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| - A kibbutz (Hebrew: קיבוץ, קִבּוּץ, lit. "gathering, clustering"; plural kibbutzim) is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. Over the last decades, most Kibbutzim have been privatized and no longer practice communal living. Less than five percent of Israelis live on kibbutzim. A member of a Kibbutz is called a Kibbutznik (Hebrew: קִבּוּצְנִיק).
- Conditions were hard for all subjects of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were especially difficult for Jews. It was the underlying policy of the Russian government in its May Laws to "cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve." Except for a wealthy few, Jews could not leave the Pale of Settlement; within it, some Jews could neither live in large cities, such as Kiev, nor any village with fewer than 500 residents, even if a person needed rural medical recuperation.
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| abstract
| - Conditions were hard for all subjects of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were especially difficult for Jews. It was the underlying policy of the Russian government in its May Laws to "cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve." Except for a wealthy few, Jews could not leave the Pale of Settlement; within it, some Jews could neither live in large cities, such as Kiev, nor any village with fewer than 500 residents, even if a person needed rural medical recuperation. The Tsarist government disproportionately conscripted Jews into the Russian army. Jewish soldiers suffered severe discrimination; they had to leave the Pale of Settlement to serve with their units, but when their units were given furlough, Jews had to return to the Pale of Settlement, even if their service was in the Russian Far East. There were other laws in effect which allowed the expulsion of Jewish families that had no breadwinner. During the Russo-Japanese War, many magistrates in Ukraine took advantage of the fact that Jewish men were away at the front to expel their families. Most ominously, beginning in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the Russian autocracy allowed and encouraged its discontented peasants to take out their frustrations on their Jewish neighbors. In May 1882, Tsar Alexander III issued the so-called "May Laws." The May Laws forbade Jews to live in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and systematized the anti-Jewish quotas that kept thousands of Jews out of the professions and out of university. The consequence of the residency laws was that hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from towns and villages that their families had resided in for generations. The turn of the century marked a high point for Jewish oppression in Russia. Jews responded to the pressures on them in different ways. Some saw their future in a reformed Russia and joined Socialist political parties. Other Jews saw the future of Jews in Russia as being out of Russia, and thus emigrated to the West. Other Jews took little notice of the changing world and continued in orthodoxy. Still other Jews took the opposite course and became assimilationists. Last but not least among the ideological choices that presented themselves to Jews in late 19th century Russia was Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the cradle of Judaism, Palestine, or, as Jews called it, Eretz Yisrael. Prior to this time of increased persecution, Jews had gone to Palestine either late in life to die or as young people to attend the various yeshivas clustered in Jerusalem and Hebron. These individuals were religious and had no political ambitions. In fact, instead of having livelihoods, they relied on charitable contributions of Jews from abroad. Although Zionism's antecedents can be traced back into distant Jewish history, the ideology emerged as a significant force in Jewish life only in the 1880s. In that decade approximately 15,000 Jews, mostly from southern Russia, moved to Palestine with the two intentions of living there, as opposed to dying and being buried there, and of farming there, as opposed to studying. This movement of Jews to Palestine in the 1880s is called the "First Aliyah". Zionism is usually understood to mean a kind of nationalism, but Zionism also had economic and cultural aspects. Zionism's chief economic program was for Jews to abandon inn-keeping, pawn-brokering, and petty selling in favor of a return to the land and its cultivation. The Jews of the First Aliya generation believed that Diaspora Jews had sunk low due to their typical disdain for physical labor. Their ideology was that the Jewish people could be "redeemed"—physically as well as spiritually—by toiling in the fields of Palestine. It was believed that the soil of Palestine had magical properties to metamorphosize feeble Jewish merchants into strong, noble farmers. In 1883 the London (UK) newspaper The Jewish Chronicle wrote of the new Jewish agriculturalist in Palestine that he had been transformed from "the pallid, stooping Jewish pedlar and tradesman of a few months back … into the bronzed, horny-handed, manly tiller of the soil." In harmony with the "religion of labor," the Biluim manifesto proudly called for the "encouragement and strengthening of immigration and colonization in Eretz Yisrael through the establishment of an agricultural colony, built on cooperative social foundations." In harmony with the yet unnamed ideology of Zionism the Biluim called for the "polico-economic and national spiritual revival of the Jewish people in Palestine." The Biluim came to Eretz Yisrael with high hopes of success as a peasant class, but their enthusiasm was perhaps greater than their agricultural ability. Within a year of living in Palestine the Biluim had become dependent on charity, just as their scholarly brethren in Jerusalem were. The difference between the charity that sustained the Biluim and the charity that sustained the scholars was that the Biluim used donations for land and agricultural equipment purchases. Thanks to donations of regular Jews who read the above quotation from the Jewish Chronicle and extremely wealthy Jews such as Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, the Biluim were able to eventually prosper. Their towns, Rishon LeZion, Rehovot and Gedera developed into dynamic communities while their culture of labor evolved: instead of cultivating the soil on their own land, the Biluim hired Arabs to work the land in their place. The much-heralded economic revolution had yet to occur.
- A kibbutz (Hebrew: קיבוץ, קִבּוּץ, lit. "gathering, clustering"; plural kibbutzim) is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. Over the last decades, most Kibbutzim have been privatized and no longer practice communal living. Less than five percent of Israelis live on kibbutzim. A member of a Kibbutz is called a Kibbutznik (Hebrew: קִבּוּצְנִיק).
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