From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Jews/Morton Weinfeld
The forces that propelled Jews to come to Canada are easily understood: economic opportunity and the fear of persecution. A continuing theme in the history of immigration to this country has been the role played by the established community in welcoming the new arrivals. Conventional wisdom often stresses the elitism of Jews already in Canada – more affluent, better educated, and influenced by German, British, or Sephardic culture – in the face of masses of eastern European immigrants. The latter brought with them the culture of the shtetl, the small Jewish town or village popularized in the fiction of Sholem Aleichem. These Jews were overwhelmingly working class or small pedlars. They spoke Yiddish, and their form of worship and ritual was largely Orthodox. Many belonged to unions and were influenced by socialism and communism in the general and specifically Jewish varieties. The ideologies of Yiddishism and Zionism in their various forms were common as well. Thus many of the established Jews viewed these immigrants with alarm. They may have feared that the strange newcomers would disturb the equilibrium and stimulate anti-Semitism.
For their part, the immigrants from eastern Europe resented their alleged benefactors as inauthentic Jews and opposed to working-class values. They brought with them a vibrant Yiddish-based culture that facilitated their integration. They created fraternal, self-help, and mutual benefit associations, landsmanshaften (representing Jews from specific regions of eastern Europe), and cultural institutions such as newspapers, theatres, schools, libraries, and political organizations. Many found work in the garment industry, where their bosses were frequently German or eastern European Jews who had arrived earlier.
The eastern European immigrants to Canada differed from their counterparts in the United States in an important respect. The bulk of the American migration occurred in the period 1880 to 1900. In the case of Canada, it was more concentrated in the years 1900–20. The significance of this difference is that the Yiddish culture of American Jews was more assimilationist. The Canadian immigrants, arriving somewhat later, had been under the influence of the nationalist ideologies of Zionism and Bundism for a longer period of time. Zionism favoured emigration to Palestine (Erez Israel); Bundism celebrated Yiddish culture, socialist politics, and a territorial solution to the “Jewish question” in eastern Europe. Both these ideological currents were more nationalistic and resistant to assimilation than the views held by earlier immigrants. This fact may explain the higher degree of Jewish cultural retention in Canada as compared to the United States.
Hostility to newer waves of immigration has also been apparent in responses by the established community to the arrival of Holocaust survivors after World War II and in Montreal to the North African migration of the 1950s and 1960s. However, it is worth stressing that, whatever its motive, communal support among Jews for poor immigrants is remarkable when compared with that shown by other immigrant groups in Canada. It is part of the high level of Jewish “institutional completeness” (to use the term suggested by sociologist Raymond Breton) found in the community today. Moreover, the insecurity that animated German or Anglicized Jews should be understood in the context of its time, rather than from a modern perspective.
In 1871 over 93 percent of Canadian Jews lived in the eastern part of the country, with about 48 percent in Ontario and 42 percent in Quebec. The mass migration in the following decades served first to increase the populations in Quebec and western Canada, through the efforts of the Jewish Colonization Association to establish farm settlements. By 1931, as mass migration ended, 80 percent of Jews were in Ontario and Quebec and almost 20 percent in western Canada. Much of this settlement was urban. The proportion of the Jewish population identified by the census as rural declined from 33 percent in 1871 and 21 percent ten years later to 6 percent in 1911 and 4 percent in the following two decades. Nevertheless, it accounted for substantial numbers, increasing from 41 in 1871 to 5,559 in 1931. The proportion of the rural population was highest in the west, notably in Saskatchewan; over 21 percent of Jews in that province lived in non-urban areas.
There have been two significant patterns in Jewish settlement in Canada. The dominant story is that of heavy concentration in Montreal and Toronto, which created a dense, quintessential urban Jewish community and culture similar to that found in the northeastern United States. The occupational profile and the rhythm of Jewish life in these cities were urban and industrial. Jews clustered in clearly identified areas. In Montreal the district was defined by streets such as Saint-Laurent (the Main), Saint-Urbain, and Park Avenue, from Mount Royal (including parts of Outremont) down to the waterfront. The greatest Jewish concentrations were found in the wards of Saint-Louis and Laurier, where 55 and 51 percent of the population respectively were Jewish in 1931. The immigrant Jews were centred in this downtown area of Montreal, while the wealthier, anglicized Canadian-born Jews lived in such uptown areas as Westmount.
In Toronto, eastern European Jews were concentrated in “the Ward,” bounded by Queen, Yonge, and Gerrard streets and University Avenue; later they moved to the Kensington-Spadina area to the west. But these concentrations were somewhat less dense than in Montreal, with only 31 percent of Toronto’s ward 4, for example, being Jewish in 1931. Winnipeg in that year was home to over 17,000 Jews, who clustered largely in the west end along Selkirk Avenue, though less so than in Montreal or Toronto. Winnipeg’s ward 3 was the area of early concentration: 20 percent of its population in 1931 was Jewish.
The immigrant Jewish experience is often symbolized by these neighbourhoods. They were in many ways recreations of the eastern European shtetl. Yiddish was to be heard on the streets and seen on storefronts. Jewish butchers, bakers, and grocers supplied goods to a largely Jewish clientele. The residents of these neighbourhoods were predominantly working class, but they were eager to escape upward through commerce or education as opportunities opened up to them. Fierce political and ideological debates were the order of the day. They pitted the Orthodox against freethinkers, Yiddishists against Hebraists, Zionists against Jewish territorialists, socialists against Communists against Labour Zionists, and so on.
But Jews in Canada were never exclusively urban and never to be found only in the eastern part of the country. Farming communities existed in Quebec and Ontario before World War II, though they were small in number and size. From earliest times, Jews had also spread westward and even northward throughout the Canadian land mass. The first Jew elected to political office was Selim Franklin, who became a member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in 1860. The first to sit in the House of Commons, Henry Nathan in 1871, represented Victoria. The migration to the west was in large part orchestrated by the established community, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Prominent individuals in Montreal, faced with the beginnings of mass migration of Russian Jews during the pogroms of 1881, developed plans to direct the newcomers to the west. Several attempts were made to establish farm colonies on the prairies. After initial failure, one was founded in 1888 in Wapella, Saskatchewan, that was reasonably successful. Community leaders in Montreal were able to persuade Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a wealthy philanthropist, and his Jewish Colonization Association to underwrite some farm settlements in western Canada, and in 1892 the colony of Hirsch (in present-day Saskatchewan) was established.
With changes to Canadian immigration policy under the government of Wilfrid Laurier beginning in 1896, more opportunities were available for Jewish migrants to the west. Over a dozen farm colonies and settlements were established on the prairies between 1882 and 1911; none would survive past World War II. Not all Jews in the west were farmers; many were traders and pedlars. Winnipeg quickly emerged as the third centre for Canadian Jewry. The community there has tended to be more rooted in Yiddish culture, more progressive in its outlook and politics, and more integrated into mainstream social and political life. Jews have been prominent in all three major political parties in Manitoba. In some ways, Jewish life on the prairies, particularly given the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian and other European immigrant groups and the absence of the strong Anglocentric elite characteristic of eastern cities, most closely approximated Old World conditions.
By many criteria, Jewish life was more “authentic” in the immigrant era. However, one must be careful not to over-romanticize the quality of newcomers’ experiences. Certainly, the satirical writing of novelist Mordecai Richler, which some have seen as focusing on the sleazier side of Jewish immigrant life, offers a useful counterpoint. The degree of religious observance among immigrants rapidly gave way to the requirements for economic success (such as working on the Sabbath) in the new society. Although less extensive than that experienced by some immigrant communities, poverty, family disintegration, and petty and organized crime were to be found in Jewish neighbourhoods. The crude (unadjusted) crime rate for Canadian Jews in 1933 was 386 convictions for indictable offences per 100,000, compared to the national average of 317. However, adjusted for rural-urban distribution, it was only 226. The kind of family and intergenerational problems documented in the American Yiddish press were probably also found in Canada, and although the newcomers had escaped the eastern European pogroms, anti-Semitism was common in employment, in social and educational situations, and in the form of street brawls with Gentile toughs.
Recent immigration and population shifts have repeated both patterns of settlement. Toronto and Montreal remain dominant centres, but more of the population has moved west. By 1991, of the 369,565 persons who claimed to be wholly or partially of Jewish ethnicity, less than 2 percent of lived in the Maritimes, 27 percent in Quebec, 53 percent in Ontario, and about 18 percent in the west, with British Columbia accounting for 8 percent. Jewish immigrants, both earlier ones and recent arrivals, are to be found in all regions of Canada. In 1991 about 33 percent of Jews in Canada by religion were foreign-born. The lowest concentrations were in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where 19 and 10 percent respectively of Jews were immigrants. For the other provinces the ratios were 36 percent in Quebec, 32 percent in Ontario, 19 percent in Manitoba, 25 percent in Saskatchewan, 31 percent in Alberta, and 32 percent in British Columbia.
Yet even as Jews have spread throughout the country and moved away from the original areas of settlement in large cities, they have retained a high degree of often self-imposed residential segregation. In Montreal and Toronto they are the most segregated ethnic group. For most communities, high educational attainment and post-immigrant status are generally associated with greater dispersion within metropolitan areas. Not so for Jews. Even as they move into the suburbs and mix to a greater extent than in the past, they tend to cluster in disproportionate numbers in middle-class neighbourhoods, moving their institutions – schools, synagogues, community centres, butcher shops, and bakeries – with them. As determined by religion, Jews comprised just 4 percent of the population of the Toronto census metropolitan area in 1991 and 3 percent in Montreal; yet in both cities there are clearly identified Jewish neighbourhoods.
Jews in suburban Toronto and Montreal, even more than is the case in American cities, have created so-called gilded ghettos. Indeed, one of the pioneering works of Canadian social research dealt with the fictitious suburban community of “Crestwood Heights” in Toronto in the 1950s, which was close to 25 percent Jewish. Early segregation may have resulted from discrimination on the part of landlords or real estate agents or from poverty. But Jews may choose for reasons of convenience to live near their own institutions and other Jews. This tendency is a manifestation of the high degree of survivalism to be found among members of the community in Canada. Given the technological revolutions in transportation and communications, there might seem to be less need for ethnic neighbourhoods, though Jewish families in the suburbs may on occasion visit the older areas of settlement to enjoy a more authentic gastronomic experience. But clearly there still remain an exceptionally strong set of forces that result in the creation of Jewish neighbourhoods or concentrations away from the downtown core. Côte-Saint-Luc or Dollard-des-Ormeaux in Montreal and Forest Hill or Thornhill in the greater Toronto region did not emerge by accident.
Toronto has now surpassed Montreal as the dominant urban centre for Canada’s Jewish population, as it has for Canada generally. Using 1991 census data for Jews by religion, 48 percent (151,115) live in Toronto. Montreal remains in second place with 96,710, but Winnipeg with 13,325 Jews has been overtaken by Vancouver, which has 14,360. Jewish communities in small towns and rural areas are becoming less and less viable; at the same time, the organized community has tried to recognize the special problems of such settlements. Tension between the urban centres and the rural areas has been a feature of national Jewish life, as it has for Canada as a whole.
