<i>None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948</i> , 40th anniversary edition, Irving Abella and Harold Troper

None Is Too Many is one of the few historical works that not only contributes substantially to the story of a country's development, but also becomes part of a country's official ideology. It recounts Canada's refusal to admit more than a few thousand Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1948, making it one of the countries that was least receptive to rescuing Jews from Europe's hell. According to Irving Abella and Harold Troper, Canada's reluctance to accept more Jewish refugees stemmed from the following circumstances. In 1941, about 50 percent of Canadians were of British origin and 30 percent of French origin. Quebec's powerful Roman Catholic Church represented Jews as a corrupting modernist force of dishonest, parasitical, ideologically destructive, “money-grubbing, rootless, and contemptuous deniers of Christ's divinity,” spreading fear about the potential for Jews to destroy French Canadian morality and culture. Popular journals in French, including Le Devoir, similarly demonized Jews and urged readers not to buy from Jewish businesses: “Together, Quebec Church leaders, nationalist politicians, and the social elite united not only in support of a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, but also in efforts to keep Jews out of the public square, and, above all, to bar Canada's door to the further admission of Jews” (p. xiv). Prior to the Second World War in English-speaking Canada, Jews were prevented from fully participating in public life with communities tolerating “discrimination on account of origin, race, and religion” in housing and in employment, including in banking, federal and public services, insurance companies, industrial companies, and department stores. During this era, there were very few Jewish teachers and no Jewish school principals. Universities also limited Jewish hiring and admissions. In the field of health care, “Jewish doctors, even Canadian trained, rarely received hospital appointments.” For some Jews working in nursing, architecture, and engineering, changing one's surname was the only route to obtain employment (pp. xv–xvi). In contrast, Canadian Jews formed a small community of about 170,000. Mainly working-class and petit bourgeois immigrants, they were too few and too poorly organized to mount an effective pro-immigration campaign on behalf of their European coreligionists. None Is Too Many is a thorough and convincing chronological account of the interplay of these forces and their effects on Canadian immigration policy.

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