The Weinberg reading speaks to the economic situation of Jews before the 1917 Revolution, stating that — excluded from owning land, most Jews of the Russian Empire were resigned to the petty trades, or to abject poverty. This pre-revolutionary status of the Jews made the Jewish section of the Communist Party question whether the Jews should be considered members of the self-employed bourgeois, or members of the proletariat. The final answer was that Jews were in fact proletarian, and that therefore, “They [The Evsektsii] promoted cooperatives so that kustars [artisans] would move from capitalist self-employment to socialist collectivism.” (Pg. 7)
The reading goes on to state the the Evseksii eventually lost control of the economic situation of Russia’s Jewish population, as the First Five Year Plan hegemonized the movement towards industrialized socialism. What is surprising is that in the context of the J.A.R., the push was not to turn the Jewish population into industrial workers, but to turn them into agricultural laborers. This leads to my question: Why would the USSR attempt to turn a population which already possess mechanical skills into agricultural laborers, when the general push is to turn the economy away from agriculture towards industry?
One answer to this question may lie in the geographic location of the J.A.R.. Since the J.A.R. was situated in the Far East, it may have been difficult for the Soviet government to ship industrial equipment to the region, and to build all the infrastructure needed to support an industrial economy. But, as the Weinberg reading points out, the Soviet government was not even prepared to establish the J.A.R. as an agricultural settlement: “In many instances, Jewish pioneers found they were given land unsuitable for cultivation because it had not been drained and surveyed. In other cases, the fledgling collective and state farms, chronically mismanaged and poorly organized, often lacked basic necessities such as potable water, barns, livestock, tools, and equipment.” (Pg. 24)
Not only was the land in many cases not suitable for agriculture, and the administrative apparatus not present, but as the the reading points out, both psychologically and in terms of skillset, most Jews who migrated to the J.A.R. were completely unprepared to work on the soil: “The overwhelming majority of the Jews who came to the J.A.R. in its early years had little or no first-hand experience knowledge of farming, and many were unprepared psychologically and physically for the rigorous demands of pioneer life.” (28)
Another reason for why the Soviet government chose to turn Jewish migrants to the J.A.R. into agricultural labourers could have been in order to compete more effectively with Zionism, which also supported the Jewish return to the land. As the introduction points out, “Those who devised the scheme for an autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union were consciously competing with Zionism.” (Pg. 5) The introduction goes on to state that agricultural work offered the Jews “economic rehabilitation” and “social respectability”.
Is this assertion true? Is it that agricultural work actually gave Jews respectability, or was the state rather aiming towards replacing the mobile skills that most Jews had for a skillset that would link the Jewish population with a specific piece of land, and therefore limit their movement, thus further empowering the state?
I think that your idea that the focus on agricultural labor was to empower the state by limiting movement of Jewish individuals and skills is a really interesting one, and I’d believe it and want to see if Weinberg also is arguing this.
I’d like to add to that interpretation with the inclusion of Weinberg’s quote of Boris Miller: “the Jewish Autonomous Region did not fulfill our hopes; it became instead a factory for Jewish assimilation.” I wonder if the nationalities policy as a whole could be seen as really motivated toward assimilation, especially since the crimes that the government used to justify repression and arrests were the government’s own previous policies. As Bakhmutskii said, “I didn’t understand that what is said at one time cannot be said mechanistically at another time.”
The paradoxes and contradictions you bring up are interesting. Tying Jewish migrants to a specific space and place in time seemed like the goal for the Soviet Union, and integrating them into the struggle of the proletariat. As you mention above, the JAR was in competition with Zionism, so why did the Soviet Union support the idea of a homeland? Though this homeland was never achieved (i.e. the declining percentage of the Jewish population), why did the Soviet Union support? Does the link from Zionism to nationalism explain why this move fits into the Soviet nationalization scheme?
Another contradiction I found in the reading: “As the national language of the Jews, Yiddish, rather than Hebrew—which was considered the language of bourgeois Zionists—would help ensure that the cultural politics of Soviet Jewry would hew closely to the dictum, “national in form and socialist in content.” ” (pg 59)
I liked the point you raised about Soviet attempts to change the kinds of jobs that Jews worked is important to understanding the J.A.R. I think that latter reason you offer, that it was motivated by a desire to tie Jews to land within the Soviet Union is spot on. For the Soviet Union to compete with the project of Zionism in the 20th century they had to offer what Zionism did, work and land(Weinberg, 3). By offering these same “rewards” but in a different location, Soviets could likely compete with left wing Zionists who were less concerned with the religious aspects of Zionism than the material aspects. On top of that there was a benefit for the Soviet Union in displacing Jews from lands they historically lived on, moving Jews away from the existing religious communities and religious infrastructure in the former Pale of Settlement in the forms of synagogues and prayer houses would likely have eased the Soviet Union’s campaign to eliminate religion.
In regards to the difficulty of shipping industrial equipment to the J.A.O. I think that raises another question, and that is why Siberia? Why did the Soviets choose to locate the J.A.O. in a place with no Jewish history? We know that at least some people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Crimea were not okay with increased Jewish settlement in those areas (Weinberg, 21), but why choose Southern Siberia as the location for the Socialist Jewish nation?