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27th August 2008, 03:30 pm
We have two new academic history books on Canadian Jewry. I would like to introduce them side by side because they cover almost exactly the same era and area. I copied the descriptions from the books’ flap. Short excerpts from both books, covering more or less the same topic, are also included so you could compare which author’s writing style you prefer.
| Author(s) |
Sheldon J. and Judith C. Godfrey
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| Title |
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| Subtitle |
The Jews and the growth of equality in British Colonial America 1740-1867 |
The origins of the Canadian Jewish community |
| Published |
1995 |
1993 |
| Cover |
 |
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| Pages |
396 |
341 |
| Major parts |
- Setting the stage
- Act One: British North America, 1749-1790
- Act Two: British North America, 1791-1860
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- Old subjects in the new province, 1760-1846
- Foundations, 1847-1882
- The emergence of a national community, 1882-1900
- The East European era, 1900-1920
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| Description |
Mapping the history of Canadian Jews from the arrival of the first settlers before 1750 through to the 1860s, Search Out the Land introduces a new set of colourful players on Canada’s stage. Ezekiel Solomons, John Franks, Jacob Franks, Chapman Abraham, Rachel Myers, Moses David, Samuel Hart, Elizabeth Lyons, and a host of others now take their appropriate place in Canadian history. Focusing on the significant role played by Jews in British North America in the fight for civil and political rights, the authors compare the development of Canadians’ rights with that in other British jurisdictions of the time and set the contribution of Jews within the context of other minority groups, including French Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Quakers.
Using extensive archival, genealogical, and legal research, the authors prove that settlers other than those of British and French origins were building, exploring, and developing Canada from its inception. |
Jews seeking a new life in Canada faced problems beyond those of other immigrants. Farm colonists often lived in communities too small to afford a rabbi or ritual slaughterer, or even to form a minyan for worship. In French Canada, Protestant and Catholic school boards battled over who was responsible for educating Jewish children. In the cities, the socialist philosophies of Jews fleeing the poverty and oppression of Europe were anathema to aggressive New World capitalists. And when suspicion or resentment arose, there was always someone to revive the old anti-Semitic slurs and myths.
Taking Root is the meticulously researched record of how Canadian Jewry coped with these obstacles, and flourished despite them. The book covers the 160 years from the beginnings of the community in the 1760s to the end of the First World War, including the great European upheavals that forever changed the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe and their migration to Canada.
Canada’s Jews took root in a nation with a distinctive history, political structure, and cultural diversity. Gerald Tulchinsky weaves the threads of Canadian Jewish history into the wider Canadian fabric, and shows how the unique character of this history reflects the political, economic, and social development of the country. Drawing on letters, synagogue records, diaries, newspapers, and biographies, as well as a host of archival sources, Tulchinsky makes Taking Root not just a historical account, but a very personal one. |
| Excerpt |
Page 76
In Halifax, Jews were allowed to become shopkeepers engaged without restriction in retail trade, at a time when “two strange Jews” were not allowed to set up shops in Albany without being naturalized. Thus, in these early years of the colony, we find Isaac Levy and Nathan Nathans “Joyntly concern’d in the Trade of the Shop” as Nathans & Levy until Levy’s death in 1751. Abraham Andrews, an alien and a Jew, was maintaining a shop that sold to the public in 1752, and Mordecai Jones and John Franks were described, respectively, as a “shopkeeper” and “retailer. ” Indeed, if one takes account of the very high percentage of court cases in which Jews were involved - some 20 per cent of the total in peak years during the 1750s - it seems clear that the Jews formed a significant portion of the settlement’s merchant community, even though they constituted no more than one per cent of the population. |
Page 82-83
Considerable numbers of Jewish traders arrived in Halifax shortly after it was founded in 1749, as a British naval and military counterpoise to the massive French bastion of Louisbourg. A number of Jews moved there from Newport, Rhode Island in 1751, including Israel Abrahams, Isaac Levy, Nathan Nathans, and the four brothers Abraham, Isaac, Naphthali, and Samuel Hart, “all of whom were sons of German Jews, who had settled in England.” By the 1750s there were many Jews among the army and navy purveyors and the merchants who supplied the civilian population, which numbered 4,000. Israel Abrahams and Nathan Nathans were New Yorkers who moved to Halifax in 1752. A cemetery was acquired and some sort of community was established. The Jewish presence continued in the Nova Scotia capital into the 1760s, but the community gradually died out as trade with New England dwindled following the Non-Importation Agreement of 1765. The outbreak of the American Revolution temporarily ended the trade between Halifax and the American colonies; the cemetery land was appropriated for a provincial workhouse. |
| Extras |
- 6 tables
- 46 illustrations/photos
- 110 pages of notes
- 26 pages of bibliography
- 18 pages of index
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- List of abbreviations
- 20 illustrations/photos
- 46 pages of notes, including bibliography
- 12 pages of index
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