The legacy of ‘None is too many’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/08/2022 (1445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Historian Irving Abella, a fine scholar, teacher and Jewish community advocate, passed away in early July at the age of 82. Abella — who was married to retired Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella — and historian Harold Troper understood well that some myths die hard.

More than 40 years ago, the two academics began researching the untold story of Canada’s abysmal treatment of German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany during the 1930s. The eventual result was their groundbreaking 1982 book None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948.

The book’s title was derived from comments made by an unnamed Canadian official who, when asked by journalists how many Jews would be permitted into Canada after the end of the Second World War, caustically replied, “None is too many.”

The book became an instant bestseller, but at the time it stunned many Canadians. In 1982, as Abella later wrote, “Many Canadians believed the myth that theirs was a country of immigrants with a long history of welcoming refugees and dissidents.”

Stories about anti-Semitism, the discriminatory treatment of Asian and African-American immigrants, the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War and the abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools were generally discounted, ignored or regarded as a necessary byproduct when considered against the larger so-called “positive benefits” offered by policies that advocated assimilation to a white Canadian ideal.

In the late 1970s, Troper stumbled upon archival documents dealing with Canada’s refusal to assist the stranded 907 Jewish passengers on the MS St. Louis, who had been supposed to disembark in Cuba until Cuban officials refused them entry. He recruited Abella to work on what the two initially thought would be an article for an academic journal.

Yet the more they researched, the larger the story grew of how Canada, between 1933 and 1945, had the worst record among developed nations for admitting in European Jewish refugees. They uncovered how Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King, concerned about a political backlash, followed the advice of immigration branch bureaucrat Frederick Blair, whose anti-Semitic intransigence is now legendary.

Blair wielded enormous power over the fate of the Jewish refugees. Classically, as Abella and Troper found, he did not consider himself to be anti-Semitic, merely “realistic about Canada’s immigration needs and about the unsuitability of the Jew to those needs.”

The country did not have an official refugee policy at the time, so the German Jews had to be considered under the restrictive regulations of the day — and Jews were not “preferred” or even “non-preferred” immigrants under any circumstance; they were relegated into the unwanted “special permit class.”

The duo’s research was not greeted warmly. Abella later told me how he was derided by several veteran Canadian historians for dredging up this unsettling tale. Even some members of the Jewish community, who had heard a talk by Troper about the subject, thought it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Then, when the two authors sent the book to publishers, it was roundly rejected as “too depressing” and, more tellingly, as “un-Canadian.” Eventually, the late Toronto publisher Malcom Lester, who co-owned a small company, agreed to publish the book, against the advice of his own staff.

But the critics were wrong: None is Too Many was acclaimed as an important contribution to Canadian history and was reissued by the University of Toronto Press in 2013.

The book opened the eyes of Canadians to the realities of the past; that while tolerance (in theory, at least) remains a defining social and cultural characteristic of what it means to be a Canadian, the wide acceptance of this principle is a relatively new phenomenon.

Moreover, the phrase “none is too many” became, as Abella put it in 2013, “an ethical yardstick against which contemporaneous government polices are gauged.”

In 1979, Abella and Troper had sent a few draft chapters to Ron Atkey, the immigration minister in the newly elected government of Joe Clark. It came with a cautionary note: “We hope Canada will not be found wanting in this refugee crisis the way it was in the last.”

At the time, Atkey was trying to figure out a proper response to the emergency precipitated by the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing from North Vietnamese Communist rule. Canada had taken in only about 6,000 of an estimated 130,000 refugees.

Atkey’s deputy minister, John Manion, read the chapters and passed them on to the minister with a warning: “This should not be you.” Atkey spoke to Clark about it, who agreed to a dramatic shift in the government’s position.

Working with a large network of volunteers, the Conservatives opened Canada’s doors wide enough for more than 50,000 refugees to come to the country.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.