"Honorary Protestants": The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
"Honorary Protestants": The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997
Abstract
When the Constitution Act of 1867 (a.k.a. The British North American Act) was enacted, section 93 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to any others. Over the course of the next century, the Jewish community in Montreal carved out an often tenuous arrangement for public schooling as "honorary Protestants," based on complex negotiations with the Protestant and Catholic school boards, the provincial government, and individual municipalities. The author points out that in the face of the Constitution's exclusionary language, all parties gave their compromise a legal form which was frankly unconstitutional but unavoidable if Jewish children were to have access to public schools. Bargaining in the shadow of the law, the parties made their own constitution long before the formal constitutional amendment of 1997 finally put an end to the issue. The author presents the first "legal history" of the Jewish school question in Montreal, highlighting the complex evolution of concepts of rights, citizenship, and identity, negotiated outside the strict legal boundaries of the Constitution.
Place
Toronto, ON
Publisher
Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press
Date
2015
# of Pages
x-514p.
Language
en
ISBN
978-1-4426-3048-2
Notes

For a critical review of this book, see Roderick MacLeod's article in Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes juives canadiennes, Vol. 24 (2016) : 199-204. https://cjs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cjs/issue/view/2287

Citation
Fraser, David. “Honorary Protestants”: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997. Toronto, ON: Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 2015.
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