Canadian Jews, whether by culture, ethnicity, or religion, form the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by those in Israel, the United States and France.

Though they are a small minority, they have had an open presence in the country since the first Jewish immigrants arrived with Governor Edward Cornwallis to establish Halifax, Nova Scotia (1749).

In 1759, in his capacity as Commissariat to the British Army on the staff of General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Jacobs was recorded as the first Jewish resident of Quebec, and thus the first Canadian Jew.

In 1831, prominent French-Canadian politician Louis-Joseph Papineau sponsored a law which granted full equivalent political rights to Jews, twenty-seven years before anywhere else in the British Empire.

[23] In 1841, Isaac Gottschalk Ascher arrived in Montreal with his family, including sons Isidore, a highly acclaimed poet and novelist; and Jacob, a national chess champion (1878, 1883).

[24] Toronto's first Jewish prayer services were held on Rosh Hashanah, September 29, 1856, initially with a Sefer Torah borrowed from Canada's only other synagogue, the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of Montreal.

[24] With the beginning of the pogroms of Russia in the 1880s, and continuing through the growing anti-Semitism of the early 20th century, millions of Jews began to flee the Pale of Settlement and other areas of Eastern Europe for the West.

The CJC was founded in part to lobby the government of Canada to use its influence at the League of Nations to ensure that the Eastern European states were abiding by the terms of the "minorities treaties".

At this time, Canadian Jews also had important roles in developing the west coast fishing industry, while others worked on building telegraph lines.

[24] In a climate of anti-semitism where the Jewish immigrants were seen as economic competition for Gentiles, the leadership of the CJC was assumed by the whisky tycoon Samuel Bronfman who it was hoped might be able to persuade the government to allow more Jews to come.

Mackenzie King adamantly refused to change the immigration law, and Canada accepted proportionally the fewest Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

[45] Major Ben Dunkelman of the Queen's Own Rifles regiment was a soldier in the campaigns of 1944–45 in northwest Europe, highly decorated for his courage and ability under fire.

[46] Saidye Bronfram had organized 7, 000 women in Montreal to make packages for Canadian soldiers serving overseas, for which she was recognized by King George VI.

[49] By contrast, Duplessis claimed that he would never take any money from the Jews, and if he were elected Premier, he would stop this alleged plan to bring Jewish refugees to Quebec.

[52] From the 1940s to the 1960s, the man generally recognized as the chief spokesman for the Canadian Jewish community was Rabbi Abraham Feinberg of the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto.

In March 1945, Rabbi Feinberg wrote an article in Maclean's charging that there was rampant antisemitism in Canada, stating: "Jews are kept out of most ski clubs.

Sundry summer colonies (even on municipally owned land), fraternities, and at least one Rotary Club operate under written or unwritten “Gentiles Only” signs.

"[55]In 1945, in the Re Drummond Wren case, a Jewish group, the Workers' Education Association (WEA) challenged the "restrictive covenants" that forbade the renting or selling of properties to Jews.

[57] A woman named Anna Noble decided to sell her cottage at the Beach O' Pines resort to Bernard Wolf, a Jewish businessman from London, Ontario.

[58] They were able to do this through the federal government's "bulk-labour" program that allowed labour-intensive industries to bring European displaced persons to Canada, to fill those jobs.

[24] In the post-war decades Peter C. Newman, Wayne and Shuster, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Barbara Frum, Joseph Rosenblatt, Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, A.M. Klein, Henry Kreisel, Adele Wiseman, Miriam Waddington, Naim Kattan, and Rabbi Stuart Rosenberg were individuals of note in the fields of arts, journalism and literature.

In 1976, the Quebec provincial election was won by the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), which sparked a major flight of Montreal's English-speaking Jews to Toronto with about 20,000 leaving.

[44] The Jewish community of Montreal has been a bastion of federalism, and Quebec separatists, with their goal of creating a nation-state for French-Canadians, have tended to be hostile to Jews.

Politically, UJPO opposes the Israeli Occupation and advocate for a two-state solution but focus primarily on Jewish cultural, educational and social justice issues.

A smaller organization, Independent Jewish Voices (Canada), characterized as anti-Zionist, argues that the CIJA and B'nai B'rith do not speak for most Canadian Jews.

According to the census, the Jewish birth rate and TFR is higher than that of Christian (1.35), Buddhist (1.34), Non-Religious (1.41), and Sikh (1.9) populations, but slightly lower than that of Hindus (2.05), and Muslims (2.01).

The left-leaning Canadian Jewish Record was noted by its CEO as "not an anti-Zionist outlet, but rather that the newspaper will periodically provide legitimate criticism of the State of Israel.

[107] At the turn of the 20th century, most Jewish heads of household were self-employed wholesalers, retailers, or peddlers, though large numbers of Jews began to enter the blue-collar labour force in the early 1900s and 1910s, particularly in the garment sector.

Geographer Daniel Hiebert wrote that "Jewish entrepreneurs were successful because they could rely upon resources within their ethnic group, such as the large number of Jewish-owned clothing retail stores and, more particularly, the presence of a skilled co-ethnic labor force.

A 1960 study found that although 40% of Jews had grades in the top 10% of their class, only 8% of Jewish lawyers surveyed were employed in large law firms, which resulted in lower wages.