MONTREAL, Quebec. According to the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg/Combined Jewish Appeal, Montreal has one of the largest Sephardic populations in North America, with Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent making up 22.8 percent of the Jewish population as of 2001.
But at McGill University, considered the most prestigious university in the city, students are hard-pressed to find many courses focusing on aspects of Jewish culture and history outside of the Ashkenazi experience.
Originally planning to major in Political Science and Jewish Studies, first-year Eric Abrams switched his second major to Middle East Studies when he realized that the courses offered did not match his interest in the history of the Diaspora.
“There was too much shtetl and Yiddish — too European-centric, in my opinion,” says Abrams. “I wanted to get a better sense of the Jewish situation in the Middle East, considering that Jewish communities in the Middle East date back 2500 years, much longer than any…in Europe.”
“It’s important to know about the diversity within the Jewish people,” he added.
Ashkenazi Beginnings, Ashkenazi Direction
Anna Fishman Gonshor, McGill alumna and current professor of Yiddish language and literature, recalls a “tangible excitement on campus” when the university first began offering Jewish Studies courses in 1968. Certainly, she said, the post-’67 surge in Jewish interests played a role in creating enthusiasm for the fledgling department.
The Jewish Studies department did not solidify as such until 1971, in a movement led by Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, who was then pursuing her doctorate in Yiddish literature within McGill’s English department.
Even today, 35 years after its founding, Montreal’s Jewish community maintains a strong Ashkenazi flavor, with a still-thriving Yiddish culture. Rather than being unique to McGill and Montreal, though, the emphasis on Ashkenazi Studies reflects a greater trend in higher education.
Sephardic Studies is an underdeveloped field in North America, where the majority of community institutions are set up by Ashkenazi Jews. And with few academicians concentrating on the Jewish Middle East and North Africa, even if a department wants to hire a professor, it faces a limited pool of experts from which they can draw.
Defining “Sephardim” broadly, as those from “the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans, to the Jews of North Africa and Muslim lands including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Ethiopia and Bukharian Jews,” the American Sephardi Federation works to promote their culture and history. Within the context of the university, they promote the Broome & Allen Scholarship, which provides grants for students of Sephardic heritage and those who plan to pursue Sephardic Studies. As for their additional activities regarding the university, the foundation was unavailable for comment.
Professor Eugene Orenstein calls the department’s strength in Ashkenazi-related Judaica both “accidental and not accidental.” Through Wisse’s energetic efforts, the department began with the significance of Yiddish; indeed, Yiddish literature was one of the first two courses offered, the other being Hebrew language.
As the department grew, it sought to build on and expand this wealth.
Orenstein himself specializes in the history of the Jewish labor movements of Eastern Europe, pre-state Israel, and North America. Another department heavyweight, chair Gershon Hundert, is an expert in the Jews of Poland.
Finding his department marginal within the university, Hundert believes that a course like “Jews in Iraq” would be marginal even within the subset of Jewish Studies.
“We try to do the core,” he says, which means that the department models itself to be on par with current norms within Jewish Studies. At the moment, his top priority is to get a second appointment in Bible Studies.
Expanding Within Constraints
This is not to say that non-Ashkenazi issues are completely ignored. Gonshor emphasizes that “faculty members are going to contextualize what they’re teaching. Some things are applicable, some are not. Trying to create artificial paradigms is not intellectually honest,” she pointed out. As dedicated as a professor may be to educating students about Sephardic Jewry, teaching about Iranian Jews in a course about Yiddish literature, for instance, would serve nothing but a stab at political correctness.
Within special interest courses, professors tend to deal tangentially with Sephardic Jewish history and culture. Orenstein makes a point to mention to his class that a Jewish labor movement in Salonica predates the one in Eastern Europe and that the first Jewish socialist publication was written in Ladino, not Yiddish.
After teaching at McGill for over three decades, he believes that, “any good student who takes more than one special interest course is going to come away with the sense that Jewish culture is a very old and complex creation, like a diamond with many facets, with a history that spans some four millennia and all continents of the globe.”
Gonshor introduces Yiddish to her classes as one of many Jewish languages. “I don’t teach Ladino,” she said, “but I inform my students that it exists.”
Jewish Studies at Concordia, the other English-speaking university in Montreal, takes on a different nature. Rather than majoring in Jewish Studies, a Concordia student may concentrate on Judaic Studies within the Religious Studies department, which offers a course called Sephardic Judaism.
One such student, who prefers to remain anonymous, believes that “one of the strengths of Concordia’s program is that the profs are able to teach on a wide array of subjects within Judaism in addition to teaching their own specialty.” He notes that “Sephardic issues come up in almost every Judaism course in one way or another.”
While McGill students are free to take courses at any of the other universities in Montreal, the student notices that the non-Concordia students in his classes come mostly from Université de Montréal and Université du Quebec à Montréal, both universities with weak Jewish Studies offerings. Abrams reports that when he inquired about the lack of Sephardic courses at McGill, he was not referred to the course at Concordia.
Quebec’s unique cultural and political situation attracted many Jews from French-speaking countries, such as Morocco and Lebanon, to immigrate to the province. In a sense, the Ashkenazi-Sephardic split in Montreal follows roughly the same line as the English-French divide. Sephardic Jews seeking courses that speak to their specific cultural heritage do not come to McGill.
Commitment to academic excellence has led to a respected and popular Jewish Studies program at McGill (one with 300 students enrolled in winter semester classes), but the depth that the department attempts to achieve becomes a barrier to a geographically and topically diverse course offerings. Aside from “Bible Interpretations/Sephardic,” the only course on modern history with an explicitly Sephardic focus has not been offered for several years.
In response to the dearth of offerings, Hundert created “Jews in the Orbit of Islam,” which according to the course description gave an “overview of the history of the Jews in the Islamic world from 622 to the present.” He is reluctant to offer it again, as the subject matter is outside his field.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to expanding the Jewish Studies prog
ram is the financial constraint. As a small department, Jewish Studies cannot rely on their university budget for most of its projects.
In 2001, Hundert appealed to the private sector in a massive fundraising campaign that brought in over three million dollars from the Ashkenazi community. While most of this sum came as unrestricted donations, part was designated for the Yiddish program and another for a Jewish teacher training program. Hundert believes that had he asked the Ashkenazi community for money directed toward Sephardic Studies, it would have maintained that its first concern is to protect waning Yiddish and Eastern European cultures.
To help provide the means to hire a professor of Sephardic and Oriental Jewish culture, Hundert approached the Montreal Sephardic community, yet this drive ended at an impasse. The term “Sephardic” itself turned out to be problematic, as Jews from Iraq do not necessarily want to be lumped together with those from Morocco. Hundert also cites the reluctance from the Sephardic community to show their financial support for something Jewish to a university, rather than to a synagogue.
Hundert believes that North American universities will have to confront these challenges. “Descendents of Sephardic immigrants are only now coming to university,” he observes, “There will be more demand [for Sephardic studies] and that demand will have to be met.”
