Review - American Jewish Archives

212 American Jewish Archives
and descendants that the colonists had no farming experience whatsoever
may result from an effort to explain the failure of so many
agricultural colonies"(118).
In addition to these specific points, a major contribution of the
second half of the book is the detailed analysis of the mixture of
farming and working in small industries that increasingly characterized
the so-called agricultural colonies. Eisenberg shows the importance
of sponsor ideology in the transition to mixed farming
industry, including the sponsors' role in selecting settlers who
matched their expectations. Eisenberg concludes that the Baron de
Hirsch Fund's consolidation of loans and its decision to create local
markets through supporting industry in the colonies was the single
most important factor shaping the colonies after 1890 and helped set
the tone for the twentieth century. From 1891 to 1905, when the Jewish
Agricultural Society and Industrial Aid Society decided that further
industrial growth in the colonies was not practical, almost all
new settlers engaged in industrial work instead of agriculture.
Sponsor investment, expansion of industry, and an influx of
nonagricultural and nonidealistic settlers led to "golden years" between
1900 and World War I, but cracks already had begun to appear
that would lead to the demise of the colonies by the 1930s.
Individual farmers, especially refugees from Nazism, continued to
settle on the land in the 1930s~ 1940s~ and 1950s~ but they settled as
individuals. Even as the colonies were fading, however, the Jewish
farm population was expanding rapidly in absolute numbers. The
settlements in southern New Jersey were no longer colonies but
rather were virtual suburbs of the Vineland Jewish community. By
the early 1950s about one thousand Jewish farming families were in
the Vineland area, the largest wave of Jewish settlers to the region.
Eisenberg notes that contemporary observers have placed much
of the blame for the demise of Jewish farming on a distaste of Jewish
youth for farm work, but she presents strong statistics to support her
argument that "it is apparent that much of the blame for this high
level of attrition can be traced to poor economic conditions in agriculture
relative to other fields" (162). She notes that attrition among
Jewish farmers reflected a national trend, that Jews entered farming
in the United States just as farming was beginning to decline for
non-Jews.