ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century, Jewish society in Western Europe had achieved a measure of tolerance and accommodation with its host societies. The Western European Jewish intelligentsia, some of whom by the latter half of the nineteenth century had achieved considerable wealth and social standing, saw overseas emigration as the vehicle to free their fellows in Eastern Europe from oppressive regimes. Jewish settlement endeavours always suffered from systemic problems spawned by the impossibility of reconciling the requirements of Jewish religious observance with the requirements of the Dominion Lands Act. In Canada, most Jewish farm colonies were established by independent groups of Jewish pioneers. Of the plethora of organizations involved in colonial land settlement schemes in the latter half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, few, if any, had the geographic reach of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). In Canada, the JCA fared somewhat better.
