The history of the Jews in Canada goes back to the 1700s. Canadian Jews, whether by culture, ethnicity, or religion, form the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by those in Israel, the United States and France. In the 2021 census, 335,295 people reported their religion as Jewish, accounting for 0.9% of the Canadian population. Some estimates have placed the enlarged number of Jews, such as those who may be culturally or ethnically Jewish, though not necessarily religiously, at more than 400,000 people, or approximately 1.1% of the Canadian population.
The Jewish community in Canada is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews. Other Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented and include Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Bene Israel. Converts to Judaism also comprise the Jewish-Canadian community, which manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions and the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance. Though they are a small minority, they have had an open presence in the country since the first Jewish immigrants arrived with Governor Edward Cornwallis to establish Halifax, Nova Scotia (1749).Sheldon Godfrey and Judy Godfrey. Search Out the Land" The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867. McGill Queen's University Press. 1997. pp. 76–77;Bell, Winthrop Pickard. The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia:The History of a piece of arrested British Colonial Policy in the Eighteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961 The 1760s saw the first Jewish settlers in New France who arrived in Montreal after the British conquest of the city, among them was Aaron Hart who is considered the father of Canadian Jewry. His son Ezekiel Hart experienced one of the first well documented cases of antisemitism in Canada. Hart was consistently prevented from taking his seat at the Quebec legislature, with members contending he could not take the oath of office as a Jew, which included the phrase "on the true faith of a Christian". By the 1970s and 1980s, most legal barriers were removed, and Jews began to hold significant positions in Canadian society. However, antisemitism persists, evident in hate crimes and extremist groups.
Settlement (1783–1897) Prior to the British conquest of New France, Jews lived in Nova Scotia. There were no official Jews in Quebec because when King Louis XIV made Canada officially a province of the Kingdom of France in 1663, he decreed that only Roman Catholics could enter the colony. Esther Brandeau, a Jewish girl who arrived in 1738 disguised as a boy, remained for one year before she was returned for refusing to convert to Catholicism.Brandeau, Esther Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online The earliest subsequent documentation of Jews in Canada are British Army records from the French and Indian War, the North American part of the Seven Years' War. In 1760, General Jeffrey Amherst and 1st Baron Amherst attacked and seized Montreal, winning Canada for the British. Several Jews were members of his regiments, and among his officer corps were five Jews: Samuel Jacobs, Emmanuel de Cordova, Aaron Hart, Hananiel Garcia, and Isaac Miramer.Canada's Jews: A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s. Louis Rosenberg, Morton Weinfeld. 1993.
The most prominent of these five were the business associates Samuel Jacobs and Aaron Hart. In 1759, in his capacity as Commissariat to the British Army on the staff of General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Jacobs was recorded as the first Jewish resident of Quebec, and thus the first Canadian Jew. From 1749, Jacobs had been supplying British army officers at Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1758, he was at Fort Cumberland. The following year, he was with Wolfe's army at Quebec."Canada's Entrepreneurs: From The Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash: Portraits" from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. By Andrew Ross and Andrew Smith, 2012 Remaining in Canada, he became the dominant merchant of the Richelieu valley and Seigneur of Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu.Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867. Sheldon Godfrey, 1995 Because he married a French Canadian girl and brought his children up as Catholics, Jacobs is often overlooked as the first permanent Jewish settler in Canada in favour of Aaron Hart, who married a Jew and brought up his children, or at least his sons, in the Jewish tradition.
Lieutenant Hart first arrived in Canada from New York City as Commissariat to Jeffery Amherst's forces at Montreal in 1760. After his service in the army ended, he settled at Trois-Rivières, where he became a wealthy landowner and respected community member. He had four sons, Moses, Benjamin, Ezekiel and Alexander, all of whom would become prominent in Montreal and help build the Jewish Community. Ezekiel was elected to the legislature of Lower Canada in the by-election of April 11, 1807, becoming the first Jew in an official opposition in the British Empire. Ezekiel was expelled from the legislature with his religion a major factor.Denis Vaugeois, "Hart, Ezekiel", in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003, accessed June 9, 2013, online Sir James Henry Craig, Governor-General of Lower Canada, tried to protect Hart, but French Canadians saw this as an attempt of the British to undermine them and the legislature expelled Hart in both 1808 and following his re-election in 1809. The legislature then barred Jews from holding elected office in Canada until the passage of the 1832 Emancipation Act.
Most of the early Jewish Canadians were either fur traders or served in the British Army troops. A few were merchants or landowners. Although Montreal's Jewish community was small, numbering only around 200, they built the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Montreal, Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue in Canada, in 1768. It remained the only synagogue in Montreal until 1846. Some sources date the actual establishment of the synagogue to 1777 on Notre Dame Street.
Revolts and protests soon began calling for responsible government in Canada. The law requiring the oath "on my faith as a Christian" was amended in 1829 to provide for Jews to refuse the oath. In 1831, prominent French-Canadian politician Louis-Joseph Papineau sponsored a law which granted full equivalent political rights to Jews, twenty-seven years before anywhere else in the British Empire.
In 1832, partly because of the work of Ezekiel Hart, a law was passed that guaranteed Jews the same political rights and freedoms as Christians. In the early 1830s, German Jew Samuel Liebshitz founded Jewsburg (now incorporated as German Mills into Kitchener, Ontario), a village in Upper Canada. Kitchener Public Library
In 1841 Isaac Gottschalk Ascher arrived in Montreal with his family, including Isidore a highly acclaimed Canadian poet and novelist, and Jacob A Canadian Chess Champion (1878, 1883). By 1850, there were still only 450 Jews living in Canada, mostly concentrated in Montreal.
In 1856 Albert Gottschalk Ascher together with Lewis Samuel rented the upper floor of Coombe's Drug Store at the corner of Yonge Street and Richmond Street in Toronto for High Holy Day services which became only the second temple in Canada). A year later in 1857 a permanent Torah arrived from Montreal as a gift from Albert's parents, Isaac Gottschalk Ascher & Rachel Altmann. It was inscribed in Hebrew to "The Holy Congregation, Blossoms of Holiness [Pirchei Kodesh], in the city of Toronto." פרחי קדש — Toronto Holy Blossom Temple
Abraham Jacob Franks settled in Quebec City in 1767. His son, David Salesby (or Salisbury) Franks, who afterward became head of the Montreal Jewish community, also lived in Quebec prior to 1774. Abraham Joseph, who was long a prominent figure in public affairs in Quebec City, took up his residence there shortly after his father died in 1832. Quebec City's Jewish population for many years remained very small, and early efforts at organization were fitful and short-lived. A cemetery was acquired in 1853, and a place of worship was opened in a hall in the same year, where services were held intermittently. In 1892, the Jewish population of Quebec City had sufficiently augmented to permit the permanent establishment of the present synagogue, Beth Israel. The congregation was granted the right to keep a register in 1897. Other communal institutions were the Quebec Hebrew Sick Benefit Association, the Quebec Hebrew Relief Association for Immigrants, and the Quebec Zionist Society. By 1905, the Jewish population was about 350, in a total population of 68,834.
According to the census of 1871, 1,115 Jews were living in Canada, including 409 in Montreal, 157 in Toronto, and 131 in Hamilton.
Community growth (1862–1939)
With the beginning of the pogroms of Russia in the 1880s, and continuing through the growing antisemitism of the early 20th century, millions of Jews began to flee the Pale of Settlement and other areas of Eastern Europe for the West. Although the United States received the overwhelming majority of these immigrants, Canada was also a destination of choice due to Government of Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway efforts to develop Canada after Confederation. Between 1880 and 1930, the Jewish population of Canada grew to over 155,000. At the time, according to the 1901 census of Montreal, only 6,861 Jews were residents.
Jewish immigrants brought a tradition of establishing a communal body, called a kehilla, to look after the social and welfare needs of their less fortunate. Virtually all of these Jewish refugees were very poor. Wealthy Jewish philanthropists, who had come to Canada much earlier, felt it was their social responsibility to help their fellow Jews get established in this new country. One such man was Abraham de Sola, who founded the Hebrew Philanthropic Society. In Montreal and Toronto, a wide range of communal organizations and groups developed. Recently arrived immigrant Jews also founded landsmenschaften, guilds of people who came originally from the same village.
Most of these immigrants established communities in the larger cities. Canada's first ever census recorded that in 1871 there were 1,115 Jews in Canada; 409 in Montreal, 157 in Toronto, 131 in Hamilton and the rest were dispersed in small communities along the St. Lawrence River. When elected mayor of Alexandria in 1914, George Simon was the second Jewish mayor in Canada (after David Oppenheimer, who was mayor of Vancouver from 1888 to 1891) and the youngest mayor in the country at the time. He died suddenly in 1969 while serving his tenth term in office.
A community of about 100 settled in Victoria, British Columbia to open shops to supply prospectors during the Cariboo Gold Rush (and later the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon). This led to the opening of a synagogue in Victoria, British Columbia in 1862. In 1875, B'nai B'rith Canada was formed as a Jewish fraternal organization. When British Columbia sent their delegation to Ottawa to agree on the colony's entry into Confederation, a Jew, Henry Nathan, Jr., was among them. Nathan eventually became the first Canadian Jewish Member of Parliament. In 1899, the Federation of Canadian Zionist Societies was founded to champion Zionism and became the first nationwide Jewish group. The overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews were Ashkenazim who came from either the Austrian Empire or the Russian Empire. Jewish women tended to be particularly active in Canadian Zionism, perhaps because many of the Zionist groups were secular.