Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740-1867

Martin Nicolai teaches history at York College.

The Godfreys have written an exhaustive study of Canada’s early Jewish
settlers, and they have tracked down virtually everyone of either
definite or suspected Jewish roots who set foot on Canadian soil prior
to Confederation. Despite the overt discrimination that Jews faced in
Canada during most of this period, the Godfreys see the early Jewish
experience in Canada as a distinctly positive one, with Christian
Canadians being generally willing to accept their Jewish neighbors as
legal equals.

While Jews did not fare very well in New France, the Godfreys see
Canada as perhaps the best place in the world for Jews during the late
18th and early 19th centuries, and they trace the transition from
toleration (which, they rightly point out, was merely a willingness to
tolerate the existence of religious minorities) to equality (the
granting of equal political and religious rights to these minorities).
British attempts to promote commerce and colonization in America, along
with Parliament’s granting of political rights to Roman Catholics in
Quebec, helped make the Canadian colonies the first jurisdictions in the
English world to grant a whole range of political rights to Jews. The
greatest danger to Jews, the Godfreys argue convincingly, came from
uninformed British officials sent to British North America, who often
attempted to overturn Canadian custom and enforce the less-liberal legal
precedents that were still current in Britain itself.

More than 100 pages of endnotes attest to the thoroughness of the
Godfreys’ research. Their work on the important role played by Jewish
merchants in the post-Conquest fur trade is commendable, as is their
important contribution to our understanding of the evolution of minority
rights in early Canada. The historical revelations of recent decades
have systematically demolished Canadians’ smug myths about their
supposedly virtuous past, but the Godfreys have amassed considerable
evidence to support their claim that Canada’s present-day character as
a cultural mosaic had its roots in the middle of the 18th century.