The Divergence of Judaism and Islam: Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil

8. In Search of Jewish Farmers: Jews, Agriculture, and the Land in Rural Morocco

8 In Search of Jewish Farmers Jews, Agriculture, and the Land in Rural Morocco Daniel J. Schroeter It is commonly assumed that once exiled from the ancient land of Israel, Jews were transformed from being a society of primarily rural farmers to urban dwellers engaged in other occupations: commerce, peddling, and well-defined crafts. Farming pursuits by Jews were mainly confined to urban and suburban cultivation of vineyards, orchards, and other forms of intensive agricultural production. Apart from these limited domains, both in the Christian and Islamic worlds, Jews had abandoned the land and agriculture. Historians have offered a number of explanations for this fundamental transformation. The abandonment of agriculture and the alienation of Jews from the land have been explained in part by heavy taxation, expropriation of Jewish landholdings, and general restrictions on Jewish land tenure, although there is little evidence that there were any important legal restrictions on Jewish economic activities in the period of Muslim expansion.1 A somewhat different explanation offered is that in contrast to non-Jews, a significant number of Jewish farmers were literate, giving them advantages in skilled professions needed in the new cities that developed with expanding urban settlements in the Abbasid period and later with the development of urban life in Western Europe.2 Even if Jews may have voluntarily moved away from agricultural pursuits for other, more lucrative occupations, it could also be argued that social structure inhibited Jewish landownership and farming. In Europe, Jews were outside the feudal system of land tenure, while in the Middle East and North 144 · Daniel J. Schroeter Africa, Jews were also outside the rural social system, which was based on communal lands and tribal lineages. Another reason attributed to the decline of agriculture was the restrictions of the Sabbath, more onerous for agricultural pursuits when Jews lived as a minority population. How much in fact Jews were alienated from the land and agriculture is a subject of debate, and it now seems clear that in the Mediterranean region, in both Christian and Muslim regions, Jews continued to own rural land and pursue agriculture to a greater degree than was once believed . The Geniza provides plenty of evidence that Jews were engaged in agriculture and owned farmland in Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean .3 In North Africa, evidence since the Middle Ages shows that there were Jews who were farmers and herders.4 Travel literature from the sixteenth century refers to Jewish farmers.5 Evidence of Jews cultivating the soil comes not only from the occasional observation of travelers but also from responsa literature, rabbinical discourse on legal questions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 It is, however, undeniable that a large measure of alienation from the land took place and that over the course of the first millennium Jews shifted from agriculture to more urban occupations. Even where Jews owned agricultural lands in the Muslim Mediterranean world, they often did not cultivate the fields themselves but relied instead on Muslim sharecroppers. For Jews the transition away from tilling the soil became a symbol of exile, and for Gentiles it became a Jewish stereotype. In the years preceding and following the emancipation of Jews in Western Europe, the debates about removing the civil disabilities of the Jews often revolved around the supposedly unproductive nature of Jewish professions. For adversaries to Jewish emancipation, this essential nature of the Jew was what made their integration undesirable. For both Jewish and non-Jewish advocates of emancipation, Jewish productivity was a necessity for admittance to society. What was required was the “regeneration ” of the Jews, which implied, among other things, the normalization of Jewish economic and professional life. More specifically, there were calls for Jews to return to agriculture. The pursuit of agriculture as part of the revitalization of Jewish life was called for by both those who saw it as a means to integrate in the societies where Jews lived and by Zionists , who saw the “return to the land” as a sacred duty for the national restoration of the Jewish people. The result of this ideology, whether Zionist or assimilationist, from the mid-nineteenth century resulted in the In Search of Jewish Farmers: Jews, Agriculture, and the Land in Rural Morocco · 145 establishment for Jews of agricultural colonies and schools and communal farming settlements in Palestine, North Africa, the United States, and Argentina. This is the context for understanding the discovery, real...