Jewish Farmers

P: "Hen of the Year," chosen at a recent Poultry Industries Exposition in Manhattan, was a bird bred by Irving Kauder, a Jewish poultry farmer.

P: What President Roosevelt called "a perfect stand of Cossack alfalfa" on his Georgia farm, was grown from seed raised by a Jewish seedsman.

P: Journalists George and Gilbert Seldes, onetime Pennsylvania Congressman Benjamin Colder, Dean Jacob Goodale Lipman of the Rutgers College of Agriculture (New Brunswick, N. J.), Judge Jacob Panken of Manhattan, Judge Theodore Rosen of Philadelphia, Judge Joseph B. Perskie of New Jersey's supreme court-- all were once Jewish farm boys.

P: President of the Massachusetts State Federation of Poultry Associations is a second-generation Jewish agriculturalist.

Such facts are pleasing to seamy-faced Dr. Gabriel Davidson, who last week rendered his 30th annual report as general manager of the Jewish Agricultural Society. Established in 1900, the Society is still backed by a fund set up by Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-96), the great German Jewish philanthropist who spent millions trying to improve the lot of European Jews, to get them to emigrate from their ghettos. In 1900 there were 200 Jewish farmers in the U. S. Today, although many Americans have never seen any Jewish farmers, there are nearly 100,000, many of whom have benefited by the $7,500,000 in loans the Society has made.

There is a semireligious inspiration behind the Jewish back-to-the-farm movement, for the Jewish civilization of the Old Testament was primarily agricultural. The three great religious feasts of the Jews--Passover, Pentecost, Succoth--are fundamentally harvest festivals. Though in the centuries of the Diaspora (dispersion) circumstances have forced most Jews into occupations from which they could pull up stakes at any time, there nevertheless have always been farmer Jews somewhere. Today there are 800,000 Jewish farmers in the world.

Of U. S. Jewish agriculturalists, Dr. Davidson--who is too busy to farm himself--says that most are immigrant Jews, most come from trades such as the needle and fur, most seek farms and remain on them because farming is a peaceful way of life. Because they are city-bred, Jewish farmers are apt to have more plumbing, electricity, furnaces, radios, telephones than the average U. S. farmer.

Partly by reason of their religion Jewish farmers differ from most others. Although they engage in many forms of agriculture (but chiefly poultry and truck farming), they tend to live in groups; for Jewish dietary laws and ritual practices are hard to fulfill in isolation, and ten Jewish men is the smallest permissible group for public worship. With well developed commercial instincts many a Jewish farmer also takes in summer boarders.

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