The Traitor and the Jew

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The Traitor and the Jew (Full title: The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in French Canada from 1929-1939) is a 1992 book of non-fiction by Quebec political scientist Esther Delisle Ph.D..

First published in the French language by L'Étincelle as Le traître et le Juif : Lionel Groulx, le Devoir et le délire du nationalisme d'extrême droite dans la province de Québec, 1929-1939, in 1993 it was published in the English language by Robert Davies Publishing of Montreal (ISBN 1-895854-01-6). Based on her doctoral thesis, Dr. Delisle details the history of anti-Semitism and support of fascism among Quebec nationalists during the 1930s and '40s.

[edit] Controversy

Dr. Delisle provided hundreds of anti-Semitic quotations from or attributed to Lionel Groulx (1878-1967), a Roman Catholic priest and a leading intellectual, the nationalist review L'Action nationale and the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir. Her allegations of pseudonymous anti-Semitic articles by Lionel Groulx, and her assertion that he was an active Fascist sympathizer, caused the greatest controversy.

In a March 1, 1997 cover story titled Le mythe du Québec fasciste (The Myth of a Fascist Quebec), L'Actualité magazine covered the controversy around Dr. Delisle's doctoral thesis. A profile of Father Lionel Groulx also appeared in the same issue but both articles did however acknowledge Groulx's anti-Semitism and the general favourable attitude of the Roman Catholic church towards fascist doctrine during the 1930s. Professor Pierre Lemieux, an economist and author wrote: "The magazine's attack is much weakened by Claude Ryan, editor of Le Devoir in the 70s, declaring that he has changed his mind and come close to Delisle's interpretation after reading her book." [1]

Further, a claim, never substantiated, that Delisle had been subsidized by Jewish organizations, was also made by the same magazine and repeated on television by former Parti Québécois cabinet minister Claude Charron while introducing a 2002 broadcast on Canal D of Je me souviens, the Eric R. Scott documentary about Dr. Delisle's book. Outraged at what both Scott and Delisle called an absolute falsehood, they asked Canal D to rebroadcast the documentary because it was introduced in a way they considered to be defamatory and inaccurate. [2].

Lionel Groulx is a revered figure by many French Quebecers and seen him as one of the fathers of Quebec nationalism. A station on the Montreal Metro as well as schools, streets, lakes, and a chain of mountains in Quebec are named for him. In the book, Delisle claimed that Groulx, under the pseudonym Jacques Brassier, had written in 1933 in L'Action nationale:

  • "Within six months or a year, the Jewish problem could be resolved, not only in Montreal but from one end of the province of Quebec to the other. There would be no more Jews here other than those who could survive by living off one another."

Referring to Lionel Groulx and the Le Devoir newspaper, Francine Dubé wrote in the National Post on April 24, 2002 that "the evidence Delisle has unearthed seems to leave no doubt that both were anti-Semitic and racist." And, also in 2002, the Montreal Gazette wrote "anti-Semitism and pro-fascist sympathies that were common among this province's (Quebec) French-speaking elite in the 1930s." Further support for Dr. Delisle's writings come from a variety of sources.

In the Canadian Historical Review - Volume 75, Number 4 December 1994, Irving Abella wrote: "Clearly Delisle's message is discomfiting to many French-Canadian nationalists and it should be. She portrays a nationalism which was racist, paranoid, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Yet its spokesmen and ideologues were not cranks, but rather the leaders of French-Canadian society, its clerics, academics, and journalists - people who were universally admired and listened to."

Claude Bélanger, Department of History, at Marianopolis College stated: "Anti-semitism was alive and well among the ultramontane nationalists of the period of 1890 to 1945" and "These anti-semitic views were propounded broadly and openly from about 1890 to 1945." Bélanger refers to Delisle's book and the anti-semitism in Quebec as also recounted by Pierre Anctil in his 1988 book "Le Devoir, les Juifs et l'immigration." [3]

Gary Evans, historian, author, and professor at the University of Ottawa said: "Academic Esther Delisle angrily attacks the Establishment for its position of "Everyone knows, but no one should say" with regard to her own attempts to reveal Quebec's shameful intellectual past, including a postwar policy of welcoming Nazi collaborators from France and of trivializing the Holocaust." [4]

[edit] Criticism by Academics

In an article entitled "The Sins of the Abbé Groulx" published in the Literary Review of Canada in 1994, sociologist Gary Caldwell, asserted in essence that:

  • Some articles written under the pseudonym of Lambert Closse have not been proven to be that of Groulx (Delisle's argument depends heavily on the assumption that Groulx wrote under that name although she frankly states she has no evidence that he did; some historians, for example Jean-François Nadeau, have adduced evidence from Groulx's archives which suggests that Lambert Closse was the pseudonym of another priest, J.-Henri Guay, whose correspondence Groulx did not reply to)
  • she ignores articles which present more moderate opinions
  • many of the articles cannot be found as referenced by her (she has corrected some of these citations)
  • the extracts from the articles she selected often misrepresent the ideas in them
  • she fails to distinguish Catholic anti-Semitism from fascist sympathies
  • she fails to deal adequately with the contradictions in Groulx's attitudes towards Jews (he publicly denounced anti-Semitism as unchristian, for example and invited French Canadians to take Jews as a model of ethnic solidarity)
  • she ignores the possibility of interethnic rivalry between two minority groups (French Canadians and Jews) as did for exemple Morton Weinfeld in The Jews of Canada.
  • she does not compare the texts drawn from Le Devoir or l'Action nationale to texts from French Canadian publications generally considered to have been fascist such as the newspapers edited by Adrien Arcand.
  • she presented an admittedly exploratory study as a test of several linked hypotheses (for example, by drawing inferences from isolated texts rather than by estimating the frequency of anti-Semitic themes in Le Devoir and l'Action nationale and comparing it to a control frequency, such as the frequency of anti-Semitic references in English Canadian or foreign publications of the same period).

Methodological criticism of Delisle's work has also been made by historian Gérard Bouchard in his work Les Deux Chanoines - Contradiction et ambivalence dans la pensée de Lionel Groulx published in 2003. On page 19 of his work, he warns the reader that he chose not to use Delisle's book Le traître et le Juif : Lionel Groulx, Le Devoir et Le délire du nationalisme d'extrême droite dans la province de Québec, 1929-1939 as a reference because according to his own verification, it contains to many errors in its references. To support his claim, he provides the result of his verification which had him conclude that among 57 references to texts by Groulx supposedly published in L'Action nationale between 1933 and 1939, 23 could not be found and 5 others were not exact.

Esther Delisle contested the results of Bouchard's verification in a letter published in Le Devoir on April 11 2003. She also had her lawyer submit a formal notice to have Bouchard withdraw the assertions he made on page 19 of his book. In this communication, she provided Bouchard with clarifications on the sources she used in her work and recognized 13 irregularities in her references.

In response, Bouchard wrote a letter to Le Devoir published on May 1, 2003 in which he made public the results of a second and more thorough verification. In the letter, he asserted that :

  • On the total of 58 references to texts by Groulx in L'Action nationale published between 1933 and 1939, only 14 were exact (the year, the month, the page number were correct and the excerpt was unaltered)
  • In the 44 inexact references, "23 contain 31 modifications of Groulx's text". The modifications take the form of "amputations and other types of alterations".
  • there are 21 references that cannot be found (instead of 23), 2 that were ultimately found thanks to the information provided by Delisle

[edit] References

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