Circulating a history: promoters and reviewers of B.G. Sack`s History of the Jews in Canada

In my ongoing study of Canadian Jewish historiography, I have been examining, in addition to the publications of historians, their historical practices, such as how they helped create spaces for history (archives, historical societies, museums) and the intersections of historians with the public square and communal politics. In this paper, I focus on the period after the appearance of a book in print, when promoters and critics will mediate the work of authors. Specifically, I examine the afterlife the two English editions of B.G. Sack’s History of the Jews in Canada, published in 1945 by Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), and re-published in 1965 by Harvest House Press. I will demonstrate how CJC used the book as an extension of its wartime campaign to shape public opinion by monitoring the press and circulating. Harvest House appealed to an emerging discourse of multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism. Three groups with overlapping memberships are evident after a survey of the reviews. (1) Non-Jewish Québécois intellectuals responded to the first edition with some ambivalence vis-à vis Sack’s enthusiastic description of Jewish “contributions” to Quebec. Two decades later, the responses to that aspect of the work became more positive.(2) Reviewers in the non-Canadian Jewish press and scholarly journals welcomed a new examination of the Jewish community of Canada which they perceived would be playing a larger role in the Jewish diaspora because of the devastation of European Jewry. (3) Especially after the appearance of the 1965 edition, we find a group of scholars who looked to “disciplinize” the field and marginalize amateurs, although amateurs are frequently the first to study marginalized groups, as was the case with Sack’s engagement with Canadian Jewish history.