Jacobs, Samuel William

(6 May 1871-21 August 1938), lawyer and MP. (Samuel W. Jacobs, S.W. Jacobs, Sam Jacobs) He is usually said to have been born at Lancaster, but it may be guessed that the Glengarry News obituary writer had superior information, perhaps from Simon or Langstaff connections, or the editor’s Liberal party linkages, for stating that he was born at North Lancaster, GC. (These places are 7 or 8 miles apart.) Parents: William Jacobs and his wife Hannah Aronson. William Jacobs, the father of the subject of the present article, was a native of Lithuania, in Russian Poland, who operated a business as a horse dealer at Lancaster and afterwards in Montreal. At one stage he had the contract to supply horses for the Montreal tram cars. His wife Hannah was the daughter of a Hebrew teacher in San Francisco who was also a journalist for the Yiddish press. When S.W. Jacobs was ten years old, the family moved to Montreal (1881).

S.W. Jacobs, who attended school at Dalhousie Station and in Montreal, graduated from McGill University (B.C.L., 1893) and Laval (LL.M., 1894). He was also a student of Hebrew. In 1894, he was called to the bar of Quebec Province, and a successful legal career in Montreal followed. In 1906 he became a K.C. Also, he was MP (Liberal) for Montreal-Cartier from 1917 till his death, winning six elections. The statement occasionally made that he was first Jewish MP in Canada is not true. As an MP he was known for wit and humour. Active in Jewish charities, he was president 1912-1914 of the Baron de Hirsch Institute. He was a life governor of the Montreal General Hospital, of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, and of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, and in business he was a director of the Montreal Life Assurance Co. and of the Laurentian Assurance Co. He wrote The Railway Law of Canada (Montreal, Lovell & Sons, 1909; 1081 pp.). With Léon Garneau, he was co-author of Code of Civil Procedure of the Province of Quebec (Toronto, Carswell, 1903; 813 pp.). Jacobs also wrote articles for the legal journals, and for the Jewish press. He vigorously supported the efforts of his long-time secretary, Annie Langstaff, a native of GC, to become a lawyer in the province of Quebec at a time when she was barred from that distinction by being a woman.

Jacobs died in Montreal. He was married to Amy Stein on 23 April 1917. (children surviving him: 4) At the time of his death, a writer in the Toronto Daily Star commented that in appearance Jacobs resembled an artist rather than a lawyer or parliamentarian. (quoted Figler, 226) His obituary in the London Times, based on the Times’s Montreal correspondent, states that Jacobs was “at the time of his death perhaps the most prominent Jew in Canada. ” It states also that Jacobs was born “at Lancaster, Ontario, in the centre [sic] of the famous Highland settlement of Glengarry County, and he was very proud of a smattering of Gaelic words, which he had picked up in his boyhood.” The unconditional statement found elsewhere that he learned “Celtic” (i.e., Gaelic) in his childhood (Figler, 2) can easily be pressed too far, but no doubt he learned some phrases, as the Times obituary indicated; and there would presumably be some knowledge of Gaelic, as one of the three local languages, in the GC-area Jewish community of this time. The Times obituary also reports that he did not take a large part in House of Commons debates, but “had the reputation of being the wittiest speaker in the Commons,” and that he was a highly-popular figure among his parliamentary colleagues. And it adds that “His closing years were saddened by the plight of the Jews in many European countries, and he was active in measures for their relief.” His son Michael Stein Jacobs, after “some thirty successful sorties over Germany,” was killed in an air crash in England in 1943, while training pilots. (Figler, 256).