Ferdinanda van Gennip - The blue shirts : Adrien Arcand and fascist anti-semitism in Canada

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, and by the University of Ottawa.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canadas Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

Originally published as Les Chemises bleues Les ditions du Septentrion 2012

T his book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

I would like to personally thank historian Pierre Anctil, who penned the preface to this book; my friends Gilles Toupin and Michel Bdard, for their precious counsel; and my spouse, Emmanuelle Dubois, who encouraged me throughout this project, long and perilous though it was. And, finally, I wish to emphasize the invaluable collaboration of Janice Rosen and Hlne Valle, of the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives / Archives juives canadiennes Alex Dworkin, as well as the archivists of Library and Archives Canada and the Bibliothque et Archives nationales du Qubec.

T oday, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that francophone academics were slow to take an interest in the Jewish presence in Quebec. There are several factors to explain this reticence, so firmly entrenched that even the great societal reorientations of the Quiet Revolution during the 1960s failed to dislodge it. For much of the twentieth century, Jews were perceived in French Canada as foreigners, their longstanding historical roots in Canada and Quebec overlooked. Jews were also seen as directly obstructing the economic ambitions of francophonesbe it small merchants or those in the consumer-products industryparticularly on the island of Montreal. The Achat chez nous (Buy from our own) campaign conducted during the interwar period attests to this. Above all, certain Roman Catholic Church teachings, although dismissed and rejected outright after the 1960s, had clearly imprinted on many francophone minds the notion that the Jews could never be assimilated, were not to be trusted, and, in Quebec, were turning their backs on the French language; furthermore, in the eyes of the Church, they were guilty of deicide and perfidy. Later, they simply became people not to associate with, people whose political aspirations challenged those of the majority of francophones. In short, a lingering unfavourable bias and generally negative attitude, even recently, prompted Quebec intellectuals to avoid the subject and steer well clear of the shore of Montreal Judaism. To write in French on this theme in the early 1980s was still a perilous undertaking, especially if it dealt with intercommunity relations, and more so if it touched on Yiddish literature, Jewish cultural history, or political Zionism.

This bias has changed since the turn of the twenty-first century, when it became more apparent to researchers that the Jewish presence in Quebec raised some fundamental historical issues with respect to cultural diversity, the multiplicity of religions, and pluralism. In certain sectors of Montreal society, Jews had played an outstanding role in such critical areas as the labour-union movement, the rise of progressive ideas, and cultural creativity, to the point where they had paved the way for the emergence of modernity and stood for progressive forms of change. Since that time, new movements of Judaism have also appeared in the province, largely with immigration, movements such as Hasidism that advocate more traditional social behaviour, which are constantly being challenged in Montreal neighbourhoods like Outremont, Mile End, and Snowdon. Without a doubt, the influence of the Jewish population in Montreal far exceeded what could be measured by the number of their members or the political space they occupied.

This recognition lifted doubt around the topic and contributed to opening a theme on which very little scholarly work had been done. Within a very short time, studies and translations appeared that would never have seen the light of day as recently as twenty-five years ago. Yet the issue of the blatant, even mainstream anti-Semitism of the 1930s remained neglected, particularly as it pertained to nascent Quebec nationalism. Certainly, progress was made in the way francophones understood contemporary Judaism, but what about the Judeophobic discourse that had been common currency during the interwar period? Recalling this anti-Semitism was chilling and, for a long time, constituted a powerful disincentive to undertaking any study of the Jewish minority in Quebecas I myself can testify from personal experience early in my career. At the Institut qubcois de recherche sur la culture, to which I was recruited in 1980 to study the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in French-language schools after Bill 101, which officially made French the working language of the province, Montreals Jewish history caused a gnashing of teeth and a fear that the subject would surely bring disgrace upon Quebec nationalism. In such a context, any effort to advance true understanding of the historical relationship between Jews and francophones in the province was unthinkable.