CANADIAN ^�^:^5^^^''^^T^^^^w^^^?M V:.^'r> ;?;,-;>..> ^r<--;:^'--v>'v^;': � v- f: r'^i �&\&4li�r\ I �' Wu^ili>]*sii >lui!A5 '� '^'�vl '' AN IMPARTIAL MEDIUM FOR THE DISSEMINATION OF JEWISH NEWS AND VIEWS Published Weekly by the Canadian Jewish Review OFFICE, SUITE 109 119 BAY STREET, TORONTO Telephone Adelaide ?628-9 Entered as Second-Class Mail at the Post Office in Toronto, Ont., in December, 1921 Subscription Price, 33-00 per Year. United States, $3.50 To insure publication, all correspondence and news matter must reach this.Office by Tuesday evening of each week, G. W. Cohen, Managing Editor. S. A. Frecdlander, Advertising Manager. Rabbi B. R. Brickner, Contributing Editor The Canadian Jewish Review invites correspondence on subjects of interest to the Jewish people, but disclaims responsibility for indorsement of the views expressed by the writers. All correspondence must be signed with the full name of the writer. APRIL 21, 1922 VOLUME 1. NUMBER 25 EDITORIAL SUCCESSFUL JEWISH FARMERS CAN Jews become farmers? is a question that has seriously been asked by Jew and non-Jew in modern days. Our answer is categorical. The Jew can become anything that his opportunities will permit him. Achad Ha Am, the brilliant Jewish essayist1 says in one of his essays :'the Jew has a genius for adaptation." During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the doctrine of evolution was the open sesame to the interpretation and proper understanding ol all phases of life and growth, but this term has proven too vague; more and more that general concept is being analyzed, narrowed, defined. Sociologists are all agreed'that its place is being usurped by the more definite concept of ADAPTATION, which is being recognized as the principal condition to survival. If an individual or a social group wishes to survive and live, the first condition is, that it shall adjust to the changing environment and circumstances of its life. After it has submitted to this process it can then endeavor to change or fit the environment to its peculiar nature and desires. The former is essential and compulsory, the latter is voluntary and problematical The Jew is unique in the history of nations in that he has survived because he has adjusted and adapted himself to all climates, peoples and circumstances of life. In Egypt, according to Biblical account, Pithom and Raamses stood as monuments of his skill as .a mason. In Palestine he was a farmer and shepherd. Babylon transformed him into a banker and trader. In Spain he became a merchant prince, court physician, sweet singer and philospher. In the middle ages, deprived of natural privileges and human rights he conceived and developed international trade and commerce based on the only factor that could sustain these, namely, international credit. Modern international business and finance stands as a living monument to the Jews' commercial genius as founder. Industrial America transformed the Jewish people from small traders into manufacturers and proletariats. 60,000 Jewish Farmers in United States And now comes the annual report of the Jewish Agricultural Aid Society of America, indicating that there are known to i^, a Jewish farmer population in the United States alone of over 60,000 and that more than 1,000,000 ae*es are under cultivation by Jewish hands, that the real estate and personal value.of these, hold ings are over $100,000,000. Every State in the United States has its quota of Jewish tillers of the soil. In 1900 when the Society first began to function there were in the United States only 216 Jewish farm families, with a total acreage owned of 12,029. This bird's eye view of Jewish development proves conclusively that the Jew can become whatever his economic and cultural opportunities will permit him td become. After all, men are not conceive*} in their mothers wombs to be doctors or lawyers, journalists or engineers, ministers or professors, farmers or sweat shop workers, merchants or bankers. Men become what their environment and opportunities for Cultivating their native abilities allow them to develop into. The theory that a man must become what his father was, is a remnant of the old theory of caste and class, which in modern V "�* m -' .^^ "'I�~4'"..'*'* '**" ^-\ . ' 7' r. i 1 � j p "T"1 VTT" '" ' -~ 7"' *~ � � ~~~ "7 ~ " ^'i ""L"7"" T '""^ ^' 'l * �T r*^Crt.l'-^~'*f"5 ' acquired charaxttn^ (jafried over frond o^ejgerteration' to anoj tional forces in our ;ef^yirx>nmeiitv � � 1 , Nevertheless -this fact does .STANDJptir bluntiy/ ari^' bbl4ly ytbai> ^-^ the great masses* of Jews are hot larrnefe to a^/reaKextferit ^d t|^- ;,! the number of Jews tfri the soil m the yni^ States;^yy.j5aW^:fa^,5'V; insignificant when <;ohlpared to th� toteVjevrcsh ''''I^P'Ml^^^^^^^^^ K^ countries. The cause, However, does riot lie wi&nprin is not because he is biologically unsiiited for the flirm Jt>r; tf and hardships of agricultuFal;labor tunity was given him. The successful Jewish farmBionics in Russia, in Argentine and now in the United States and Palestine are evidences of this. ' ' V To be sure it requires patience and time for a people to go fi;orri onejorm of life to another. But it is more than opportunity in the mere free offering of tillable land that the Jew requires to become a( successful farmer and lover of the soil. i The Jew is primarily a social being. ,His religion encourages him to live in social groups. The need for a synagog, cemetery,;./-;lMS religious school, kosher food, fellowship with people of his own ;? ;f^ persuasion and type of mind are more than mere needs. They :v^v| are imperative requirements for Jewish life. Talmudic law forbids C^, a Jew to live in a place where there are not nine other JeWs in the vic^ / ''�<$$ ihity. When a Methodist settles on the soil, though his neighbor be:a ^5% Presbyterian or Baptist or even a Roman Catholic, they have at least ^?| the fundamentals of Christianity in common, they may come from the ' S^l same old country and speak the same language�there is immediately v V-S a common basis for fellowship in the domain of spiritual and cultural iV^ interests. When a Jew settles on the land he is isolated from other/ -'.p^. Jewish fellowship which he craves, his neighbors regard him as.a -'A--^^ stranger, his feasts, his fasts, his sabbaths are different from theirs. . ;^f� His children grow up without religious education; as they grow-into. ,v0| young manhood and womanhood the fear, greater than all other fears, ; f^ begins to gnaw at his heart�the fear of intermarriage. He yearns . , v^ to see his children receive the benefits of more than a mere rural, -�v education. The Jew unlike his neighbour is always striving-for - ;>� "something higher." He wants his children to reap the benefit of 'V.-iS the best that higher education offers. . VA He appreciates that "man doth not live by bread alone," . :/i:^ No, it is not the physical rigors of pioneering nor the craving after ;-:'; ,^ the lights of the big city nor even the absence of fine clothes and � /;:)� sanitary facilities, which drives him ultimately to desert his farm and 'j go to the city, for this has happened hundreds of times in almost t y,~J]g every attempt at settling Jews on farms. It is the craving for Jewish ' ::^| fellowship, and the inability to live up to the requirements of 'his.:., Jj faith that have halted many Jews from-going or staying on the soil. '-, \ jV, There is another and deeper reason, which is physchologicaHn V^ character. A Freud might even characterize this state of mind, i; '.�$ which we are about to describe as a "complex." -> ' ' ':'"�' '�'* For ages the world has by its oppression and expulsions taught /?� the Jew, that though -his father ana his father's father had lived ui ' ^ this or that country in safety, that he, or his children are nevertheless - f :* strangers, and tolerated foreigners, and might expect at the slightest > ;^ provocation to be driven from their homes within twenty-four hours and exiled. This happened in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, England, South America, and is npw happening ia Poland, Ukraine and Germany. In all of these countries the Jews ^were pioneers and had lived in some of these countries/when the ancestors' of those who drove them out, were aborigines in the forests of fiurope, Thus the Jews livecl in Poland before the Poles, they were there as a result of Roman exile, and were the first to teach the ancient Poles to mine and refine salt. Yet to-day they are hunted like hounded animals in an alien jungle. This condition has everywhere up to the last century instilled in the Jew the secret fear that though we are here to-day we may have to be elsewhere to-morrow. Such a statfe? of mind was not and never could be conducive to agriculture. In farming, the farmer plants the orchard -from which hU children will pick the fruit. When a farmer is exiled he must leave all his wordly goods behind him though it may represent generations of labor. The Jew in the Western World has lived under the spell of that fear complex and until the Christian world ,can make the Jew feel that in lands of freedom where he comes to make his home, he ia not an unwelcome stranger nor a tolerated foreigner, simply becatt�e he b ol a