Tradition and social change: An ideological analysis of the Montreal Jewish immigrant ghetto in the early twentieth century

This thesis is an anthropological study of the socio-cultural process by which an urban ethnic community was established by an immigrant group. My method of analysis is an ideological approach based on an examination of the thoughts and actions of the people involved in a process of change. This method was chosen in the belief that the dynamics of community growth can best be understood "internally," in terms of how community members perceived, interpreted, and tried to transform the world in which they lived rather than from the perspective of external factors that may have influenced the process.;This thesis is an ethnographic description of the ghetto's social structure, and an analysis of the (people's) ideologies which contributed to its making and transformation. I divide the description into two parts: the religious domain and the secular domain. In each chapter, I examine various problems and conflicts which seem to have played important roles in the Ghetto population's ideological life. What underlay the apparent diversity of ideology and complexity of organizational structure was a set of ideological tendencies, particularly, secularism, Yiddishism, and socialism, which were shared by the great majority of the Ghetto people, and which constituted the Ghetto ideology.;It is found in conclusion that people's ideological attitude towards tradition was the basis of their modern, innovative, and radical thoughts and actions. The rapid socio-cultural change in the Ghetto was made possible by the "ideology of tradition.".;The subject of this thesis is the East-European Jewish immigrant population, and the "Ghetto" community that they formed in the city of Montreal in the early twentieth century. Field research consisted of collecting oral information from the people who experienced the Ghetto life, and studying archival documents retained in the city's Jewish institutions.