It is not easy to measure the ethnic/religious survival of any minority without analysis of many variables related to such communal identities. Jewish life in Canada cannot be monitored or assessed by language data alone, but obviously finding large numbers of people who know Yiddish and/or Hebrew in any city speaks loudly of strong and proud Jewish activity in that place. So it seems still worthwhile to use Canada census data to find out how these languages are doing in regard to being used and studied vs. just being abandoned and therefore shrinking from view on the census of Canada. That is our task in this article. I have carried out such updates for years while teaching at York University in Toronto.
In the briefest and broadest terms, we will find in the reports from Canada’s population census 2021 to be presented below that Ivrit (Hebrew) is alive and well in greater Toronto, Yiddish is showing good survival in greater Montreal, but not much good news on the language front is heard from the rest of Canada. That means that there are no significant speech communities using Yiddish outside these two centers in today’s Canada.
The status of Yiddish and Hebrew in Canada: Toronto vs Montreal
We shall explain the “miraculous“ survival of Yiddish in that one lone cultural-linguistic powerhouse as due to the hassidic families and congregations of Montreal, who cling fiercely to their traditions and their language – Judeo-German aka Yiddish. No other place in Canada has a critical mass of Jews who are so committed to preserving the past this way.
Now on to the census numbers. We are going to examine mother tongue counts for Yiddish and Ivrit in CMA (greater) Toronto vs. Montreal over three decades, and then also look at home language reported for those metropolises in 1991 vs. 2021. You can quickly tell from our numbers that outside these centers there is no meaningful use of the two languages anymore.
Starting with Yiddish, please remember its prominence in the early and mid-1900s. In 1951, the census reported over one hundred thousand Canadians whose first language was Yiddish. These speakers were found in all Jewish cities and towns across the land, not just in “fortress Montreal.“
By 1991, however, massive abandonment of that tongue brought us to a smallish YMT count and a concentration into just the two metropolises, as the rest of Canada had almost no childhood speakers of Yiddish left. The 2021 picture shows that the same trend continued from 1991 to 2021, leaving us with the picture already visible in the 1990s.
While the mother tongue numbers in Montreal declined slightly during the 30-year interval, those of Toronto CMA dropped dramatically (about 75 % loss). What was left in the rest of the country was clearly tiny. But the home language increase in Montreal is incredible, showing an 80% rise! How could this happen?
Briefly, high hassidic birth rates and religious school enrollment would be the main reasons for such minority tongue success. In other places these realities have been discussed, but this shows a tight and highly committed population winning the assimilation/disappearance battle; this has not occurred elsewhere in Canada.
For Ivrit, therefore, the 30-year evolution shows significant growth of the mother tongue total, about half in greater Toronto, while the counts rose in other major centers as well. Much of this must be due to Israeli immigration to Canada, as few native Canadian Jews would claim Hebrew as their first childhood tongue.
As to Ivrit spoken at home, Toronto stayed stable during this time period; the Montreal count shrank somewhat, but the rest of Canada became a significant part of the IHL picture; this was a count of about 2,700 speakers outside Toronto and Montreal.
So Israeli teachers and immigrants are apparently staying with Ivrit as home language in cities such as Ottawa and Vancouver, which have synagogues, Jewish schools, etc., that encourage and sustain the use of Hebrew in Canada.
There you have our current picture as reported by Statistics Canada from the census. Yiddish is now kept going in Canada only by Greater Montreal’s hassidic enclaves, as the elderly general Jewish population that used Yiddish is pretty well gone. Hebrew has increased its presence in Canada between 1991 and 2021 as measured by mother tongue or home language. Toronto remains the peak of Ivrit usage in Canada, but some other cities do show Ivrit as a living reality today as well.
So while it might seem counterintuitive to expect that either language would be in use anywhere in Canada today, the statistics do show that both languages thrive to some degree, even in a country that prides itself on making all immigrants “Canadians.” ■
Sociologist Leo Davids was on the faculty of Toronto’s York University for over 40 years. He and his wife, Faigie, made aliyah in 2018.