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Chapter 5: Canadian Jews and Politics
Despite the fact that they are both liberal democracies, Canada and the United States are
different in ways which have a bearing on the political outlook and behavior of their
Jewish citizens, including Chassidim. In Canada, according to Daniel Elazar, one of the
foremost scholars of the American and Canadian Jewish communities, Jews are an
ethnocultural minority in an ethnically diverse society, aimed at cultural pluralism” 1
Jews, assert Harold Troper and Morton Weinfield are a multicultural community, par
excellence, combining a high degree of cultural retention with mainstream economic
success.2 Though they are categorized as European, rather than as non-white, nonEuropean “visible minorities”, Canadian Jews share the political perspective of the
underdog, just as in the U.S. Canadian Jews, like their American counterparts, vote
consistently liberal and are strong defenders of civil liberties, both their own and those of
other minorities. They are driven less by economic concerns than they are by concerns
about individual rights. This is why, despite the sympathy that many Quebec Jews feel
for the attempts by French speakers to preserve their culture and language, their
sympathy is tempered by their stronger commitment to individual rights when those two
principles appear at odds, as they often do.
Nathan Glazer, in contrasting American and Canadian Jews emphasizes that Canada,
because it was based on two distinct, national groups at its founding, gave more
opportunity for incoming minority groups “to select group maintenance as a possibility.
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Thus it appears there is somewhat less integration, somewhat greater commitment to
group maintenance among Slavic groups and Jews who went to Canada, compared with
groups of the same origins that went to the United States.”3 The ideal in the U.S. was one
of unitary culture and shared American identity. Whereas the U.S. was established as a
federation of states defined politically and territorially, Canada was established as a
federation of peoples organized into different provinces.4 For this reason, Canada appears
more receptive to the concept of group rights. Its political system is also more responsive
to organized political activity on the part of groups.
Canadian Jews have an ambivalent status in the Canadian polity. They are counted in the
official Canadian census as both a religion and an ethnic group. Jews are the only group
that is Statistics Canada permits to fall into two categories. Canada has considered
“Jewish” to be both religion and ethnicity for a century. Censuses in years ending with
one have asked about religion and ethnic background since 1901. (mini-censuses in years
ending with six ask about ethnicity only). The 1991 census found 318,000 respondents
who claimed to be Jewish by religion and 368,000 who listed themselves as Jewish
according to ethnicity.
Academics contest the meaning of the numbers, with some arguing that the higher the
percentage of Jews identifying themselves in terms of ethnicity, rather than religion, the
higher the rate of assimilation. Whatever the significance of the breakdown itself, it is
clear that the Canadian political system, and Canadian Jews, themselves, view Jews as
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both a religion and an ethnic group, whereas in the U.S. census, Jews, as a group are
invisible. There is no category that would identify Jews by either religion or ethnicity.
Whether or not Canada’s policy of recognizing Jews as both a religion and ethnic group
affects how Jews are regarded and responded to in the political process is unclear. There
is no indication that Jews in Canada have, as a result of their official categorization,
enjoyed more political clout than their counterparts in the United States. Since both
countries’ electoral system registers only individual votes, Jews in both countries are, at
least as a group, at an obvious disadvantage, numerically speaking. Only in local
elections, where there is a large enough concentration of Jews in a given district, can
Jews wield any kind of group power at the ballot box. Accordingly, Jews in both Canada
and the U.S. have developed other political strategies in order to make their collective
voice heard on those issues where there may actually exist something like a shared
Jewish interest. Despite feeling at home in Canada, Jews are acutely aware of their
minority status. Like American Jewry, they retain a certain sense of political insecurity,
despite the fact that by all measures, they have done well for themselves in both
countries. As the old joke goes, “Jews just can’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.”
On October 8, 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau declared that Canada “has no
official culture”, making it the first nation to formally endorse multiculturalism with
legal authority, in 1971 declaring it a positive attribute of Canadian society, worthy of
official and financial support. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1985 and the
Multiculturalism Act of 1988 reinforced the status of the Third Force, First Nations and
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Quebecois. According to Will Kymlicka, multiculturalism is intended to preserve cultures
without hampering access to equality of opportunity in the economic and political realms.
5
This makes Canada, according to Fleras, the world’s first postmodern society, having
transcended the idea of a unified national culture to which all ethnic groups ideally must
assimilate.
The fact that Canada has been more inclined to recognize multiculturalism than has been
the United States, is part of the legacy of a society that from its earliest history, divided
along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines. The “First Nations”, or the native peoples
have operated under a different legal status than have the native peoples of the Unites
States. Juxtaposed upon these original inhabitants, the British and the French colonizers
constitute two additional permanent political entities. By the 1970s, what became known
as the “third force”, or recent immigrants, increasingly from Third World Countries,
began to vocalize their desire that minority cultural groups be granted more political
recognition, commensurate with their new prominence.
Unlike the United States, which had a Bill of Rights attached to its Constitution before it
went to the separate states for ratification, the Canadians had no specific protections for
individuals. Rights were granted to groups. For instance, Jews received their rights as
Jews, not as individuals by a special act called the “Jew Bill” of 1832. It was a law “to
declare persons professing the Jewish religion entitled to all the rights and privileges of
the other subjects of his majesty in this Province”. Without a Bill of Rights, the
Canadians managed to solve the problem of state-backed religious discrimination. The
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Canadian government did not have to contend with the complications of federalism, in
which individual states could impose laws in contradiction to the federal constitution, In
Canada, the provinces could not impose piecemeal legislation in contradiction to Ottawa
without it being voided by the Court.6
In more recent times, the Canadian Constitution, and more specifically, the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms have provided more specific and concrete guarantees. Section 2 of
the 1982 Constitution Act affirms freedom of religious worship and provides, therefore,
the legal basis for freedom of association for Jews and other religions. Section 15
prohibits discrimination, and Section 15.2 legalizes affirmative action. Section 27
enunciates the principle of “multiculturalism” Therefore; the government can legislate
affirmatively on religious matters, and can penetrate and demand remedy for private
discrimination. Apart from the Constitution, the Criminal Code of Canada now contains
section 281.1 and 181.2 against hate literature. This legislation was passed with the
support of the Canadian Jewish Congress, which, while sharing its American
counterpart’s strong commitment to civil liberties, did not share its angst over this sort of
limitation on free expression.
In the United States, Jews received their rights as individual Americans at the same time
as everyone else, and were granted no political recognition as a group. On the other hand,
the U.S. Bill of Rights did not immediately or unequivocally guarantee the protection of
individual rights by the states, but came only gradually to do so through selective
incorporation. When states did discriminate against Jews and other minorities, the federal
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government could not grant relief by fiat from Washington, D.C. as Canada could from
Ottawa, because of the Ninth Amendment, which granted residual powers to the states. In
many states of America, Jews suffered political and economic disabilities well into the
19th, and in several cases, the 20th century. They had to fight it out on a state-by-state
basis to secure their rights as citizens and individuals.
Quebec, the province with the largest concentration of Chassidim, almost all of whom
reside in, or immediately outside of Montreal, adopted its own version of the
Multiculturalism Act in 1988. The British North America Act of 1867 gave Quebec
powers in the area of civil law and education, which the Quebec government has sought
to use to promote French cultural and linguistic dominance. Quebecois were initially
hostile toward the Canadian version of the act because they suspected that the concept of
multiculturalism might really be a cover for an attempt to reduce the political power and
status of the French speaking population, by treating it as simply one among a multitude
of coequal minorities. In order to prevent the French character of Quebec from being
diluted, the Quebec version employs the term “interculturalism”. This formulation of
minority cultural rights envisions the various minority cultures as existing against the
backdrop of French culture, recognized but subsidiary. This continues to be problematic
for non-Francophones because the logic of Quebec’s own position as a minority within
Anglophone Canada requires that it be supportive of minorities within the minority. It has
certainly sought to project that image. Its two stated policy objectives with regard to
ethnic groups are sufficiently vague as to permit almost anything in reality: equal
opportunity without discrimination, and the preservation of culture.
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It has already become a cliché to describe Canada as a “mosaic” and the U.S. as a
“melting pot”, but despite the Canadian and Quebec Provincial governments’ official
policies of multiculturalism, assimilation and acculturation of minority groups has
proceeded apace just as in the United States. For a variety of reasons, some internal and
some external to the community, in Canada, the Jews remain the most resistant of all
ethnic groups to the strong, countervailing forces of assimilation. They are able to
preserve high levels of identification and community involvement, and lower levels of
intermarriage, in contrast to other Canadian minorities, and in contrast to their American
counterparts.
The Jews of Canada
The differences between the Canadian and American Jewish communities are often
attributed to the historical differences in immigration patterns, in addition to the
differences in the political cultures of the two countries. Despite the cultural similarities
of the two countries, and the fact that they are both categorized as liberal democracies,
their political environments and histories are sufficiently distinct to have fostered
different organizational structures and levels of community solidarity among their Jewish
citizens. But with respect to their Chassidic communities, both the United States and
Canada have witnessed a similar dialectic of isolation and interaction. In both countries,
the Chassidim have faced the ironic reality of having to become more politically involved
in order to remain more autonomous.
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The sequence and timing of immigration, and countries of origin of Jewish immigrants
has differed in Canada and the U.S. Jews were a small but noticeable presence in the U.S.
from colonial times, first petitioning for admission the New York under the Peter
Stuyvesant in the 16th century. The first significant wave of Jewish immigration in the
mid-19th century, were Sephardim, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal
in the 1490s. Having resided in the countries of central Europe, primarily Germany, they
were heavily influenced by Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, or Jewish
Enlightenment. These immigrants subscribed for the most part, to Reform Judaism,
which gained a dominant position in American Jewish life by the end of the century,
aided by the fact that its theology which emphasized individual conscience and
Enlightenment style rationailty, was congruent with the Protestant and liberal cultural
underpinnings of the country.
By the time Orthodox immigrants began to arrive in large numbers, fleeing the series of
pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s, and later, the First World
War, Reform Judaism and its offshoot, Conservative Judaism were well entrenched
politically as well as socially. The influx of Chassidim did not begin until after the
Second World War and the Hungarian uprising of 1956. They arrived as a small, tattered
remnant and remained a numerical, theological and political minority even within the
Jewish community.
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Meanwhile, Jewish immigration to Canada did not begin in earnest until about fifty years
later than in the U.S. This wave of immigrants came primarily from Eastern Europe and
Russia. Their communities had not been heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, so
these Jews were largely Orthodox. In Canada, they maintained the theological upper
hand, and to this day, the Reform and Conservative movements have made few inroads,
especially in Quebec. The majority of Canadian Jews, even those who do not attend
synagogues regularly, label themselves Orthodox. In addition, after 1957, large numbers
of Jews began to arrive in Canada from the countries of North Africa. These Sephardim,
who are primarily Orthodox, though with their own distinctive language, customs, music,
food and traditions, now constitute close to 25% of the Jewish population of Quebec.
More recently, Israeli, Soviet, and Ethiopian Jews have added to the distinctive Canadian
Jewish cultural mix.
Finally, a higher percentage of Canadian Jews are foreign born than American Jews, and
a higher percentage of Canadian Jews are survivors of the Holocaust, which has had an
impact on the political attitudes of the community. Canadian Jews, then, are religiously
more homogeneous and more Orthodox than American Jews. Jews who identify
themselves in religious, rather than ethnic terms, are statistically less likely to intermarry.
This partially explains the lower rates of outmarriage among Canadian Jews who unlike
their American counterparts, are less likely to see Judaism as an ethnic identification. The
timing and pattern of Jewish immigration to Canada and the U.S. has had an influence on
the two communities, though sociologists like Morton Weinfeld do not rate these as
decisive in explaining the differences between the two communities.
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Canadian Jews entered a political stage on which the major actors were two nationalities
and their respective religions: British Protestants and French Catholics, and the sizable
indigenous population. A larger role in framing political issues and divides has been
played by race than religion, in the U.S. Moreover, the founding of the U.S. was
intimately connected to religious dissenters, which is reflected in the vigilance with
which Americans protect the separation of Church and State. Race and class have been
the most salient and divisive political issues for Americans. In Canada, the backdrop
against which political life has been played out has been language, ethnicity and national
origin. While Section two of the Constitution guarantees religious freedom, it does not
strictly prohibit Church-State entanglement. Canada has not, therefore, experienced the
ongoing legal and legislative disputes over nativity scenes, crucifixes, or menorahs on
public property which seem to engage, if not monopolize Jewish political energies during
much of America’s history.
The Chassidic courts of Montreal tend to be understudied by analysts of the Canadian
Jewish community just as they tend to be underrated as a political force. Just as in the
U.S., it is surprising how many Canadian studies of the Jewish community neglect to
even mention the presence of Chassidim in their midst. This is partly explained by their
tendency to shy away from involvement in institutionalized Jewish life. There are several
reasons for this, including the fact that as more recent immigrants, the Chassidim arrived
to find a well-organized Jewish establishment already in place. Chassidim did not want to
be associated with the political positions or theological orientation of these organizations.
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Chassidim in both New York and Montreal share a political predisposition that has
ancient roots in Europe. They still seem to feel most comfortable in the political realm
when they can cultivate personal relationships with government officials. In Quebec
politics, in particular, it is still clear that some things can best be accomplished by special
pleading through the agency of a modern-day equivalent of a “Shtadlan”(intermediary),
who since medieval times, has spoken in behalf of Jewish communities throughout
Europe and North Africa.
1
Elazar, Daniel, Community and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry, (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society,1995) p.33
2
Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld, “The Canadian Jews and Canadian Multiculturalism” in Adelman,
Howard and Simpson, John H., eds., Multiculturalism, Jews, and Identities in Canada, (Jerusalem: The
Magnus Press, 1996)
3
Nathan Glazer, “Individual Rights Against Group Rights” in Kymlicka, Will, ed. The Rights of Minority
Cultures, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995) p.135
4
ibid
5
Fleras, Augie and Elliot, Jean Leonard, Unequal Relations, (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall,
1996)p.404
6
Gershman, Gary Paul, Hamiltonian Ideals and the Bill of Rights, (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1993)
(Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Duke University, 1992)