Farming the land on three continents: Bilu, Am Oylom, and Yefe-Nahar

Jewish agrarianization projects in Eastern Europe began in the late eighteenth century. This article compares three such movements that emerged in the Russian Empire: the colonization of the southern Ukraine that took place in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and, later, in the 1880s, the initiatives known as Am Oylom and Bilu. The founders of the colonies in the Ukraine combined the ideology of the Enlightenment with Russian imperial considerations, while the later movements were part of a radical Jewish avant-garde that aimed to create a “new” Jew, who would be a hardworking farmer and live in a cooperative community. Yet these visions could be realized only in a new land free of old, anti-Jewish political systems. Thus the place of social and economic rebirth would be “New Russia,” the United States, or Palestine, and regardless of location or time, the initiators of these enterprises all adopted a consistently productivist rhetoric. In addition, the settlement projects all unknowingly advanced the expanding colonialist interests of the governments of Russia, North America, and Palestine. A revised version of this paper was presented at the international conference “Beyond Eastern Europe: Jewish Cultures in Israel and the United States”, Rutgers University, March 2007.