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.

Contents

[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 great controversy, as did her reporting of anti-semitic opinion pieces and articles that had been published in the respected intellectual Quebec newspaper Le Devoir during the 1930s.

Her thesis was controversial even before it was published, as conflicts over it amongst her thesis committee delayed its approval (Janice Arnold,"Post-graduate paper comes under attack", The Canadian Jewish News, April 23, 1992); although the normal waiting period for approval of a thesis at LavalUniverstiy was 3 to 6 months, the approval of hers was delayed for two years. Her analysis of Groulx and Le Devoir received a sympathetic treatment in an early article on her in the Quebec newsmagazine L'Actualité (Luc Chartrand, "Le chanoine au pilori", L'Actualité, June 15, 1991, p. 114). However, the treatment she received changed for the worse after her work was quoted with approval in Mordecai Richler's controversial book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!; Delisle has said that the reaction among the French Canadian public to his praise was as if she had been "embraced by the Devil" (Sarah Scott, "The Lonely Passion of Esther Delisle", Elm Street magazine, April 1998, p. 97 at 98).

In a March 1, 1997 cover story titled Le mythe du Québec fasciste (The Myth of a Fascist Quebec), L'Actualité magazine revisited the controversy around Dr. Delisle's doctoral thesis. A profile of Father Lionel Groulx also appeared in the same issue; both articles acknowledged 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]

However, the same newsmagazine made a claim, never substantiated, that Delisle had been subsidized by Jewish organizations, and the claim was 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 to many French Quebecers who see him as one of the fathers of Quebec nationalism, although his actual writings are little read today. A station on the Montreal Metro as well as schools, streets, lakes, and a chain of mountains in Quebec are named for him. In order to separate his political and literary activities from his academic work, Groulx wrote journalism and novels under numerous pseudonyms. In her 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 referred to "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 Other Academics

In an article entitled "The Sins of the Abbé Groulx" published in the Literary Review of Canada in 1994, Gary Caldwell, a sociologist and demographer who is a member of the governing national council of the Parti Québécois, asserted in essence that:

  • Articles written under the pseudonym of Lambert Closse have not been proven to be written by Groulx (the Lambert Closse articles are not central to Delisle's thesis, and were not mentioned in the doctoral thesis on which her book is based; she acknowledges that she cannot prove her suspicion that the article was written by Groulx, but asserts that Groulx' involvement in the publication of the book in which the article of concern appeared is itself of concern.)
  • 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, Caldwell claims, often misrepresent the ideas in them
  • she fails to distinguish Catholic anti-Semitism from fascist sympathies (instead, she argues that they were closely linked at the time in fascist Italy and Portugal, in Vichy France, and in the writings and radio broadcasts of the American Father Coughlin; see clerical fascism)
  • she fails to deal adequately with the contradictions in Groulx's attitudes towards Jews (although he expressed anti-semitic opinions in his private correspondence and pseudonymous journalism, opposed Jewish immigration to Canada and urged French Canadians not to buy from Jewish-owned stores as part of the "achat chez nous" campaign, his opinions were more muted in his academic writings; he publicly denounced anti-Semitism as unchristian 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 example Morton Weinfeld in The Jews of Canada (instead, she considers that the bulk of the French and Jewish populations were not antagonistic to each other, and considers extreme anti-semitism to have been more prevalent among the French Canadian intellectual elite).
  • 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).

Caldwell accused Laval University of disloyalty to the French Canadian community for having granted Delisle a doctorate (Scott, above).

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, Bouchard 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, he claimed, 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.

Both Bouchard and Caldwell acknowledge that Groulx at times expressed anti-semitic opinions; they argue that these opinions do not taint his scholarship or secular Quebec nationalism, either because the anti-semitism arises from Groulx' Catholic beliefs or because it is a personal bias unrelated or peripheral to his academic work. Delisle, by contrast, argues that antisemitism is an integral component of Groulx' race-based nationalism and his enthusiasm for right-wing authoritarian governments.

[edit] Other Themes

The controversy over whether or not Quebec society is or was anti-semitic simplifies her thesis and has obscured the more important themes of her work. For her, Quebecers were not uniformly anti-semitic; anti-semitism was a disease of Quebec intellectuals rather than of the common people, part and parcel of their condemnation of the vices of liberalism, modernity, urbanism, not to mention movies and jazz music and other aspects of American culture, all of which they saw as dangers to their conception of the ideal Quebec society. She notes that the mass circulation newspaper La Presse, as one example, did not display the anti-semitic content of the intellectually influential but less popular Le Devoir.She attacks as myth the beliefs put forward by historians such as Lionel Groulx that the Quebecois are a racially and ethnically homogeneous group of pure descent (pure laine in French) from French-speaking Catholic immigrants to New France. She argues that the Quebec intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s were far less isolated and more deeply influenced by the intellectual currents in Europe, particularly the nationalism of the extreme right, than is described in most Quebec histories of the period.

[edit] References

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