Burn This Gossip: The True Story of George Benjamin of Belleville, Canada's First Jewish Member of Parliament 1857-1863

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When Herb Gray became, in 1969, the first Jew to join the federal
cabinet, a precedent was set, and yet, 107 years earlier, the honor had
been offered to George Benjamin, who had already become the first Jew to
hold an assortment of elected municipal offices. Benjamin was offered
the post of finance minister in the government of John Sandfield
Macdonald in May 1862, but turned it down, because he thought J.S.
Macdonald was “a man of no principal . . . who has not understanding
enough to be classed as a tenth-rate statesman.” Benjamin’s loyalty
was to John A. Macdonald, with whom he had sat in Parliament, and from
whom he had promises over the years of a sinecure with which he could
retire. Alas, the promise was never fulfilled, and John A. becomes the
villain of this interesting short biography. After Benjamin’s death in
1864, one of Benjamin’s sons referred to John A. as “the man I look
upon as the Murderer of my poor father.”

A six-page preface by the authors, whose previous work is a study of
important historical buildings, details an extraordinary hunt for
information about their subject, whose entry in the Dictionary of
Canadian Biography does not even allude to the fact that he was Jewish.
The evidence that led to this book includes information unearthed by a
rabbi in Plymouth, England, and papers from such distant points as New
Orleans and Australia. The Godfreys have pieced together and thoroughly
documented the story of a relatively minor figure in Canadian history,
but one whose achievements are remarkable partly because they were those
of a man whose people were not yet permitted to sit in the British
parliament; two of his predecessors in Canada, each elected to
legislative assemblies, had been denied their seats because they were
Jews. Despite some scurrilous attacks in, for example, a Kingston
newspaper, and the enmity of famed writer Susanna Moodie, Benjamin
succeeded first in municipal and then in federal politics. Earlier, he
founded the Belleville Intelligencer—today the oldest still-publishing
newspaper in Ontario. The Godfreys show a man of paradoxes: the Jew who
financially supported a Montreal synagogue, and recorded his
children’s births (for a time) in a Hebrew prayer book, but who was a
Grand Master of the Orange Lodge, and had himself baptized a few months
before his death.

In describing Upper Canada in the mid-nineteenth century as seen from
the life of a mostly municipal politician, the Godfreys have added to
the overall impression we have of that era, and helped rescue a
relatively minor player from oblivion, as well as informing us of the
state of civil rights and liberties (and lack thereof) for the small
number of Jews living in Canada up to that time. There are more than
three dozen pages of footnotes, an assortment of illustrations, and
family trees that show both the ancestors and the many descendants of
George Benjamin, as long ago as 1650 and as recently as the year before
the book was published.