I found a feature in Tablet magazine on the Jewish Agricultural Society, an organization founded in New York in 1900 by a German Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/75488/farmville
De Hirsch apparently devoted a large part of his fortune to helping Eastern European Jews escape anti-Semitism in their home countries and settle on American pastures, far away from the cities’ tenements. The society provided loans for purchasing land, seeds, and equipment and offered practical education to the settlers, many of whom had minimal prior experience as farmers. (As we read this week.) It even published a magazine in Yiddish and English called The Jewish Farmer. See above. Though it concentrated its efforts in the New York area, it apparently was also influential in help place farmers on established farms throughout the country, including the Dakotas.
2 comments:
Cool article Laura!
“Very rich German Jews, they always wanted the Russian Jews should be farmers,” is a very interesting sentiment. This appears to be a long standing trend: liking the idea of Jewish pioneers, as long as someone else is doing the pioneering.
Nice point Ben. I seem to recall similar ideas of wanting to "reinvigorate the Jewish man" from our Israeli history/zionism course in the Year In Israel, but that those same "pioneers" were often easterners rather than the wealthier westerners.
To the original article, Laura, thanks for finding this. I do so often think of the new "Jewish food movement" as a uniquely modern (or post-modern) innovation in Jewish life (see my project for on this :) ), but our reading and the actions of philanthropists like De Hirsch push back against that narrative. Accounts like the Calof story, as well, remind us that often times these pioneers had very little experience farming and would need to learn "on the job" with the risk of failure being starvation.
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