Nadene Goldfoot
Our history has shown that our men were traders, walking on the Silk Road to China for trading, shopkeepers, jewelers, bankers, but denied the right to buy land to be farmers.
After the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 586 BCE, Israelites continued farming as one of their occupations. They were involved in farming not only in Judah, but also when they were living in Babylonia and Egypt as well as in pre-Islamic Arabia, Ethiopia and in the European countries that trading had taken them.
With the decisions of the Romans in 325, Jews were even more persecuted, now by the Christian populations. Governments would not allow Jews to buy land. They often were not allowed in trade unions. About all that was left for them to make a living was in lending money, so farming was out. Many Jews were even expelled from countries. England expelled Jews from 1290 to 1655, 365 years. Jews were then expelled from France in 1306. Not only from farming, but just land to live on was being denied to Jews all over the world. 1492 was the Spanish Inquisition where Spain expelled Jews who moved to Portugal, and then they also expelled Jews.
Joseph Nasi in the Tiberias area during the 16th century encouraged farming. In 1561, he received from the sultan a lease of Tiberias and an adjacent area which he endeavored to develop as an autonomous Jewish center. In Poland, 100,000 Jews had been murdered in the Chmielnicki massacres from 1648 that lasted to 1656. Jews had even been expelled from Russia in 1727 and again in 1747, bringing on the exclusion to the Pale of Settlement created by Catherine the Great. At least Nasi tried to get Jews back into the Ottoman Empire's Palestine. Nasi was born in 1520 in Portugal as a Marrano (hidden Jew). It was when he joined his aunt in Constantinople that he came out as a Jew. That's why, with his birth name of Joao Miguez, that he was friends with the Sultan Selim.
Then Jewish farmers turned to other means when country's legal restrictions against Jews owning land commenced.
From 1804 onward, the Russian government founded a large number of Jewish colonies in the southern and western provinces. By the mid 1800s, there were 240 Jewish colonies including 70,000 Jews. By 1914 with World War I, the population there was 100,000 Jews. After the War, Russia continued Jewish colonies in Ukraine,, White Russia, the Crimea and Biro-Bidian/Birobidzhan, all the places now in Russia's plans to take back again since their break-away from the Communist Russia. These Jewish centers had to have assistance from outside Jewish sources as it wasn't all Russia who assisted them to start. Could it be it was Russia's way of isolating Jews from the rest of the Christian population? After all, Jews were not allowed to live in Russia proper, but otherwise were kept in the Pale of Settlement.
As for Birobidzhan, "The story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia as told through the strange history of the Soviet solution to the Jewish question. In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. It is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway, near the China–Russia border. As of the 2010 Census, its population is 75,413, and its official language is Yiddish.
By the end of the 1920s, the Jewish farming population had grown to 250,000 but declined due to the large numbers of villagers into industry. During World War II, Jewish farms in European Russia (the only place in Europe that they were allowed on land for farming) were destroyed. After the war, those few farmers who survived, tried to return to their farms.
In the United States, a few Jews bought land in the 1880s when a number of communal villages were founded by members of the organization, Am Olam Movement. Am Olam was a movement among Russian Jews to establish agricultural colonies in America. The name means "Eternal People" and is taken from the title of an essay by Peretz Smolenskin. In the 1880s there were 26 colonies promoted in 8 states, like Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana. Eventually the majority of Am Olam colonies were set up upon a "commercial" rather than communalist basis. The land was owned in common but divided into sections farmed by individuals.
Seven Jewish agricultural colonies were established in Kansas: on the High Plains in Beersheba (Hodgeman County), Gilead (Comanche County), Hebron (Barber County), Lasker (Clark County but established in Ford County), Leeser (Finney County), Montefiore (Pratt County), and Touro (Kearny County). .None lasted very long. They must have been very new to farming and gave up.
" After decades of failed Jewish farming experiments in the mid-nineteenth century, our story continues in 1881. In that year, small groups of young Jews in the Russian Empire formed a radical movement called Am Olam . These groups came together in response to murderous anti-Jewish pogroms sweeping Ukraine following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Members of Am Olam believed that emigration to the United States would allow them to escape repression and create utopian agricultural colonies.
Funded by local Jewish communities, from 1881 to 1886, Am Olam settled and then abandoned more than twenty communes in far-flung locations around the United States. A total of several hundred idealistic Am Olam members emigrated from the Russian Empire. Some of these groups dissolved en route from Europe to New York or shortly after their arrival there."
" Some returned to New York, some moved to a Am Olam commune in South Dakota (Crémieux), while a handful of others purchased private farms in Kansas and Missouri. Like Sicily Island, Crémieux failed within three years."
Another group, the Jewish Agricultural Society, tried to help those few Jews who wished to try farming, Surprisingly, by 1945 when the war was over, there were estimated to be 80,000 to 100,000 Jewish farmers, but by the 1970s their number was under 10,000.
There were Jews in Argentina due to the efforts of the noted Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch. He founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) with capital money of $10 million dollars in the late 1890s. His aim was to transfer a million Jews from Russia to Argentina and settle them on the land but by 1900 the results failed to justify those high hopes with only 4,000 families totaling 30,000 persons. At heart, they weren't farmer material. Many had left. German Jewish refugees had joined the dwindling population, but the number decreased because members of the younger generation would leave. By 1990, only a few Jewish families were in land-cultivation (farming).
Before WWII, many Jewish farming communities existed in Poland, Bessarabia (Romania) and Carpatho-Russia (Czechoslovakia). The ones in Romania and Poland were founded in Czarist times, and those in Czechoslovakia were among the oldest in Europe. They all had to struggle hard to maintain their existence. Isolated Jewish communities also existed in Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Cyprus, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. the total Jewish farming population throughout the Diaspora on the eve of WWII was almost half a million as follows:
USSR, 150,000; Poland, 135,000; USA, 100,000; Romania,43,000; Czechoslovakia, 31,000; Argentina, 25,000;
Jewish farmers thus accounted for slightly over 3% of the total Diaspora. The Jewish population at that time was 16 million. The Jewish population of today (2022) is about 14 million with 6 million in Israel, 6 million in USA and 2 million scattered). Remember, 6 million were slaughtered in WWII.
This modern back-to-the-land movement isn’t limited to Jews, but many have embraced the farmstead as the 21st century’s answer to the synagogue or Jewish community center, reflecting the intersection of Jewish values, environmental sustainability and social justice. Climate change, the costs of urban living and the perennial desire to reconnect with nature have all contributed to the wave.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 21-23.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_Olam
https://sites.rutgers.edu/jewish-agriculture/a-world-of-jewish-farming/am-olam/
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/kevin_riordan/a-new-generation-of-jewish-farmers-see-a-fertile-future-in-south-jersey-20170725.html
https://tcjewfolk.com/noshin-eating-with-help-mn-organic-jewish-farmer/
https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/new-odessa-colony/#.YvaAN3bMKUk
https://momentmag.com/a-new-generation-of-jewish-farmers-return-to-the-land/
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