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“Honorary Protestants”: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997
2015 
By David Fraser, Professor of Law, University of Nottingham, published by the University of Toronto Press.
Section 93 of the Constitution Act 1867 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to anybody else. This study of the challenges, legal and otherwise, encountered by Jewish parents in educating their children in Montreal in the shadow of s. 93, will undoubtedly become the standard work on the subject. Faced with alternating periods of hostility and tolerance, the Jewish community of Montreal carved out an educational modus vivendi based on complex and continuing negotiations with the Protestant and Catholic school boards, the provincial government, and individual municipalities. Divisions within the Jewish community itself, with different groups alternating between cooperation and militancy, only added to this complexity. In the face of the constitution’s exclusionary language, all parties engaged in modes of informal normative ordering that were at times 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 constitutional amendment of 1997 finally put an end to the Jewish school question.
David Fraser’s Honorary Protestants is an impeccably researched history of the tensions, contexts, and meanings of the struggles to delineate how, in what manner, and with which accommodations Jewish children were schooled in the Montreal public school system. It is a welcome addition to the fields of Canadian legal history, modern Jewish history, Quebec history, and the history of education in Quebec…. [A] compelling illustration of the inadequacy of ‘two solitudes’ as a framework for understanding social reality or law in Quebec.’ David Koffman, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol 86, 2017, p. 145.
REVIEWS OF HONORARY PROTESTS HAVE ALSO APPEARED IN THE FOLLOWING
Jory Binder, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol 54, 2017, pp. 959-965
Mary Anne Poutanen, Historical Studies in Education, Vol 28, 2016, pp. 153-15
Related Topics
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgement ix
1. Introduction: Constituting Law, Constituting Justice in the Jewish School Question 3
2. Invoking Equality, Invoking Legality: Jews Constituting Their Canadian Identity 42
3. Schools, Taxes, Jews, Catholics (and Protestants): The Origin of the Jewish School Question 60
4. Jews and Roman Catholics School Taxes and Protestants: The First Jewish School Question 95
5. Taxes, the Rabbi, and the Schoolboy: Section 93 and the Pinsler Case 123
6. Promises, Promises: “Honoary Protestants” in Protestant School 157
7. Jews, Protestants, and Taxes(Again): The Jewsih School Question in the 1920s 187
8. Jews Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the Law: The Jewish School Question Goes to Court 218
9. Jews Protestants, Roman Catholics: Two Crises and the Jewsih School Question, 1928-1931 244
10. The Protestant Jews of Ste Sophie and La Macaza: Constituting School and Community in Rural
Quebuec 273
11. Outremont and Beyond: The Jewish School Question Moves West 300
12. Hampstead and Beyond: From the Ghetto to Citizenship and Equality under Law’s Shadow 329
13. TMR, St Laurent, Côte Saint-Luc: Democracy, Law, and the End of the Jewish School Question 360
14. Constituting Canada and the Jewish School Question in Montreal, fin 385
Notes 405
Index 501
Awards
- Honorable Mention - Canadian Law and Society Association Book Prize (2016)