Sephardic Jews in Canada: Two Communities a Century Apart

Canada has a genuine Sephardi story, but it is not the one usually told.

The country’s oldest congregation, Shearith Israel in Montreal, was founded in 1768 on the Spanish and Portuguese rite and follows it to this day, and it is natural to assume that its founders were Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

Almost none of them were.

The great majority of Canada’s first Jewish settlers were Ashkenazim — from England, and behind England from Germany and central Europe — who adopted the Sephardi minhag because it was the established rite of the London and New York congregations they came from, not because it was their own ancestry.

Why does the “Spanish and Portuguese” label mislead?

This is the single most important thing to understand before researching a Canadian family as Sephardi.

The demographer Louis Rosenberg, for many years research director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, examined the question in 1960 and concluded that the legend of a Spanish and Portuguese founding population “has been accepted unquestioningly, and repeated or paraphrased so frequently that it is now generally assumed” — but that the Sephardi names among the earliest arrivals belonged to men who did not settle permanently.

Jacob de Maurera, Elias Seixas, Fernandez de Fonseca, Joseph Bindona, Emanuel de Cordova, Isaac Miranda, Hananiel Garcia, Uriel Moresco, Manuel Gomez — these appear in the record and then leave it, returning to New York, Newport or Philadelphia, or marrying out.

Of the twenty members named in the Shearith Israel minute books between 1778 and 1780, Rosenberg found one who was Sephardi. By his account the first Sephardi Jew to settle permanently in Canada was Rabbi Abraham de Sola, who took up the Montreal pulpit in 1847.

Two Sephardi histories, separated by a century

They should never be run together.

A ritual Sephardi presence from 1768 — a congregation using the Spanish and Portuguese rite whose membership was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. This is the world of the Harts, Davids, Josephs, Hayses and Judahs, and it is superbly documented, but it is Sephardi in liturgy rather than in descent.

An actual Sephardi population from the twentieth century — French-speaking Jews from Morocco above all, and from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and later Israel and France. This is a large, living community, concentrated in Montreal and Toronto, and it is the real Sephardi Canada. Its records are recent, largely in private and communal hands, and mostly point back to the country of origin.

Neither Leonard Cohen nor William Shatner, the two Montreal Jews most often assumed abroad to stand for Canadian Jewry, was Sephardi. Both were of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent. The genuinely Sephardi Canada is younger, more French, and less famous.

Where did they come from?

The founding period

Not from Iberia, and not directly.

The first Jews in what became Canada arrived with or just after the British conquest of New France in 1759–60 — army provisioners, commissariat officers and merchants who came up from the British possessions to the south, chiefly New York, Newport, Albany and Philadelphia, and behind those from England.

Aaron Hart, conventionally called the father of Canadian Jewry, came to Trois-Rivières from New York in 1760.

Samuel Jacobs, a merchant on the St Lawrence before the conquest, wrote parts of his diary in phonetic English and French rendered in cursive Ashkenazic Hebrew script — a small but telling detail, since a Sephardi of the period would have written in Portuguese or in a different hand. He married a French Canadian and raised his children Catholic.

Before any of them, in 1738, a young woman named Esther Brandeau reached New France disguised as a boy; she is the first known Jew in Canada, but she was returned to France after a year for refusing to convert, and left no community behind her.

The twentieth-century community

North Africa above all.

After decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian Jews left in large numbers, and Montreal — thanks to the active sympathy of its Jewish community and the appeal of a French-speaking city — became second only to Israel as a destination for Moroccan Jews. Many came via France or Israel rather than directly.

Smaller streams came from Egypt, from Iraq and the wider Arab world, and a few Sephardi families from the Balkans reached Montreal just before the Second World War.

These are the families for whom the word Sephardi describes descent and not merely rite.

How did they make a living?

The founding families were merchants and fur traders.

The early Shearith Israel membership reads as a commercial network reaching from Montreal and Quebec City down the Richelieu and across the Great Lakes to Detroit, Michilimackinac and Green Bay — the Harts, the Davids, the Josephs, the Solomons, Levy Solomon, the Judahs, Myer Michaels.

They supplied the British army, traded with Indigenous nations, held seigneuries and later moved into banking, railways, shipping and the professions. This is a small, prosperous, interconnected elite, and its members appear again and again in militia rolls, petitions for representative government, and the founding minutes of Canadian institutions.

The twentieth-century Sephardi arrivals entered a very different economy, and their occupational history belongs to modern Montreal and Toronto rather than to the fur trade.

Where should you look when a Canadian line runs out?

Across the border, almost always.

Within Canada the founding families concentrated in Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières, with individuals ranging far west with the trade. But the more important movement for research runs the other way: the Canadian founding population was continuous with the congregations of New York (Shearith Israel, the same name), Newport, Philadelphia (Mikveh Israel) and London (Bevis Marks).

Families and records crossed these borders constantly. The Montreal register of vital events kept by the Rev. Jacob Cohen was carried off to Philadelphia when he became minister at Mikveh Israel, and the early Montreal entries are bound into the Mikveh Israel book there. A later hazan, Piza, took the Montreal register back to London “by mistake.”

A Canadian line that runs out will very often continue in New York, Philadelphia or London, and these three should be treated as part of the same field.

Montreal — Shearith Israel (the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue)

Founded in 1768, this is the oldest congregation in Canada and for nearly eighty years the only synagogue in Montreal.

It has occupied four homes: the first small synagogue at Notre Dame and Little St James Streets (built 1777, in use from 1783); the Chenneville Street building (consecrated 1838, in the Egyptian revival style then fashionable); the Stanley Street building (dedicated 1890, in a Judeo-Egyptian style designed by Clarence de Sola); and the present Lemieux Street building (now Rue Saint-Kevin), whose sanctuary opened in 1960.

The congregation adopted the Spanish and Portuguese rite from the outset and undertook to follow the minhag of Bevis Marks in London, referring questions requiring a rabbinical decision to the Haham there. From its founding it was closely tied to Bevis Marks and to the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York.

The de Sola family shaped it for a century. Abraham de Sola (minister from 1847), his son Meldola de Sola (the first native-born hazan to serve a Canadian congregation), and Clarence de Sola (a founder and long-serving president of Canadian Zionism) run right through the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century record. Abraham de Sola, as Rosenberg noted, was very probably the first permanent Sephardi settler in the country.

The congregation is still Shearith Israel and still Sephardi in rite, and since the mid-twentieth century it has been joined by many members of the newer North African Sephardi community, for whom its minhag was familiar.

The modern Sephardi community

Montreal

The living Sephardi community of Montreal dates from the 1950s and 1960s. The Communauté Sépharade Unifiée du Québec and the Sephardic Kehila Centre (whose Montreal origins are usually dated to the mid-1950s) are its institutional core.

Its character is strongly Francophone — one of the genuinely distinctive features of Canadian Jewry, since these families chose to keep French rather than assimilate into the Anglophone Ashkenazi majority. By the early 1970s Montreal had more than 11,000 North African Jews. Services in French and Judeo-Arabic, unusual in North America, are a normal part of Montreal Sephardi life.

Toronto and elsewhere

Toronto’s Sephardim are fewer and later than Montreal’s but real, drawn from the same North African and Middle Eastern migrations, with a further three or four thousand North African Jews there by the early 1970s. Individual congregations serve Moroccan, Iraqi and other communities.

Elsewhere in Canada the Sephardi presence is thin: the older story is almost entirely Montreal, and the modern one heavily so.

Cemeteries

The Shearith Israel congregation has used a succession of burial grounds in Montreal since 1772.

The earliest, in use from that year, was sold to the city in the 1860s for civic improvement, and the remains, memorials and tombstones were removed to a newer ground — an event that, as elsewhere, complicates the survival of the oldest stones.

Later burials took place in the congregation’s own grounds and, from the nineteenth century, alongside the other Montreal congregations. Because the David family financed and controlled the earliest cemetery, its notarial deeds and the arrangements over the “ninety feet adjoining the old cemetery” are documented in the congregation’s minutes in unusual detail.

For the modern community, burial records are recent and held by the individual congregations and communal bodies rather than by any central archive.

What records survive?

Canada is, for the founding period, a well-recorded community whose records are scattered across three countries — Canada, the United States and England — and whose best single narrative source is not an archive at all but a congregational history.

The indispensable published account is Esther Blaustein, Rachel Esar and Evelyn Miller, ‘Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue (Shearith Israel) Montreal, 1768–1968’, in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, vol. 23. It is a detailed, footnoted, family-by-family history drawn largely from the congregation’s own minute books, and for the Harts, Davids, Josephs, Hayses, Judahs, Solomons and de Solas it is the natural starting point.

The congregation’s own minute books are the core manuscript source and remain with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Montreal. They run from the 1770s and record membership, governance, finance, discipline and the fabric of communal life.

Where they are silent on vital events, the reason is often that the early vital register kept by the Rev. Jacob Cohen was taken to Philadelphia and is now bound into the early records of the Mikveh Israel congregation there — a point every researcher of the founding families needs to know.

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Shearith Israel minute books	1770s–	S&P Synagogue, Montreal	No
Early vital register (Cohen)	18th c.	Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia	No
Blaustein/Esar/Miller history	to 1968	Published (JHSE Trans. 23)	Yes
Congregational records (CJHN)	18th–20th c.	Canadian Jewish Heritage Network	Partly
Immigration / passenger lists	1865–1935	Library and Archives Canada	Partly
Border entry records	1908–1935	Library and Archives Canada	Partly
Naturalisation records	1915–1951	Library and Archives Canada	Partly
Census (Canada)	1871–	LAC / provincial	Yes
Quebec civil (BAnQ)	from 1760s	BAnQ	Partly

The Canadian Jewish Heritage Network holds a body of Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue material and is searchable online.

Library and Archives Canada holds the immigration, passenger, border-entry, naturalisation and census records that carry the community forward into the modern period, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec holds the Quebec civil registration, notarial and land records in which the founding merchant families — landowners, seigneurs and litigants — appear repeatedly.

The McCord Museum in Montreal holds much of the family and business papers cited in the standard history (the Hart papers, the Joseph diaries, the Beaver Club minute book).

Where else should you look?

New York — Shearith Israel, and the Spanish and Portuguese congregation there. The Montreal founders came largely from New York and Newport and moved back and forth; the two Shearith Israels were, in the phrase of one study, kissing cousins.

Philadelphia — Mikveh Israel, which holds the early Montreal vital register within its own records.

London — Bevis Marks and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, whose minhag Montreal followed and to whose Haham it deferred; and the Jewish Historical Society of England, which published the standard Montreal history.

Portugal and the Caribbean — for any family that is genuinely Sephardi by descent rather than by rite, the line runs back through the same Western Sephardi world as the London and Amsterdam communities: Portugal and its Inquisition, and the Caribbean congregations of Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname and Curaçao.

North Africa, Israel and France — for the modern community, the records are those of the country of origin, and of the French and Israeli communities through which many families passed on the way to Montreal.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The founding period is well told and the modern one is barely begun — the reverse of what the community’s actual demography would suggest.

The Spanish and Portuguese founding families have a genuine literature: the Blaustein/Esar/Miller history, Arthur Daniel Hart’s classic The Jew in Canada, and the general surveys of Tulchinsky and others. Rosenberg’s demographic work is unusually rigorous and is the corrective to the Sephardi legend.

What is thinner is any systematic linkage of the Montreal founding records to the New York, Philadelphia and London material with which they are continuous — the families are documented, but as a Canadian story rather than as one node in a cross-border network.

The modern, genuinely Sephardi community — the North African and Middle Eastern families who are the real subject of the term — is, by contrast, very little documented genealogically. Its records are recent, dispersed among congregations and communal organisations, and mostly still point back to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq and beyond.

This is the large gap, and it is the one that matters most for anyone whose Sephardi Canadian ancestry is real rather than ritual.

Organisations and repositories

Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Montreal (Shearith Israel) — the congregation and its minute books

Canadian Sephardi Federation

Canadian Jewish Heritage Network — Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue material, searchable online

Library and Archives Canada — immigration, passenger, border-entry, naturalisation and census records; the Samuel Jacobs diary

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec — Quebec civil, notarial and land records

McCord Museum, Montreal — Hart, Joseph and related family and business papers

Jewish Public Library Archives, Montreal

Ontario Jewish Archives, Toronto

Mikveh Israel Synagogue, Philadelphia — the early Montreal vital register

Jewish Historical Society of England — publisher of the standard Montreal history

JewishGen Canada database; FamilySearch (Canada); Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Any index or transcription of the Shearith Israel Montreal minute books, 1770s onward
A full transcription of the early Montreal vital register held at Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia
Transcriptions or surveys of the earliest Montreal Jewish cemetery (1772) and the tombstones removed when it was sold to the city in the 1860s
Material linking the Montreal founding families to their New York, Newport, Philadelphia and London origins
Records of the modern Montreal and Toronto Sephardi congregations — Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Iraqi and other
Family papers, correspondence or photographs from any Canadian Sephardi family, of either the founding or the modern community

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Canadian Sephardi research divides in two. The founding “Spanish and Portuguese” families are well documented but scattered across Montreal, New York, Philadelphia and London, and Sephardi in rite rather than in descent — a distinction that trips up almost everyone. The modern North African and Middle Eastern community is genuinely Sephardi but recent, and its records usually lead back out of Canada to the country of origin. If you would like help with either, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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