Pierre Anctil may well be an anomaly: a French Canadian scholar who has learned Yiddish and writes extensively on the history of the Jewish community in Montreal.
But on second thought, as he suggested in a lecture on Yiddish scholarship in Canada today, he may not be an oddity at all.
Speaking at a symposium on Canadian Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto on Nov. 17, Anctil claimed that much of the current scholarship on Yiddish in this country is being produced by French Canadian academics.
In a wry observation, Anctil said it will soon be necessary for anglophones to learn French in order to read francophone works on Yiddish.
He said he was attracted to Yiddish because, as a francophone, he wanted to learn more about Jews, a minority that has preserved its ethnic identity and cultural and linguistic traditions in the face of assimilation.
A professor at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches contemporary Canadian history, Anctil has written widely on Jews and Yiddish.
Three years ago, in conjunction with Concordia University historian Ira Robinson, he published Trajectoires juives au Quebec. More recently, he wrote Jacob-Isaac Segal, un poete yiddish de Montreal et son milieu, a biography of that late poet.
Wearing a black fedora usually favored by modern Orthodox Jews, Anctil launched into his talk by reciting a poem by Segal, enunciating each word meticulously.
In a brief survey of Yiddish, he said it was the language used by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in Canada during the great migration from 1904 to 1914.
By 1931, Yiddish was the mother tongue of more than 90 percent of Jews in Canada over the age of 10, he noted.
Yiddish was spoken exclusively by immigrants rather than by native-born Canadian Jews.
Even the children of Yidddishists failed to utilize it as their first language, he pointed out.
In a lament, Anctil said that current scholarship on Yiddish literature and culture tends to be neglected, if not ignored, by Canadian Jewish studies programs. This stems from the fact that few researchers can master Yiddish, which, he observed, is not currently taught in a sustained or serious manner.
According to Anctil, less than one percent of Yiddish documentation has been translated into English.
In closing, he said that more and more non-Jewish scholars are specializing in Canadian Jewish history. As he put it, “It’s opening up to all Canadian historians.”
The symposium was organized in honor of Gerald Tulchinsky, a Canadian historian who taught at Queen’s University from 1966 to 1999 and who has written a series of books on Jewish history in Canada, from Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community to Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment.