This post is dedicated to my Canadian friends who are horrified by what’s happening in their beloved country and terrified at the thought of what’s next.
The history of Jew-hatred in Canada doesn’t start with the Christie Pits Riot. It doesn’t start with Frederick Blair or Adrien Arcand or Ernst Zündel. It starts before Canada was a country at all…and with a royal decree.
When King Louis XIV made Canada officially a province of France in 1663, he decreed that only Roman Catholics could enter New France. Jews were legally barred from the colony entirely. That prohibition held for nearly a century.
In 1738, a 23-year-old Jewish woman named Esther Brandeau arrived at Quebec City disguised as a young man named Jacques La Fargue. Once discovered, she was interrogated by the colony’s chief administrator, intendant Gilles Hocquart, and subjected to months of pressure to convert to Catholicism. She refused. By the fall of 1739, Hocquart, frustrated by what he called her “frivolity” and “stubbornness,” deported her back to France. She vanished from the records. She had been in Canada for roughly a year. Her crime was her religion.
The British conquest of New France in 1759-1760 ended the formal prohibition, and Jewish merchants who had been supplying the British Army followed the troops into the territory. Among them was Aaron Hart, a Bavarian-born merchant who settled in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, married a Jewish wife, raised his children in Jewish tradition, and became prosperous enough to be considered the father of Canadian Jewry. His son Ezekiel Hart became the first Jew elected to public office in the British Empire.
On April 11, 1807, Ezekiel Hart won election to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, representing Trois-Rivières. When he arrived to take his seat in January 1808, he swore his oath on a Hebrew Bible and replaced the phrase “on the true faith of a Christian” with “of a Jew,” which was the standard practice for Jews giving testimony in Canadian courts at the time. Attorney General Jonathan Sewell objected immediately, seconded by Justice Pierre-Amable de Bonne. The assembly debated. On February 20, 1808, it resolved by a vote of 35 to 5: “Ezekiel Hart, Esquire, professing the Jewish religion cannot take a seat, nor sit, nor vote, in this House.”
Hart ran again in the election that followed. He won again. He tried this time to take the standard Christian oath. The assembly voted to expel him anyway, on the grounds that he had already been expelled as a Jew, and that precedent stood. On September 7, 1808, the colonial secretary in London, Lord Castlereagh, confirmed officially that a Jew could not sit in the assembly. Hart did not run a third time.
The case, known as l’Affaire Hart, set off a long public debate about Jewish political rights in Canada. It took 24 more years to resolve. On June 5, 1832, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, under the influence of Speaker Louis-Joseph Papineau who had himself voted for Hart’s expulsion in 1809, passed the Act to Grant Equal Rights and Privileges to Persons of the Jewish Religion. It was the first law in the British Empire granting Jews full civil and political rights. Britain wouldn’t pass equivalent legislation for another 26 years.
The pattern was already visible long before Christie Pits, long before Frederick Blair, long before anyone had heard of Adrien Arcand. Jews could come, as long as they stayed in their place. When they didn’t, the institutions found a way to remind them.
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