JCA-ORT-JAS-JDC: one big agrarianizing family JONATHAN DEKEL-CHEN The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel E-mail: dekelchen@mscc.huji.ac.il Abstract. This essay examines ideological and institutional patterns that character- ized the four most successful projects in Jewish agrarianism from the 1890s until the eve of the Second World War. These major undertakings included the agricultural settlements created by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Argentina, colonization efforts in North America supported by the Jewish Agricultural Society, the settlement work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the interwar Soviet Union, and parts of the institutional mechanisms that supported Zionist agricultural settlement in the Yishuv. The article studies the forces that drove the world of Jewish philanthropy to support such efforts over several decades and across four continents. In 1990, Eliahu Benjamini published the remarkable book, Medinot la- yehudim: Uganda, Birobidzhan ve-od 34 tokhniot [States for Jews: Uganda, Birobidzhan and Another 34 Plans], which is a treasure of valuable data on experiments in organized Jewish agrarianization in the modern era. Medinot le-yehudim remains a landmark work and in part inspired the organization of the international conference BTo the Land!: 200\ Years of Agricultural Settlement in the Jewish World,^ whose papers form the core of this issue of Jewish History. Benjamini_s book documented projects that, quite literally, spanned the globe and well over a century. Most of the ideas of Jewish agrarianization discussed in his book did not get beyond their planning stages. But a number of agrarianization projects did become major endeavors that attracted a great deal of public resources and attention in their day. Benjamini thereby gave us insight into the breadth of thoughts and actions of organized agrarianization in the modern Jewish world. 1 This essay examines some of the ideological and institutional patterns among what I consider the four most successful projects mentioned in Medinot la-yehudim. These links are keys to understand- ing the persistence of organized agrarianization over several decades and, I believe, its relative successes. The settlement projects in question sprouted in the Americas, the interwar Soviet Union, and in the Land of DOI:10.1007/s10835-007-9038-3 Jewish History (2007) 21: 263Y278 • c Springer 2007