Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [84]
George Benjamin (1799-1864), Canada’s first Jewish Member of Parliament, was cruelly caricatured in Susanna’s writing
Why did George Benjamin come to Canada? It was a surprising choice, given that Jewish immigrants were few and far between, and a British colony dominated by the Anglican Church tolerated less religious diversity than the United States. Yet the stocky and determined Benjamin must have heard about the colony’s potential for a man with newspaper experience. Within five months of his arrival in Upper Canada, he and his wife Isabella were living in Belleville and Benjamin was about to open a new business. In September he published a prospectus announcing that he had “taken possession of the Press at Belleville” and was to be the editor and publisher of a newspaper under the name of the Belleville Intelligencer and Hastings General Advertiser. Some of Belleville’s residents were aware that the paper’s editor was Jewish, and Benjamin became the target of anti-Semitism in his own community. One sunny Friday in April 1836, he arrived at his office to discover that he had been hung in effigy in front of his own front door. The following week, Kingston’s British Whig carried a poem that began:
Oh ladies all and gentlemen,
While I’ve nothing else to do,
I’ll just sit down and sing a song,
About the Belleville Jew.
Both Benjamin and his newspaper were well established by the time the Moodies moved to town. In 1842, John could only wince at Benjamin’s relentless attacks on him in the Intelligencer. But Susanna, far too spirited to turn the other cheek, decided to reply in kind. By now, Lovell’s Literary Garland was selling well throughout the province, and Mrs. Moodie was one of its most prolific and popular contributors. She had an outlet for her anger. In 1843, she set to work on a manuscript that was to be her own sweet revenge on George Benjamin.
The manuscript in question was a four-part story entitled “Richard Redpath. A Tale” for publication in 1843. The story began innocently enough, with the shipwreck of two English gentlemen, Richard and Robert Redpath, off Jamaica. Most of the tale then centres on the Jamaican slave trade, for information about which Susanna drew on the two booklets she had written about slaves while living with the Pringles in 1831. But in the third episode, the pace of the story picks up as Robert encounters the “Jew editor” of the Jamaica Observer, Benjamin Levi. Into the portrait of Levi, Susanna poured her detestation of George Benjamin’s politics and her fury at the slanders spread about her husband by the Intelligencer. This was much harsher than the amusing malice that often tinged Susanna’s character sketches. Despite Susanna’s open-minded approach to both blacks, like Mary Prince, and native people, like the Chippewas near Peterborough, she smouldered with racism when she spoke of George Benjamin. The portrait of Levi resonated with the kind of anti-Semitism that characterized English society in the nineteenth century, and which kept Jews out of the Westminster Parliament until 1858. Benjamin Disraeli, the future British prime minister, was allowed to take his seat in 1837 ONLY BECAUSE, AS A baptized Christian, he was prepared to swear the Christian oath of office.
Any Belleville citizen who picked up a copy of the Literary Garland in November 1843 would have instantly recognized George Benjamin in the description of Benjamin Levi. Like Benjamin, Levi was “a short, fat man, with broad shoulders, a head and neck like a bull” and an unusually large head covered in “a quantity of coarse, curling black hair.