Inferences of Practice

II.

Many years ago that most luminous of Jewish thinkers, Aron David Gordon wrote that, for the sake of the redemption of the people, there should be not only that Yishuv in Palestine; there should be Yishuvoth wherever Jews dwell. I have believed that for a long time. But unskilled in economic matters as I am, I did not dare to propose it. Nor would I dare now but that the immensely sagacious article of Professor Selig Perlman “Our Economic Arena” in last Spring’s Menorah Journal gives me so invincible a starting point.

I should like to see Professor Perlman’s searching analysis of our economic situation in the hands of every young Jewish man and woman in America. For my present purpose I content myself with two brief quotations:

“The present depression with its extremely low prices on agricultural investments would seem to make this the strategic moment for Jewish entry… To the Jewish youth, now being pathetically driven from pillar to post in corporate industry, agriculture may indeed offer an avenue to a new deal.”

Leaning upon these two authorities, one ideological and practical, the other scientific and American and contemporary and practical, I plunge into my proposal.

Large tracts of land should be acquired by properly incorporated bodies. This can be done physically because there are many States in the Union (even among the original thirteen) where whole counties are absurdly underpopulated. It can therefore be done morally because the American has no sense of land-scarcity for himself. He will not feel landless even though a million Jews till the American earth.

Upon these tracts there should be founded co-operative freehold villages, stringently individualistic in every moral sense. The farms should be owned or leased by the families who constitute the village. The structure of the Palestinian Moshav ovdim should serve as model and guide with probably corrections for this country from the co-operative rural economics of Denmark. These village groups should, of course, do all their buying and marketing co-operatively. Thus, they would in many sections of the country set an admirable example. (In my State the farmers, mistaking stubborness for individualism, are being eaten up by jobbers and other middle men.) By this means as well as by highly skilled and very intensive cultivation and, above all, by bold experimentation our farm communities could enter all markets in free and honorable competition.

Nor is this all. Our villages and groups of villages would go far beyond furnishing employment and livelihood for the farmers who cultivate the earth and raise the cattle. These communities would employ (buying all services co-operatively) artisans of all kinds, engineers and mechanics, teachers and pharmacists and physicians and rabbis and cantors. Schools and hospitals and junior colleges would be needed in increasing measure and in that increasing measure the young Jewish professional men and women who now so frequently knock at closed doors would find fitting and congenial employment.

Thus normal sociological structures in pyramidal form (the tiller of the earth being base and foundation) would be built up; the reproach of unproductiveness would be taken from us; a powerful counteraction to our pitiful over-urbanization would set in; the surfaces of psychical and economic friction with Gentile society, both economic and professional, would be reduced in number and in sharpness. A young Jew proposing, let us say, to study medicine, would be not unwelcome in the great medical colleges if he could say that he would serve his people in such and such a hospital of such and such a community in Vermont or Colorado; a young man or woman working for a doctorate in English would no longer be discouraged if a job in a junior college of a village-group were waiting to be occupied.

These are the outer things and they are both basic and crucial. But there are higher considerations or, rather, profounder ones. One of the basest and most pitiful psychological results of the false emancipation is the wide-spread assimilatory sentiment and saying that all such plans as I propose are a return to the ghetto. Among all mankind it is considered honorable and rational that men should prefer to dwell together with those of their own faith and blood and kin and kind and historic experience. Analyze the social groups in any American community. All groups co-operate for all necessary public service and civic duty. But socially and sociologically, without strangeness or enmity, the groups exist as groups, self-affirmatively crystallized about a common faith or common descent or both. We alone, alas, take our natural grouping negatively. That is our central tragedy; from it springs half our hurts and failings and subtle contortions and bad manners and spiritual wounds and otherwise inexplicable corruptions. A series of village-groups producing, as they would, noteworthy products both physical and intellectual, would go far to take from us this curse of self-negation—the cure which the Gentile, too, feels in our very clamor to the contrary.

We shall respect ourselves more and thus gain more of the respect of the world if we stop clamor and justification and proceed to creative action upon fundamental grounds.