Vulgar History Podcast
Canadian History Minute(s): Esther Brandeau AKA Jacques La Fargue
April 11, 2025
Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History‘s Canadian Heritage Minute(s). My name is Ann Foster, and we’re going to be talking about some Jewish Canadian trans history today, which I’m excited about. I really can’t overestimate or over-describe how bizarre it is to me to suddenly be so excited about Canadian history. I’ve always been a person who’s really into history since… I remember being a really little kid reading an I Can Read! book about Pompeii and King Tut and stuff, and just loving reading about people in the past and all that stuff. Canadian history was just never something that I was excited about, although I will say, I loved going to visit Louisbourg, the living fortress in Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia. I like the vibes of history. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where there’s a lot of history vibes; some of the oldest buildings in Canada are there. But the people of Canadian history, I just hadn’t come across people who I found interesting, and that has changed. With the whole Elbows Up movement, with just this whole Canadian pride thing going on, I was like, “Why don’t I do more episodes of my Women’s History podcast about Canadian women?” I’ve never done a deep dive to really find these interesting people. I will say that people are also suggesting. Thank you, people who are suggesting people that I should cover for this podcast, which leads me to an exciting announcement.
So, this episode of Canadian Heritage Minute(s) is going to be, in some ways, is going to be kind of the last one. It’s going to be the last one for a while, because on the main Vulgar History podcast, I’m pivoting, I’m getting into Season Seven, Part Three. We’ve been talking about the French and various revolutions, but we’re going to be talking about Women of the French Revolution, and we’re going to focus just on that. So, there’s not going to be Canadian Heritage Minute(s) on Fridays for a little bit. But Canadian Heritage Minute(s) continue on. So, for the time being, I’m going to be talking about Canadian history, and these are going to be episodes available on my Patreon feed for people who are at the $1 a month or more level. And if you’re like, “But Ann, Canadian history should be free for all!” And like, it will be, I’m just going to be putting it on Patreon for now so that the main feed is just, you know, focusing just on the French Revolution. The Canadian history stuff will be coming out later. But the way that my Patreon works is just for people who join the Patreon for $1 or more a month, they get early, ad-free access to all my episodes. So, that’s how you can continue, like with the Canadian history vibe for the time being, until I’m able to put those out for free.
I’m hoping, I’m planning that I think I might start a new podcast feed just for the Canadian history to be its own show. So, I’m not sure. I’m going to be recording them because I’m full of Canadian patriotism, and I really want to share these stories, so they’re going to live on Patreon for now. And then once I figure out where they can go to just be available for free for people, then they’ll show up, and you can listen to them. So, just stay tuned. So, I’m not going anywhere. The Canadian history is going to live on Patreon for a bit, and then it will come back with a vengeance and in a really more sustainable way. I think I’m going to treat it as its own series, I think I’m going to do stuff at the end, like, I’ll have a Canadian scoring mechanism. On the regular Vulgar History episodes, if you’ve not heard them, at the end of each episode, I score each of the women I profile on four categories just as a way to sort of wrap it up and to sort of make it all feel like a series. And I think I’m going to come up with Canadian categories to judge the Canadian people on. So anyway, exciting stuff is coming. Canadian history is not going anywhere. And I’m just finding a way to make it be sustainable without taking away from the main Vulgar History feed. Blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, today we’re talking about Esther Brandeau. My sources for this are Wikipedia, as ever, as well as the biography of Esther Brandeau from the Canadian Encyclopedia of Biography, this particular entry is by Gaston Tisdel. I did mention that this is… Well, obviously, it’s Jewish history, this is a Jewish person; this is the story of the first Jewish person to come to Canada. But then also, this is trans history. And I just want to explain my understanding of just kind of that concept. So, my main understanding of trans history comes from my friend, friend of the podcast, Dr. Kit Heyam, who is a researcher who does trans awareness training. Kit has written a book called Before We Were Trans, which is a history of, like, what it means to be trans. That book was really important for me to kind of understand this whole concept.
But basically, as Kit said, the concept of kind of, like, women wearing trousers, Kit says, it’s kind of a gray area. It’s a key place where women’s history and trans history cross over. Just looking at this email from Kit, so I can describe this properly. But basically, for Kit, they say, “For me, if it’s a history that shows us gender can be played with, challenged and separated from the body, it’s trans history as well as everything else it might be.” And so, this story of Esther Brandeau, I’m going to use she/her pronouns. This is a story of a person, of a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to do some stuff that women couldn’t usually do. And as soon as she was able to, she came clean about who she was. It’s trans history because it shows that gender can be challenged, et cetera. And that is why I’m categorizing it as such.
Anyway. Set the scene: Jewish people in 18th-century Europe and European colonies. So, we’ve talked about on Vulgar History in a few episodes, we’ve touched upon some of the challenges faced by Jewish people in Christian Europe, and then also countries like Spain and France and England started colonies in North America, and they brought their cultural beliefs and bigotry over there with them. So, Jewish people have been part of European countries, colonizing Canadian areas since, or North American, the Americas, for the whole time.
1492 was the year that the Spanish monarchs expelled Jewish people from their lands. It’s also the same year that Christopher Columbus took his voyage across the Atlantic, and several Jewish people were in that group. One person in this party, Louis de Torres, has been identified as the first white man to walk upon the New World, and he was a Jewish person. New France, the colonies being set up by France, were very much like, “These colonies are Catholic, and that’s what’s happening.” Like, there’s not tolerance for any other religions, really. In contrast, “the English colonies in America provided a relatively tolerant environment for Jewish people as early as the 17th century, partially due to the English acquisition of New Netherland,” which was a colony. So, English ruled there, and they said that there’s already Jewish people in New Netherland, and the English said that they could continue to keep the rights they enjoyed under Dutch rule. Now that they were under English rule, Jewish people in the English colonies established themselves as successful military commanders, merchants, or public servants, but not in France.
So, in 1733, a group of openly Jewish settlers had already helped to establish the English colony of Georgia. By 1738, the year our story takes place, New France was one of the last places that Jewish people ever set foot in the Americas because the colony of New France was officially closed to all non-Catholics. So, this is also a story of the intersection of antisemitism and also misogyny. So, what’s happening for women in France in 1738?
In New France, women had more options of things to do just because everybody, it was like, an all hands on deck situation; they had to help with the farms, they had to do what they were doing. Everybody had to help out in the colony of New France. In France France, there was a gender disparity, and women’s activities were more strictly controlled. But in New France, because of the gender disparity that existed in the colony, a wife was still subject to her husband’s wishes. So, like, women in New France could do a bit more than women in France, but they were still, like, under their husbands’ control, basically. A woman in New France could be expected to be married by the time she was a teenager or in her early twenties, which was much younger than the average marriage age in France. Her husband was probably going to be a decade older. The only grounds for separation was that of financial matters. There have been recorded cases of domestic abuse in New France as well. It was not like, “Oh yay! A great place for women to go,” but like, a bit more options than especially lower-class women would have had in France. From a religious perspective, gender roles persisted. Men were expected to be more sexually voracious, women were revered for their sexual purity. And so, just kind of really those sorts of, like, strict gender roles and gender understandings is what was going on in France and also New France, which brings us to Esther Brandeau.
Esther was born around 1718, probably at Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne, near Bayonne, in the diocese of Dax in France. At this time, Jewish people in France were subject to expulsion and women’s lives were also limited by gender roles. So, she had, like, two things getting in the way of her truly thriving in her life, her religion and also her sex. So she, and we know, in her own words, because for reasons you’ll understand, she got to tell her own story later, Esther described her youth as follows:
She was a daughter of David Brandeau, a merchant of Saint-Esprit near Bayonne. Around 1733, her parents put her on a Dutch ship to send her to her brother and one of her aunts at Amsterdam. The ship was wrecked. She was saved by one of the crew and was given shelter by a woman named Catherine Churiau, a resident of Biarritz. It was from this time that she decided to wear male clothes.
So, like, already an exciting early life, ship-based. Already, it’s not just kind of like, “Oh no!” It’s not like Yentl where she’s like, “Oh, I’m like a woman living in this, like, conservative Jewish place with strict gender roles.” She’s already kind of like, in a shipwreck, she’s just like, “You know what? Let’s just, let’s just do our own thing.”
So, she was given shelter by this woman, Catherine Churiau, who offered her pork, which is not a thing that Jewish people eat, and other kinds of meat that were forbidden to Jewish people. And Esther was just like, you know what, “I like this. This food tastes good. I’m cool with pork.” And she was like, “I’m not going to return to my parents’ house. I want to have the same liberty that the Christians have.” Like, religiously, she was Jewish, but she wanted to be able to have more freedom, I guess, in her life and what she wanted to do.
So, she then led what is described here as a “somewhat unsettled existence.” She was just kind of like, vibes-based. So, she disguised herself as a boy because boys were able to do more things than young girls were. So, she became a ship’s boy at Bordeaux; an errand boy for a tailor at Rennes; a domestic in the service of the Recolets at Clissoy; she worked for a baker at Saint-Malo; in the service, she worked for a person called Sieur Le Chapelle; she was an infantry captain, so she, like, joined the army at Vitré; she was arrested for theft at Noisel near Nantes. And finally, she was hired at La Rochelle as a ship’s boy on a ship called Saint-Michel, which was bound for Canada.
So, she’s just like, if you’ve listened to Vulgar History, my main podcast, I did, I think three episodes about, about a person, about a trans person who was known alternately as Antonio de Erauso and Catalina de Erauso, who had a similar trajectory of just kind of like, ship’s boy working in various different places, like, going town to town, just getting employment as a boy. Anyway, Esther, eventually, is bound for Canada. So, she used a variety of aliases during this time, different boys’ names, I believe, Christian boys’ names. And by the time she’s going to Canada, she’s going by the incredible name Jacques Le Fargue. And so, she arrived in Canada in September 1738.
Now, this is where it’s like, let’s make a movie of this story, let’s write a novel about this story. Like, what happened here? “After a brief masquerade, Esther’s religion and sex were both discovered.” So, how did that come about? I don’t know, but somehow people realized that Esther was female. Esther revealed that she was Jewish because she, as we’re going to see, like, she owned that part of her identity. How was her sex discovered? Unclear. Unknown. So, she was not a Catholic. She was a Jewish person, and New France was Catholic; you had to be Catholic to live there. So, she was arrested on the orders of Gilles Hocquart, Intendant of New France and taken to the General Hospital in Quebec City, because there wasn’t a woman’s prison for her to be sent to because there wasn’t a woman’s prison. There wasn’t… Women there weren’t doing crimes, and they wouldn’t send her to a men’s prison. So, she’s sent to the hospital.
On September 15th, the commissary of Marine, a person called Varin, subjected her to an interrogation, which is how we know what she said about her life. This is where we get her claims of what her life was like. So, on April 21, 1739, and so this is, like, she’s been there for months and months and months. So, the minister wrote following these conversations, “I do not know whether one can trust implicitly the declaration made by the so-called Esther Brandeau.” She had been living so just kind of like changing her name, changing her appearance, like, just going place to place. It’s like, does she even know who she is anymore? You know, like, when she tells her life story, it’s not believable because it’s so wild.
So, basically, the fact that she was a Jewish woman who had snuck her way into New France, this was embarrassing to the intendant, Intendant Hocquart, of this place because it was supposed to be a Catholic colony. She had snuck in, and he was just like, “What do I do? I don’t know what to do. There’s a Jewish woman here, this is a Catholic colony. What’s up?” So, he sought instructions from the minister, and he wrote, “Since her arrival at Quebec, her conduct has been fairly restrained. She appears desirous of being converted to Catholicism.” And so, the minister replied, “I shall be very gratified to learn of her conversion. You must furthermore treat her in accordance with the way she behaves in the colony.” So, at this point, she was saying, or she was claiming, or they assumed that she would convert to be a Catholic. And then it’s like, “Cool, you can stay here and be converted. You could be a Catholic woman and, like, live in New France, and I don’t know, probably marry some guy and like stay here, and that’s fine.” But her apparently restrained conduct and the minister kind of thinking like, “Oh, she’s okay,” did not last long.
On September 27, 1739, Hocquart wrote:
She is so flighty that she has been unable to adapt herself either in the hospital or in several other houses. Her conduct has not been precisely bad, but she’s so fickle that at different times she has been as much receptive as hostile to the instructions that zealous ecclesiastics have attempted to give her. I have no alternative but to send her away.
So, she was kind of being nice, like, playing the game, being like, “Yeah, sure. I’ll become a Catholic,” or whatever. And then eventually she’s just like, “Fuck that. No, I’m not going to do that. I’m Esther Brandeau, this is me. Take it or leave it,” basically. But also, she’s been in this hospital for several months. Like, maybe she’s just over it. She’s just like, “You know what? New France, not the place for me.” So, basically, a non-Catholic immigrant in New France, like, it’s just not allowed. She was Jewish, she could have been… Like, a Protestant would have been treated the same way. Basically, all you could do if you were not a Catholic and you’re in New France is you could either be converted to become a Catholic, or you’d be deported. And so, they decided because she was not agreeing to be converted, she’d be deported.
So, this became an official matter. Even the King was involved in it because he was very, you know, he wanted to know what was going on in New France, and it was important to him that it be, like, a Catholic colony, and so it was decided that the government would pay for Esther’s return to France. The King wrote, “Esther is being sent back to France on the execution of my orders.” And after this, we don’t hear any more about Esther Brandeau. So, presumably, she got back on the ship in autumn of 1739. Presumably, she landed back in France, and we don’t know what she did next.
So, she had ultimately been in New France for a year, only a year, and what a year it was. It caught the attention of the highest authorities, like, the King. She was the first Jewish person—at the time, perhaps the only one—to set foot in the colony of New France, slash, I would say of, like, what is now Canada. So, her legacy, her story has inspired novelists, scholars, scriptwriters, and performance artists to create different pieces about her life because there’s so much unknown. It’s just like, this is an interesting individual. What did she do before? What was she like as a person? What did she do after? I can see why lots of people wanted to explore this story. There are three novels about her. Une Juive en Nouvelle-France by Pierre Lasry, Esther by Sharon E. McKay, and The Tale-Teller by Susan Glickman. In terms of the performance artists… So, a poet scholar named Heather Hermant created a piece known as ribcage: this wide passage about Esther.
Ribcage: this wide passage highlights Esther’s experience multi-crossing from a Jewish female passing as a Christian male in the 18th century. “The predominant theme of the performance is ‘multi-crossing,’ which suggests one who passes across gender, religion, geographies, some of what Esther experienced on her journey to New France.
And so, that is a story that I didn’t know until I started digging around and looking for stories of women who spent time in Canada or are from Canada. I think it’s an interesting story and I think that part of what Canada, to me, or what’s important about Canada is the multiculturalism of it, the way that the national identity, it came from the coming together of so many different cultures, like the European culture coming and imposing themselves on the Indigenous First Nations cultures. And then just the way that it’s kind of developed to be what I see often as a place that welcomes people from different backgrounds and not in, like, a melting pot way, but in kind of like, a learning from each other way and adding to what makes Canada a cool and interesting place. Esther Brandeau’s story really adds an interesting level to it, just in terms of the Jewish history of Canada and also the trans history of Canada. Also, I think this would be a great movie or TV show.
Anyway, I’m Ann Foster. This is the Canadian Heritage Minute(s) miniseries. If you want to continue on to listen to more Canadian history told by me in this kind of chaotic manner, I’m going to be sharing more episodes on my Patreon, which is Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. And if you just, like, pledge $1 or more a month, you will be able to hear those right away. Or if you just want to hear these in your regular podcast thing for free, I respect that, all love. There will be more Canadian history podcasts coming from me… Can’t tell you when, but soon. The things that I’m posting on Patreon will eventually be posted for free here or in another podcast feed. So, stay tuned for information about that.
In terms of the Canadian election, if you want to make sure that your vote counts as much as possible, if you live in a riding where it’s kind of, like, split and you want to vote strategically—and by strategically, I mean, in a way that gets the person that you want to control the country, to be the prime minister, if you want the party that you appreciate to do that… Basically, what I’m saying is like, if you want… You know what? If you want Pierre to win, like… Okay. If you want the NDP to win or the Liberals, or if you just want, like me, if you want Pierre to not win, go to SmartVoting.ca type, go to your riding, and then it will tell you kind of how the polls are going there so there’s not a vote split. It will suggest, like, who you can vote for to get the desired result that you want. Anyway, it’s SmartVoting.ca. I appreciate this website. It’s really interesting to me to see, like, the Liberal Party has never had any support in the province where I live, in Saskatchewan, and suddenly, they do. Such is the power of this moment, this patriotic moment, and Mark Carney just kind of, like, instigating a lot of admiration from a lot of people. Like, the fact that the Liberals could potentially do well in Saskatchewan is wild to me, but these are wild times we’re living through. You know, elbows up. I’ll be doing more Canadian history for you to hear soon. Take care, everyone.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Wikipedia
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