About the Book
The
positions held by Canada’s most intellectual French-language daily, Le Devoir, with respect to the Montréal
Jewish community and Judaism more generally have been one of the most discussed
historiographical topics in Canadian Jewish history. A number of works written
by Anglophone authors cite Le Devoir
as typical of French Canada’s ideological defensiveness during the 1930s and
its inclination to adopt a hostile position towards Jews.
However, until
now, no serious analyses existed supporting or disproving this thesis. That is precisely
the task undertaken by Pierre Anctil in his exhaustive analysis of Le Devoir (1910-1947), from the founding
of the newspaper by Henri Bourassa until the death of its second director,
Georges Pelletier. What place did Jews occupy in Le Devoir’s editorials and how, exactly, are they perceived?
Between
1910 and 1947, approximately 200 editorials were devoted to Jews and Judaism in
Le Devoir—approximately 2% of the
total number of editorials written over that period. Sixty of those, of great
historiographical significance, have been reproduced here in their entirety
along with annotations. These editorials shed light on the way the nationalist
Francophone elite viewed the Jewish presence in Montréal, the German Nazi State
and anti-Semitism, and the Shoah.
This
curated collection of editorials, along with Anctil’s in-depth analysis, provide
a much clearer idea of the roots and the extent of anti-Semitism in the pages
of
Le Devoir.
