State of the Field: The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography

Abstract

State of the Field:The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography David S. Koffman (bio) and Pierre Anctil (bio) On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an apology for Canada's 1939 federal government decision to deny entry to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that had carried 937 Jewish refugees. The ship would eventually return to Germany and 227 of its passengers would ultimately be caught in the Nazi death dragnet. The refusal of multiple countries to accept these refugees (Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each accepted asylum seekers) helped solidify the Nazis' confidence that the western world didn't care much for the plight of Jews, already apparent at the Evian Conference a year prior. In Canada, the MS St. Louis became shorthand for the country's abysmal wartime record regarding Jewish refugees. Canada accepted the fewest Jews of any refugee-accepting nation in the world: all told, a meager 7,400 souls.1 Credit for the fact that Canadians remember the St. Louis episode and that Canada's prime minister would acknowledge its dismal Naziera policies on immigration and refugees, is largely due to the scholarly work of the Canadian Jewish historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper.2 None is Too Many became and remains essential reading for Canadian political leaders, academics, and public intellectuals. The book has been credited with influencing humanitarian and immigration policy decisions [End Page 403] since it was first published in 1983.3 (Curiously, it has not yet been translated into French.) Rarely have historians of Canadian Jewish life reached so far into Canadian national public consciousness, but the case allows us to see something of the impact that Canadian Jewish historical scholarship has had on Canadian life.4 This essay aims to introduce readers to the literatures of and debates within the field of Canadian Jewish history, a field we characterize as maturing, if segmented, and one that has remained publicly engaged since the 1980s. WIDE-ANGLE LENSES For a relatively small field, Canadian Jewish history has received an outsized share of attention. There have been several attempts to capture, qualify, and quantify output within the field. A 1992 annotated bibliography by Stuart Schoenfeld and Dwight Daignault5 was soon followed by Morton Weinfeld's sociological analysis of the features that distinguish Canadian Jewry from its American counterpart.6 Weinfeld predicted that the two Jewish communities would ultimately converge into one indistinguishable, continental Jewry. These two works complement Gerald Tulchinsky's 2008 Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, a synthesis of his two previous volumes.7 Until his death in 2017, Tulchinsky was widely [End Page 404] recognized as the preeminent historian of Canadian Jewish life. His long-standing interests in political, labor, and business history shaped his view, and that of others, of the Canadian Jewish past as a history that focused on the social life of Jews as the community developed an institutional grounding for self-preservation and defense. According to this view, immigrants and their descendants worked to integrate into local and national cultures, and to safeguard their interests in the realm of politics, both domestic and international. Other historians have treated areas that Tulchinsky's work ignored or deemphasized, including religious transformation and accommodation; developments in Jewish culture, language and letters; and the histories of non-Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox Jewries. Richard Menkis and Ira Robinson have published important studies on the history of Judaism. Menkis has worked on the history of Conservative and Reform Judaism;8 Robinson has published on the Eastern European rabbinate in Canada;9 and the two together cut an innovative path using sermons as sources for interrogating the ideological, contextual, and circulation of religious ideas.10 Yolande Cohen has published extensively on the Sephardi experience in Canada11 —a sub-field that remains understudied—and Rebecca Margolis, Pierre Anctil, and others have published works on the history of Yiddish culture in Canada.12 [End Page 405] Tulchinsky's efforts in writing wide-angle work have been emulated by others over the past decade and a half. One collection foregrounded studies of Canadian Jewish subjects from disciplines largely foreign to Tulchinsky's social history, including visual arts, literature...