By Shimshon Cohen
Canada’s first synagogue was in Montreal, and it was not Ashkenazi. The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, Shearith Israel, was formally established in 1768. It was a Sephardi congregation, built by some of the first Jewish families in what became Canada. That is worth remembering, particularly in Montreal, where people sometimes talk about Sephardi Jews as though they arrived later to somebody else’s community, bringing different food, different tunes, different customs and perhaps a little too much volume.
Montreal Jewish life grew in layers. The Spanish came first. Ashkenazi communities followed. Then came Jews from Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, France, Israel and everywhere else Jews had been pushed out of or had finally decided to leave. They did not all pray the same way. They did not all speak the same language, have the same rabbi, the same politics, the same ideas about halacha or even the same idea of what being Jewish was supposed to look like. Yet, they were still all Jews. That sounds obvious until one spends a little time in the Jewish community.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe gave a Purim talk in 1960 under the title A Jew is a Jew. He was speaking about something more serious than communal togetherness. He was talking about the belief that a Jew could hide his identity, blend in, act like everyone else and somehow avoid the people who hated him. The Rebbe’s answer was that it did not work that way. He quoted the old line that a Jew, even after sinning, remains a Jew. Haman, after all, did not need a directory of synagogues to decide whom he hated.
The Rebbe was speaking about the outside world, the problem now is that Jews have become very good at doing a version of it to each other.
We do not just have communities. We have categories. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Hasidic, Litvish, Modern Orthodox, Yeshivish, Reform, Conservative, secular, Zionist, anti-Zionist, Israeli, French, English, Syrian, Moroccan, Persian, Hungarian. A few of those terms describe religious or historical differences, others are just a way of telling somebody, without saying it directly, that he is not from here.
Montreal’s Jewish community has a bad habit of acting like a collection of private clubs with a shared emergency number. When there is an attack on a synagogue, a school shooting, a swastika, a firebombing, a threat against a Jewish institution, suddenly everybody remembers the word community. There are statements, meetings and solidarity pictures. People who have spent years avoiding each other find themselves standing in the same room, using the same language and asking the same questions about police protection, security grants and what the city is going to do.
Then, the immediate danger passes and we go back to normal. Back to the schools that quietly make clear which families fit and which ones do not. Back to the shuls where a person can walk in and know within thirty seconds that he is being looked at. Back to the jokes about accents, minhagim, clothing, food, pronunciation, education and who is really frum. Back to treating another Jew’s customs as either quaint or suspicious, depending on how much we know about them.
The Ashkenazi-Sephardi split is not some ancient feud handed down at Sinai, it is a map of exile. Jews from Central and Eastern Europe developed one set of customs. Jews from Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the Middle East developed others. The difference is in the piyutim, the food, the melodies, the pronunciation, the halachic traditions and the way families and communities formed themselves around those traditions. That should have made us richer. Instead, people found a way to turn it into a ranking system.
A Sephardi kid should not have to enter an Ashkenazi school and feel as though his family’s Judaism is the colourful version of the real thing. An Ashkenazi kid should not grow up believing that every minhag he doesn’t recognize is an oddity that needs to be explained. There is no “standard” Jew. There never was, the first synagogue in this country should have settled that argument a long time ago.
The split between Hasidic Jews and the Lithuanian rabbinic world is different because it began as a serious fight over the future of Jewish life. When Hasidism emerged in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, it brought something new into the Jewish world; There was an emphasis on joy, prayer, spiritual connection, stories, the rebbe and the idea that a Jew who was not the town’s greatest scholar could still have a powerful relationship with G-d. For ordinary people, that was not a minor thing, Judaism could feel like it belonged to them too.
The rabbinic leadership in places like Vilna saw danger in it. They had lived through the wreckage left by false messiahs and religious movements that had promised the world and left Jews broken behind them. They worried about the growing authority of rebbes, about emotional fervour overtaking serious learning, and about a movement they did not control spreading through towns and villages faster than anyone could contain it. So they went after it. In 1772, Hasidim in Vilna were excommunicated. There were bans, boycotts and efforts to isolate entire communities.
The people opposing Hasidism were not cartoon villains, they believed they were protecting Torah. The Hasidim believed they were bringing life back into a Jewish world that had become too cold, too rigid and too far removed from ordinary people. Both sides thought the other was endangering Judaism.
That is usually when Jews become their worst selves.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, ended up in a Tsarist prison in 1798. He was accused of treason and of sending funds to Jews living in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, which Russia was then at war with. The allegations came amid the wider struggle against Hasidism and he spent 53 days imprisoned in St. Petersburg before being released. The state did not care about the finer points of Hasidic theology, nor did not care whether the Lithuanian rabbis had a real concern or whether the Hasidim were right about joy and spiritual renewal. It saw Jews fighting, saw an opportunity, and did what states like that do.
The fight survived and so did both sides. Hasidism became one of the great forces in Jewish life and the Lithuanian yeshiva world became one of the great centres of Torah learning. They built schools, shuls, institutions and entire neighbourhoods. They still fight, sometimes over ideas and sometimes simply because people inherit old suspicions before they ever learn the history behind them.
The Orthodox, Reform and Conservative split came from a different world, but it was also a fight over survival. By the nineteenth century, European Jews were entering universities, professions, politics and the broader culture. The old communal structure was falling apart, and Jews were being told they could become full citizens, but there was an unspoken condition: they were expected to become less visibly Jewish while doing it.
Reform Judaism tried to answer that by changing Jewish practice to fit the modern world. Orthodoxy answered by insisting that Torah and halacha were not something to be adjusted every time the world outside changed its mind about religion. Conservative Judaism tried to stand somewhere in the middle, holding on to halachic continuity while accepting that Judaism had always changed and developed.
Those are not arguments that disappear because a federation puts everybody on the same poster once a year, they go directly to questions of authority, revelation, conversion, marriage, gender, prayer and what the Jewish people are supposed to preserve. But there is a difference between believing another Jew is wrong, and treating him as though he is a problem, and that line gets crossed constantly.
There are Orthodox Jews who speak about Reform and Conservative Jews as though they are only useful when the community wants bigger numbers at a rally. There are Reform and Conservative Jews who speak about Orthodox Jews as though they are an embarrassment that will eventually fade away once everybody becomes enlightened. Secular Jews complain that religious Jews want to control everything. Religious Jews complain that secular Jews only remember Judaism when there is a crisis or a fundraiser. Everybody has examples, everybody has stories, everybody can name a rabbi, a school, a board member, a family or an organization that gave them a reason to be angry.
The problem is not the anger. Jewish communities should be angry when institutions treat people badly, when schools humiliate families, when rabbis misuse authority, when organizations forget the people they claim to represent, when wealthy people decide that communal life belongs to them because they pay for a seat at the table. The problem begins when anger turns into contempt for entire groups of Jews.
Then there is Israel.
The Zionist and anti-Zionist divide is the one that is being used most aggressively now because it is the easiest one for people outside the community to exploit. Zionism was never one idea; There were religious Zionists, socialist Zionists, secular Zionists, political Zionists, cultural Zionists and Jews who wanted a Jewish state for entirely different reasons. There were religious Jews who opposed Zionism because they believed Jewish sovereignty had to come differently, there were Jews who thought Zionism was too secular, Jews who thought it was too religious, Jews who thought the Diaspora was safer, and Jews who thought the Diaspora had already proven it was not. Those debates are old and did not start on a university campus after October 7.
What is new is the way anti-Israel movements have learned to use Jewish division as cover. Find a small group of anti-Zionist Jews, put them near the front of a rally, and suddenly the whole thing is presented as beyond criticism. A person can scream outside a synagogue, harass Jewish students or call for Israel to be dismantled, and somebody will point to the Jews nearby as proof that none of it is anti-Jewish. It is a strange standard that nobody would accept it anywhere else. A few Jews standing in a crowd do not make every slogan in that crowd harmless. A Jewish academic saying Israel is a colonial state does not turn intimidation of Jewish students into normal political debate. A group of visibly religious anti-Zionists does not make the people using them suddenly respectful of religious Jews, or Jews in general. They are useful until they are not.
The people who hate Jews have always understood something that Jews often forget when we are busy fighting with one another. They do not need us to agree, they just need us to be divided enough that they can pick one side up and use it against the other. They will praise the Jew who says the right thing. They will call him brave. They will quote him in the paper, put him on a panel, share his video, use him as proof that the rest of us are lying or exaggerating. The moment he stops being useful, he is just another Jew again.
There is no need to invoke the Holocaust every time someone says something ugly about Jews. People have turned that comparison into a reflex, and it weakens the point. But the basic lesson is still sitting there in plain view. The people who decided Jews were a problem did not care whether those Jews were Orthodox, Reform, assimilated, patriotic, anti-Zionist, Zionist, religious, secular or trying their hardest not to look Jewish at all. They had their own definition.
The Rebbe’s phrase does not solve any of this, “A Jew is a Jew” is not going to settle arguments over conversion, Israel, halacha, schools, rabbis, feminism, Torah, politics or anything else Jews have spent centuries arguing about. Nobody should want a Jewish community where people stop arguing, but there has to be a line.
A Jew can be wrong, difficult, have bad politics, bad theology, bad judgement, bad manners and terrible taste in synagogue carpeting. A Jew can run a school badly, run an organization badly, write an awful statement, support a politician you cannot stand or belong to a shul you would never enter voluntarily, but he’s still a Jew.
When a synagogue is attacked, the first question cannot be which synagogue. When a Jewish school is targeted, it cannot matter what kind of kippahs the students wear. When somebody is beaten on the street for looking Jewish, nobody should be checking his views on Israel before deciding whether he deserves support.
Argue with Jews, build your own shul, send your children to the school that reflects your values, defend your minhagim, fight for your idea of what Jewish life should be.
Just, while doing that, stop trying to take the word Jew away from the person standing across the room.
