History of the Jews in Canada

The history of the Jews in Canada is the history of Canadian citizens who follow Judaism as their religion and/or are ethnically Jewish. Jewish Canadians are a part of the greater Jewish diaspora and form the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by those in Israel, the United States, and France. As of 2011, Statistics Canada listed 329,500 followers of the Jewish religion in Canada and 309,650 who claimed Jewish as an ethnicity. One does not necessarily include the other and studies which have attempted to combine the two numbers have arrived at figures above 375,000 Jews in Canada. This total would be approximately 1.1% of the Canadian population.

The Jewish community in Canada is composed mainly of Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants. Several other major Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented. These include Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Bene Israel from India, besides converts to Judaism. The Canadian community has all four of the main modern denominations of Judaism. Many religious and cultural customs are observed.

Though they are a small minority of the total Canadian population, Jews have been present in the country since the first Jewish immigrants arrived with Governor Edward Cornwallis to establish Halifax, Nova Scotia (1749).Sheldon Godfrey and Judy Godfrey. Search Out the Land" The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867.  McGill Queen's University Press. 1997. pp. 76–77;Bell, Winthrop Pickard. The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia:The History of a piece of arrested British Colonial Policy in the Eighteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961

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