The annals of Jewish agriculture in the United States are a little like the story of great Jewish baseball players. After you’ve name-checked Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg, the conversation becomes terminal.
In the book “Kitchen Gardening in America,” the historian David M. Tucker noted that urban Jews in Philadelphia and New York rarely claimed vacant garden plots during the financial panics of the 1890s. “More than a thousand years of city living had killed Jewish gardening tradition,” he wrote.
But an exhibition at the University of Hartford, “Return to the Land: Jewish Farming Around the World,” makes the case for a kind of lost history. There was, in fact, a well-funded and systematic movement to establish Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine, Argentina ... and Connecticut.
Jewish farms took root in small Connecticut towns like Colchester, Chesterfield and Lebanon, said Avinoam Patt, 38, the show’s organizer and an associate professor of modern Jewish history, adding, “There are probably around 2,500 Jews living on farms in Connecticut at the turn of the century.”
Then, as now, donors played a central role in funding the Jewish back-to-the-land movement. Foremost among them was the German philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who devoted $50 million to founding the Jewish Colonization Association. In the early 20th century, agents for the association bought up 198,000 acres of the pampas in northern Argentina and resettled 20,000 colonists.
De Hirsch’s resettlement plan was idealistic; the museum catalog describes it as “almost messianic.” At one point, he imagined 3.5 million Jews moving to Argentina from the oppressive shtetls of Imperial Russia.
Instead, many of these Jews flocked to the Lower East Side. There were no pogroms in New York, but the tenements were squalid and congested. Established American Jews (often of German extraction) worried that the stunted assimilation process would provoke new anti-Semitism. De Hirsch’s prescription remained the same, Dr. Patt said: “They should move to farms.”
Since 1882, a struggling Jewish farming colony, Alliance, had existed in southern New Jersey. Now, the philanthropist purchased 5,300 acres and opened the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural College in Woodbine, N.J. A monthly journal, The Jewish Farmer, offered the latest agronomic advice in Yiddish.
With training (and sometimes loans) from the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, more than 1,000 Jewish families occupied farmsteads in Connecticut after World War I. Stymied by degraded, rocky soils, they found their greatest success in the poultry business. “But it also seems there is a high degree of turnover,” Dr. Patt said. “They’re one-generation farmers. This is not what they aspire to for their kids.”
To supplement profits, some of the Connecticut farmers started to take in New York City boarders during the summer swelter, providing cool bungalows and kosher meals. And in the process, a few Jewish farms evolved into a better-known institution in Jewish culture: the Borscht Belt resort.
“Return to the Land: Jewish Farming Around the World” runs through Oct. 15 at the Museum of Jewish Civilization, University of Hartford, with tours by appointment over the summer. Information: 860-768-4964 or mgcjs@hartford.edu.