Exiles From Nowhere, The Jews and the Canadian Elite, by Alan Mendelson, Robin Brass Studio.
Political and religious philosopher George Parkin Grant was born into an aristocratic Canadian family. He certainly had yichus. When he attended Upper Canada College, his father was headmaster. When he moved on to Queen’s University, he could point to his paternal grandfather who had been principal from 1877 to 1902.
When he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and set out for Oxford University, he was aware that his uncle and maternal grandfather had been deeply involved in the history of the scholarship scheme.
Alan Mendelson, the author of Exiles From Nowhere, The Jews and the Canadian Elite, writes, “The more I read about Grant, the more I was struck by stark contrasts between him and his family, on the one hand, and contemporary North American Jewish immigrants and their families, on the other. The Grants and their confrères may have crossed the paths of Jewish immigrants in Toronto or elsewhere, but it was as if they inhabited different worlds.”
Mendelson, a professor emeritus of religious studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, points out that Grant’s eminent relatives upheld a doctrine of Christian superiority “to support a narrow religious nationalism in which Judaism was relegated to an inferior position.” Grant, who became a professor at McMaster University and was well-known for his book Lament for a Nation, couldn’t escape the influence and opinions of his relatives, including those of his uncle, Vincent Massey, who was part of Canadian prime minister McKenzie King’s inner circle, which conspired to exclude Jewish immigrants from Canada.
The book begins with an account of Goldwin Smith, who in the 19th century, tirelessly churned out anti-Semitic articles for a group of well-regarded journals.
It continues with the anti-Jewish politics of French-Canadian nationalist Henri Bourassa and those of King. The major portion of the book, however, is concerned with Grant, whose intellectual heroes included the historian Arnold Toynbee, who characterized modern Jewry as a parasitic “fossil” race, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who refused to repudiate his Nazi associations.
Another of Grant’s heroes was philosopher Simone Weil, a tragic victim of Nazi brutality who remained ambivalent about her Jewish roots and background.
An engrossing section of the book deals with young Matt Cohen, a well-known Canadian novelist, who became Grant’s Jewish protégé. In time, Cohen left McMaster and spoke of Grant as a bundle of contradictions.
As a rabbi in Hamilton, I knew Grant and would second Cohen’s appraisal of him. He was drawn to Jews and was often friendly to me, but it was difficult to maintain a close relationship. Once, he told me rather excitedly that McMaster’s department of religion had appointed a Jewish scholar – a traditional Jew, he explained, not one of the secular variety.
Grant often remarked that he didn’t want to fall into gutter anti-Semitism. Unhappily, his pernicious views veered from the genteel.
Mendelson has done a prodigious amount of research in shaping his continually informative story of some of Ontario’s Anglo elite of a previous era.
* * *
Transliterated English-Hebrew Dictionary (Biblical Lexicon), Seventeenth Section, by David Harduf.
David Harduf of Toronto is one of Canada’s foremost scholars. His contributions to Hebrew and Yiddish scholarship have been prolific and outstanding.
For the past 14 years, he has been engaged in a project of magnificent proportions – an extensive and detailed English-Hebrew dictionary that has now reached its 17th published section – the letter “S.”
This work has been selected as part of Canada’s Publishing Heritage in the Library and Archives of Canada.
Harduf deserves both respect and support. For more information, write to Harduf Books, 11 Plum Treeway, Willowdale, Ont., M2R 3J1.