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Canadian Jews or, alternatively, Jewish Canadians are Canadian citizens of the Jewish faith or Jewish ethnicity. Jewish Canadians are a part of the greater Jewish diaspora and form the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by those in Israel, the United States, and France. As of 2011, Statistics Canada listed 329,500 adherents to the Jewish religion in Canada and 309,650 who claimed Jewish as an ethnicity. One does not necessarily include the other and studies which have attempted to combine the two streams have arrived at figures in excess of 375,000 Jews in Canada. This total would account for approximately 1.1% of the Canadian population. The Jewish community in Canada is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews, who emigrated from Europe, and their descendants. Other Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented, including Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and a number of converts. The Jewish Canadian community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as encompassing the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance. Though a small minority, Canadian Jews have had an open presence in the country since the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants after the British took possession of nearly all of New France after the 1763 Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years' War. == Early history (1759–1850) == Prior to the British Conquest of New France there were officially no Jews in Canada because when King Louis XIV made Canada officially a province of the Kingdom of France in 1663, he decreed that only Roman Catholics could enter the colony. One exception was Esther Brandeau, a Jewish girl who arrived in 1738 disguised as a boy and remained for a year before being sent back to France after refusing to convert.〔(Brandeau, Esther ) Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online〕 The earliest subsequent documentation of Jews in Canada are British Army records from the French and Indian War, the North American part of the Seven Years' War. In 1760, General Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst attacked and seized Montreal, winning Canada for the British. Several Jews were members of his regiments, and among his officer corps were five Jews: Samuel Jacobs, Emmanuel de Cordova, Aaron Hart, Hananiel Garcia, and Isaac Miramer.〔Canada's Jews: A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s. Louis Rosenberg, Morton Weinfeld. 1993.〕 The most prominent of these five were the business associates Samuel Jacobs and Aaron Hart. In 1759, in his capacity as Commissariat to the British Army on the staff of General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Jacobs was recorded as the first Jewish resident of Quebec, and thus the first Canadian Jew.〔(''The Canadian Jewish News'', April 21, 2013 )〕 From 1749, Jacobs had been supplying British army officers at Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1758, he was at Fort Cumberland and the following year he was with Wolfe's army at Quebec.〔Canada's Entrepreneurs: From The Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash: Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. By Andrew Ross and Andrew Smith, 2012〕 Remaining in Canada, he afterwards became the dominant merchant of the Richelieu valley and Seigneur of Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu.〔Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740-1867. Sheldon Godfrey, 1995〕 However, as Jacobs married a French Canadian girl and brought his children up as Catholics, he is often overlooked as the first permanent Jewish settler in Canada in favour of Aaron Hart, who married a Jew and brought up his children, or at least his sons, in the Jewish tradition.〔 Lieutenant Hart first arrived in Canada from New York City as Commissariat to Jeffery Amherst's forces at Montreal in 1760. After his service in the army had ended, he settled at Trois-Rivières. Eventually, he became a very wealthy landowner and a respected community member. He had four sons, Moses, Benjamin, Ezekiel and Alexander, all of whom would become prominent in Montreal and help build the Jewish Community. One of his sons, Ezekiel, was elected to the legislature of Lower Canada in the by-election of April 11, 1807, becoming the first Jew in an official opposition in the British Empire. Ezekiel was expelled from the legislature with his religion a major factor.〔Denis Vaugeois , "Hart, Ezekiel", in ''Dictionary of Canadian Biography'', vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003, accessed June 9, 2013, (online )〕 Sir James Henry Craig, Governor-General of Lower Canada at the time, tried to protect Hart, but the legislature dismissed him in both 1808 and 1809. French Canadians later saw this as an attempt of the British to undermine their role in Canada. Ezekiel was re-elected to the legislature, but Jews were not allowed to hold elected office in Canada until a generation later. Most of the early Jewish Canadians were either fur traders or served in the British Army troops. A few were merchants or landowners. Although Montreal's Jewish community was small, numbering only around 200, they built the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Montreal, Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue in Canada in 1768. Some sources date the actual establishment of synagogue to 1777 on Notre Dame Street. Revolts and protests soon began calling for responsible government in Canada. The law requiring the oath "on my faith as a Christian" was amended in 1829 to provide for Jews to not take the oath. In 1831, prominent French-Canadian politician Louis-Joseph Papineau sponsored a law which granted full equivalent political rights to Jews, twenty-seven years before anywhere else in the British Empire. In 1832, partly because of the work of Ezekiel Hart, a law was passed that guaranteed Jews the same political rights and freedoms as Christians. In the early 1830s, German Jew Samuel Liebshitz founded Jewsburg (now incorporated as German Mills into Kitchener, Ontario), a village in Upper Canada.〔() Kitchener Public Library〕 By 1850, there were still only 450 Jews living in Canada, mostly concentrated in Montreal. Abraham Jacob Franks settled at Quebec City in 1767. His son, David Salesby (or Salisbury) Franks, who afterward became head of the Montreal Jewish community, also lived in Quebec prior to 1774. Abraham Joseph, who was long a prominent figure in public affairs in Quebec City, took up his residence there shortly after his father's death in 1832. Quebec City's Jewish population for many years remained very small, and early efforts at organization were fitful and short-lived. A cemetery was acquired in 1853, and a place of worship was opened in a hall in the same year, in which services were held intermittently; but it was not until 1892 that the Jewish population of Quebec City had sufficiently augmented to permit of the permanent establishment of the present synagogue, Beth Israel. The congregation was granted the right of keeping a register in 1897. Other communal institutions were the Quebec Hebrew Sick Benefit Association, the Quebec Hebrew Relief Association for Immigrants, and the Quebec Zionist Society. By 1805, the Jewish population was about 350, in a total population of 68,834. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Jews in Canada」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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