Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada's Jews. A People's Journey.(Book review)

Gerald Tulchinsky, Conodo's Jews. A People's Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2008)

CANADA'S JEWS IS the product of Gerald Tulchinsky's life-long immersion in Canadian Jewish life and Jewish history. The book is both an update of and a replacement for his two-volume Jewish history, Taking Root and Branching Out, issued in the 1990s.

This successor work is a thorough (500 pages of text) and masterful survey of 240 years of organized Jewish community life that covers everything from class conflict in the clothing industry to the mentality of immigrant Holocaust survivors.

The book is grounded in traditional Canadian historiography, but because it incorporates newer social history, the book can be viewed as a comprehensive synthesis of newer and older history writing. Older accounts of the histories of immigrant groups tended to focus on institutions and to laud prominent ethnic community leaders. While Tulchinsky builds on this earlier foundation, he combines it with a rich body of recent scholarly work focused on social history.

There's another, more important way in which Tulchinsky's book reflects Canadian historiography and national history. The themes of the book are the major staples of traditional Canadian history writing--French-English dualism and French-Canadian nationalism, regionalism, the British tie, Canadian-American relations - applied to Jewish life.

Within these staple themes, he shows, for example, the ambiguous position of Jews as a third solitude in Quebec, the anti-Jewish doctrines prevalent in French-Canadian nationalism, the regionally divided nature of Canadian Jewish settlement, the support of Canadian Jews for the British imperial tie because of what a Jewish newspaper called its "preservation of every individual culture within its realm," (301) and the distinctiveness of Canadian from American Jewish life, for example, Jewish Canadians' greater support for Zionism because dual loyalties were more permissible.

"The Canadian Jewish identity," he writes, "was formulated within the parameters of the emerging Canadian national personality..."--a personality based on Canada "separating itself from the mother country and distinguishing itself from the United States." Jewish traditions originating in Europe "take root and branch out in rough symbiosis with a new society that was distinctively North American: overwhelmingly British and French, conservative, traditional, precarious, and defensive." (7)

Tulchinsky writes that Canadian Jewish history before and after the watershed year of 1920 was "shaped by a set of coordinates which were unique to the northern half of this continent, and which resulted in the evolution of a distinctive community: Canada's political structure and dual 'founding peoples,' its economic dependency and long-lasting constitutional colonial status, its own immigration patterns and urbanization processes, had together shaped a historical experience different from that of United States Jewry." (194)

At the same time, Canada's Jews has plenty to engage the student of social and labour history. In this "northern land of 'limited identities,' where region, culture and class differ so significantly," (192) Tulchinsky devotes plenty of space to class relations and particularly to Jewish working people, their unions in the clothing industry, and radical politics.

Tulchinsky emphasizes the class divisions within the Jewish community. Even before the mass migration of poor Jews from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, "fairly sharp economic, ethnic, and religious differences existed within the Montreal Jewish community." (71) Labour conflict in Quebec's clothing industry during the 1920s and 1930s revealed "vicious class warfare within the community." (254) His detailed coverage of the lengthy squabbles over the position of Jews in Quebec's Protestant school system demonstrates the persistent clashes between the prosperous integrationist leadership in the west end of Montreal and the labour-backed "downtown Jews who adopted a nationalist position..." (288)

Tulchinsky starts his book with a description of the colonial era, mostly in Lower Canada, where the Hart family was an important actor in economic development and Jewish political rights were affirmed by the Assembly in 1832. He then surveys the mid-19th-century small-business enterprises of predominantly English and German immigrants through the use of credit reports from R.G. Dun and Company. He also considers the checkered fate of Jewish agricultural settlement in Western Canada.

The rising tide of Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries coincided with the development in Canada of what us historian Moses Rischin in The Promised City called "the great Jewish metier," the clothing industry. (8) Canada's Jews follows the interactions of Jews with the industry as workers and owners from the 1880s to the post-World War II years. "Competition was rife, and expanding markets placed a premium on flexibility, price-cutting, mobility, and exploitation of workers, particularly women, children, and immigrants." (145)

Industry leader Lyon Cohen was representative of the owners in sharply criticizing unions and warning that the key question was "who should control the shop floor, the fore-man or the shop delegate." (156) In one of the most interesting sections of his book, Tulchinsky discusses the "provocative" (254) actions of some Jewish dress manufacturers in using anti-Semitism as a means of fighting the IL6WU, which was organizing a work force that was 80 percent French Canadian. During a bitter 1934 strike, "some Jewish workers tried to disguise themselves by speaking French and wearing crosses around their necks." (254)

Tulchinsky surveys the familiar story of virulent clerico-facism and anti-Semitism in French Canada during the interwar period, which provides a context for understanding young Pierre Trudeau's attitudes in the early 1940s. Le Devoir ran articles characterizing Jews as "aliens, circumcised, criminals, mentally ill, trash of nations, Tartars infected with Semitism, malodorous - they smell of garlic, live in lice-ridden ghettos, have greasy hair and pot bellies, big crooked noses, and they are dirty." (313-14) The parallels with Nazi propaganda are depressingly familiar.

The book outlines the rough reception Jews received in English Canada, too, ranging from Goldwin Smith's Victorian diatribes to Social Credit's conspiratorial fantasies in the 1930s. Tulchinsky documents systematic discrimination in university admission policies in which anti-Jewish expression was rife, if more genteel than that of swastika-bearing brawlers at Toronto's Christie Pits. Frank Underhill, the liberal University of Toronto historian, while supporting the right of a promising Jewish academic, Lionel Gelber, to be "the token Jew in the history department," noted that a student applying for a Rhodes scholarship was "a Jew with a good deal of the Jew's persecution complex and this makes him unduly aggressive and sarcastic in discussion and writing." (320) Some years before, Lewis Namier's application to teach at the University of Toronto had been turned down because, as Professor James Mavor commented, Namier "has the misfortune to have the Jewish characteristic of indistinct articulation strongly developed." (133) Needless to say, even those Jews with perfect articulation were systematically denied a variety of professional positions.

The post-war chapters document the withering of anti-Semitism and the strong impact of Holocaust survivors, who by 1990 comprised some 30 to 40 percent of Jews in Canada. Emphasis on Jewish labour and leftism declined in the face of the community's prosperity and prominence. The non-European cast of recent Jewish immigration gave the community a more varied face. Tulchinsky presents abundant statistics on the changing nature of the Jewish community and its demographic challenges, including the possibility that "Jewry's very survival was at risk" (480) in the face of assimilation and intermarriage.

Tulchinsky takes a balanced approach in that he covers not just the main conservative tendency in Canadian Judaism but also the left, working-class groups such as the Arbeiter Ring, Peretz Shule, and the United Jewish People's Order. But I think Tulchinsky suggests a sense of identification with Israel that may not presently exist as strongly as it did 15 or 20 years ago.

With its balanced synthesis of political, economic, and social history, Tulchinsky's book can be regarded as the standard account of Canadian Jewish history.

GENE HOMEL

British Columbia Institute of Technology

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