Jews Inventing Ethnicity?: A Review Essay

Abstract

At FIRST GLANCE only the ethnicity of their subjects link these two histories of the Jewish experience in Canada. Taking Root, exquisitely written by a senior Cana dian historian, is a comprehensive account of the history of the Canadian Jewish community over two centuries, from the 1760s to the 1920s; Sweatshop Strife is a case study of an urban working-class community over a 40 year period in which Jewish ethnicity was just one of several factors shaping self-identity, culture, and social behaviour. Tushinsky's book sets out to establish the specific contours of the Jewish community in Canada. While acknowledging that Canadian and American shared many characteristics ? dialect, religion, minority status ? he argues forcefully that the Canadian experience moulded into a distinctive and, in some ways, a homogenous community. The narrative of the book, thus, is not only a general history of Canadian Jews; it is also an argument supporting the idea of their uniqueness. As a comprehensive text, the volume describes the various Jewish migrations in detail. It begins with the coming of a few dozen English-speaking following the conquest of New France and the establishment of a tiny Jewish congregation in Montreal in 1768; it ends with the integration of the 100,000 East European Jewish immigrants into Canadian society by the 1920s, a phenomenon that led the Canadian community to reach a point of maturation. Tushinsky's Royden Loewen, Jews Inventing Ethnicity?: A Review Essay, Labour/Le Travail, 35 (Spring 1995), pp. 309-18.