Reluctant Welcome for Jewish People

Noted historian Pierre Anctil takes a deep dive into editorials devoted to Jews and Judaism in Quebec’s daily Le Devoir in the first half of the twentieth century. Long one of the most discussed historiographical issues in Canadian Jewish history, these editorials are of great significance as they are representative of the reaction of the nationalist Francophone elite to the Jewish presence in Montreal, to German Nazi State anti-Semitism and to the Shoah.

Pierre Anctil proposes a new reading of the editorials published in the pages of Le Devoir from 1910 to 1947―from the founding of the newspaper by Henri Bourassa until the death of its second director, Georges Pelletier.

During that time, some two hundred editorials were devoted to Jews and Judaism, of which Anctil has selected sixty for inclusion in this volume. Although many of the editorials conveyed the clearly anti-Semitic views of Le Devoir’s editorialists and of Quebec society at large, a number of the editorials did express positive views of Jewish activities and accomplishments in Quebec society.

Readers will find this to be an in-depth analysis and nuanced treatment of an important aspect of Canadian Jewish history.

Published in English, translated from the original "À chacun ses juifs".

Pierre Anctil is an award-winning author, a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2012 and a professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, where he taught contemporary Canadian history and Canadian Jewish history. He has written at length on the history of Montreal’s Jewish community and on the current debates on cultural pluralism in Canada.
His most recent English-language titles are History of the Jews in Quebec (2021), Jacob Isaac Segal: A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu (2017) and A Reluctant Welcome for Jewish People: Voices in Le Devoir’s Editorials, 1910–1947 (2019), all at the University of Ottawa Press.