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THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES the spatial distribution of Jewish citriculture from its modest beginnings in late-nineteenth-century Petah Tikva to its expansion across large portions of Palestine in the 1920s and the 1930s. It also attempts, on the basis of the available sources (which are limited, for the most part) to sketch a social and, mainly, entrepreneurial portrait of the Jewish growers. The economic reasons for the expansion of Jewish citriculture and, in the main, the technological and marketing methods that the growers used to sustain the tremendous increase in citrus planted area and yields are discussed in detail in the chapters that follow. SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF JEWISH CITRICULTURE UP TO 1914 Citrus fruit has been grown in Palestine since antiquity. A comprehensive and interesting study by Shmuel Tolkowsky (a leading figure in the industry; his story is told below) about the history of Citrus Fruits in world civilization shows that various types of citrus fruit were grown in the vicinity of Jaffa from the Second Temple era (fourth century BCE–second century CE) to the onset of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine. In 1852, the Dutch researcher and naval officer C. W. M. Van de Velde, who visited Palestine in 1851–1852 and mapped the country, reported that “the oranges of Jaffa . . . appear on the tables of kings in Western Europe.”1 Thus, citriculture (especially the Shamouti orange) seems to have become a steadily developing export industry in the economy of Palestine by the middle of the nineteenth century. The hub of the industry, as stated, was Jaffa. Demand for the “Jaffa orange” and the introduction of steam-powered 49 THREE Spatial Distribution and Social and Entrepreneurial Profile vessels in maritime trade in the Eastern Mediterranean—an event that also occurred in the middle of nineteenth century—contributed to the growth of plantations in the environs of Jaffa. The fruit was marketed via Alexandria until 1895, when direct steam shipping was established between Jaffa and the main market for Palestine oranges, Britain. Reflecting the industry’s growth, the number of crates of oranges exported from Jaffa increased steadily, from 260,000 in 1895 to 500,000 ten years later. The success of citriculture did not escape the attention of the country’s Jewish inhabitants, several of whom acquired citrus groves in the Jaffa area even before the First Aliya. Just the same, Jewish citrus holdings were exceedingly small in the 1890s. One of the first Jewish growers was Aharon Leib Fellmann. Fellmann’s father, Dov David Halevi Fellmann, acquired in 1883 a forty-dunam orchard in the village of Sumeil, not far from Jaffa. The elder Fellmann passed away shortly after he settled in Palestine, but his widow and sons continued to work the orchard for many years. Other Jewish-owned orchards at the time were situated in Wadi Hanin (subsequently Nes Tsiyyona), Petah Tikva, the Mikve Yisrael school, and in additional localities. Notably, these plantations were either purchased as producing orchards or were planted and developed in accordance with local Arab methods. Two main factors determined the location of the Palestine orchard in the late nineteenth century: availability of groundwater and proximity to the Mediterranean coast. The first of these factors and, especially, the pumping technology related to it, are discussed separately in the chapters to come. Here we focus on the latter factor, proximity to the seashore or, to be more precise, to the seaport. This was one of the decisive matters in determining the spatial distribution of Palestine citriculture throughout the period discussed in this book. Since citriculture was mainly an export industry—domestic consumption could hardly sustain it—proximity to the seaport did much to determine an orchard’s profitability. What mattered most was the cost of hauling the fruit from the orchard to port on camelback. In his book Ma’ayan Ganim: Rules for Planting Gardens and Citrus Orchards in the Holy Land (1891), Aharon Fellmann urged Jewish investors who wished to plant citrus orchards in Palestine not to do so more than “three hours’ travel [from the anchorage] or four at the most. . . . One who plants farther away,” Fellmann warned, “will find his gains wiped out by his losses, since . . . the farther away one is, the more expensive haulage on camelback to the coast will be and the more purposeless expense one will incur.”2 Thus, the economic conditions of late-nineteenth-century Palestine conformed with a rule enunciated in 1826 by the agricultural economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen in his book...

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