number between 6.3 and 7.5 million according to the lat- est estimates by leading American and Israeli experts on the subject — testament to the hazards of forecasting the future, especially perhaps when it comes to Jews. Even today, much social scientific research on diaspora Jewry is motivated by the desire to assess the extent to which acculturation—involving a departure from religious obser- vance and normative nonreligious Jewish behaviour—weak- ens the foundations of Jewish communal life. Some research- ers view acculturation as a force that undermines the conti- nuity of Jewish communities. Others view acculturation as an adaptive mechanism that permits Jewish communities to sur- vive and flourish in modern environments. What do Canadian data show? If we examine census fig- ures, we can see that both forces are at play, but, on the whole, the trend favours continuity: secularization may preserve rather than threaten that continuity. Accultura- tion can cause Jewish communities to dissipate, but it can also help to ensure their continuity. In fact, both processes often operate simultaneously. The difficulty is in figuring out which force predominates in a given time and place. WHO IS COUNTING? THE CANADIAN CENSUS requires all residents to state their religion (if any) every decade, and their ethnicity, cul- ture, or ancestry every five years. Charles Shahar, chief researcher for Federation CJA in Montreal, has for decades been the foremost demographer of Canadian Jewry. He adopts what he calls the “standard” census definition of Canadian Jews. According to this stan- dard, Jews are individuals who either specify their religion as Jewish or say they have no religion but include Jewish among their ethnic, cultural, or ancestral identifiers. By this definition, even individuals with no religion who list Jewish as their fourth, fifth, or sixth ethnic, cultural, or an- cestral identifier are counted as Jews. People who identi- fy as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, or ancestry but identify with a non-Jewish religion are not considered Jewish by this definition. Sergio DellaPergola, former chair of the Avraham Har- man Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew Uni- versity of Jerusalem, is widely regarded as the dean of de- mographers of world Jewry. He uses a more restrictive defi- nition than Shahar does. In addition to excluding individ- uals who identify with a non-Jewish religion yet identify as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, or ancestry, he does not count as Jews those Canadians who say they have no religion and list their Jewish ethnic, cultural, or ancestral origins fourth, fifth, or sixth. In DellaPergola’s view, the Jewish identity of such individuals is too weak to allow them to be counted as members of the community. There is no right or wrong here. Note, however, that both Shahar’s and DellaPergola’s definitions exclude peo- ple who identify as Jewish to some degree, and there is a cost to doing so.
For example, neither definition is entirely sensible when applied to immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU), who comprise the largest category of Canadian Jewish im- migrants and, with their Russian-speaking offspring, as much as 12 percent of Canada’s Jewish population by the standard definition. Some of these individuals identify as Christian by religion yet identify as Jewish by “nationality” ( natsional’nost’ in Russian). Natsional’nost’ occupies roughly the same conceptual space as ethnicity in English. The self-definition of some FSU immigrants as Jewish by natsional’nost’ was made real and reinforced by the internal passport system of the Soviet-era administrative apparatus, which allocated choice educational opportunities, managerial/administra- tive jobs, and the right to reside in certain locales based on ethnic quotas. From the 1960s on, the internal passport sys- tem was used to systematically discriminate against Jews in order to make room for other nationality groups in the up- per reaches of the Soviet stratification system. Apart from state-sanctioned anti-Jewish discrimination, strong memo- ries of the Holocaust kept Jewish identity alive in the Soviet Union, even among Jews by natsional’nost’ who considered themselves Christian. The Shahar and DellaPergola exclusions are also less than helpful if one wants to understand the implications of the Jewish population count for Jewish continuity. The ap- proach that I regard as the most valuable approach for that purpose lets Canadians speak for themselves by counting as Jewish all those who consider themselves Jewish in any way. To help understand the implications of these definitions for an examination of Jewish continuity, it will help to look at some figures from the most recent census. They describe three categories of Jews: 1. JEWS BY RELIGION. In 2021, people who declared themselves Jews by religion comprised nearly 74 percent of Canadians who declared themselves Jewish in some way. 2. SECULAR JEWS. In that same year, close to 18 per- cent of Canada’s Jews said they do not identify with any religion but do identify as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, or ancestry. Many of these people listed one or more other ethnicities, cultures, or ancestries. 3. CONVERTED JEWS. Finally, under 9 percent of Canadian Jews said they identify as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, or ancestry and simultaneously with a non-Jewish religion.
CHANGE OVER TIME
THINGS GET INTERESTING when we examine how the three categories of Canadian Jews have changed over time. In brief:
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