There was a small Jewish presence in Canada during the period of French rule. Only after the British conquest did substantial groups of Jewish settlers begin to arrive in this land.

Among the first Jewish names to appear in the official registries during the early period (1758) is that of Aaron Hart, an officer in the army of General Amherst. A decade later, the first synagogue was established in Montreal. Fittingly enough, it was called "Shearith Israel" - the "Remnant of  Israel", a congregation of Jews far removed from their ancestral homeland.

Following the American Revolution (1775-1781), a number of Jewish Loyalists came to British North America. Some such as Col. David S. Franks of Philadelphia settled in Montreal and David Gabels of New York established himself in Saint John.

By mid-19th century small Jewish settlements had struck roots in Lower Canada, predominantly in such places asMontreal, Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City. In 1807 Ezekiel Hart, son of the first permanent Jewish settler, was twice elected  to the legislature of Lower Canada. He was twice expelled, however, because he could not affirm the purely Christian oath required of members. In 1832 this discrimination against Jews ended when legislation was passed which accorded them full civil rights. Significantly, this legislation meant that Canada was the first country in the Empire to provide legal emancipation for Jews.

By the 1840s Jewish immigrants had begun to spread out across Ontario. During this period they organized communities and synagogues in Kingston, Toronto and Hamilton. Toronto's famous Holy Blossom Temple and Anshe Sholom in Hamilton date from the early period in Canadian Jewish history. The first synagogues in Canada were Orthodox and followed the Ashkenazi or East European worship patterns in liturgy and synagogual rites. Not until the 20th century did Conservative and Reform synagogues appear on the Canadian scene in response to diverse religious, social and cultural factors.

Before 1850 the total Jewish population of Canada was less than 1,000. Within the next 50 years, however, the population increased a hundredfold and by 1920 there were more than 125,000 Jews in Canada.

How does one explain such an extraordinary increase? Immigration was the major source of this growth, a growth which was actuated by a constellation of political, economic and spiritual factors. The triggering mechanism was the assassination in 1881 of Czar Alexander II in Russia. In the wake of his murder, Russian authorities orchestrated a series of savage pogroms (massacres of Jews) which devastated Jewish communities.

For many, emigration became the only escape from the harshness of Russian society.  Between 1881 and 1920 more than two million Russian Jews fled from what one writer has called "the vast territorial prison of Russia" - to freedom in North America. The majority of the emigres entered the United States, but a substantial group also chose Canada.

Other factors besides politics and fear contributed to the westward movement of these people. One factor was the perception that Canada offered economic and professional opportunities for those willing to work hard. Another factor was the passage of immigration laws designed to attract settlers who could help develop Canada's immense agricultural and mining potential. In addition, the offer of huge tracts of land in western Canada brought thousands of Jewish immigrants (along with tens of thousands of Ukrainian, German and Russian settlers) to the future provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
 

For a variety of reasons, the majority of the new arrivals chose to locate in the larger metropolitan areas of Eastern Canada such as Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, as well as some maritime centres. In this regard Jewish immigrants mirrored the preferences of immigrants in general; Quebec and Ontario were the major industrial and employment centres in the country.

In Toronto the Goel Tzedec synagogue (the parent of today's Beth Tzedec Congregation - Canada's largest synagogue) was founded in 1883 and in 1899 the Adath Israel Anshe Rumania received its charter in Montreal. The original members of this latter institution had the distinction of having walked from Rumania across Europe to Hamburg, where they boarded ships for Canada. In Yiddish they were affectionately known as fussgeyers, "those who went by foot."

By the end of the 19th century Jewish settlers in Quebec and Ontario had established themselves in a number of manufacturing enterprises. Jewish merchants made important contributions to the fur trade and in the music halls where their talents as impresarios were put to good use.

Jewish immigrants also settled in western Canada. In the waning years of the 19th century a large number of Jews who had been city dwellers in the "old country" decided to accept the challenge of homesteading and farming in Canada's west. This little known story in the history of Canadian Jews is now becoming the focus of many learned treatises and monographs as the contributions of Canadian Jews to this sector become more widely recognized.

Jewish farming settlements under the aegis of the Baron de Hirsch Foundation and the Jewish Colonial Association began as far back as 1890 (after an unsuccessful start in Moosomin, Saskatchewan) with the establishment of such farming communities as Hirsch, Lipton, Oxbow, Wapella, Edenbridge and Sormenfeld in Saskatchewan, Rumsey and Montefiore in Alberta, and New Hirsch and Narcisse in Manitoba. It was some of the settlers from these early farming communities who first made the trek across the Rockies to establish a Jewish presence in Vancouver and Victoria.

The Jewish farming odyssey in western Canada was noteworthy from many perspectives: it demonstrated that traditional urban dwellers could transform themselves into men and women of the soil and could adapt themselves at the same time to the inclemencies of the Canadian prairies. While the presence of Jews in the  farming sector has diminished greatly, the sons and daughters of those early agricultural pioneers helped to build, in part, the economic infrastructure of Winnipeg, where approximately 17,000 Jewish residents make their home today.

      

Until recently, home for the vast majority of Canadian Jews has meant Toronto and Montreal. Quebec's largest city has been historically the centre of Canadian Jewish intellectual, cultural and political life. Most of the national Jewish organizations had their main offices in that city as well. Since the mid-1960s, however, there has been a dramatic shift in the anglophone population of the province and many Jews among the English elements of the city of Montreal have left. As a result, Toronto has now surpassed Montreal as themost populous Jewish centre in Canada. The Ontario city now has about 130,000 Jewish residents to Montreal's110,000. With the total Jewish population of Canada at around 350,000, this means that more than two-thirds of the entire Jewish population is found in two eastern cities.