti-Jewish bigotry sanctioned in press and pulpit. A Canadian Jewish Congress study commissioned in the late 1930s showed few Jewish teachers, and no principals, in Canadian schools. There was not a single Jewish university professor in the country.

Banks, insurance companies, and large industrial and commercial enterprises excluded Jews from employment. Jews were refused work even as salespeople in department stores. Restrictive covenants kept Jews out of "desirable" neighbourhoods as either tenants or homeowners.

And unlike today, the legal system provided little in the way of redress. There were few laws against discrimination, hatemongering or the like.

Redress had to await more enlightened times. Only in the 1960s could Canadian Jews consider themselves, and be considered by others, to be part of the Canadian family.