Lee Shai Weissbach. Encyclopedia of Rural America: The Land and People. Editor: Gary A Goreham, 2nd Edition, Volume 1, Grey House Publishing, 2008.

An ethnic and religious minority with a small but significant agrarian and small-town presence. Jewish immigrants began to arrive in the United States in large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century, and most settled in the country’s major cities. Nonetheless, Jews also played a role in the life of rural America, as peddlers, farmers, ranchers and residents of small towns, where they established communities that were quite different from those of urban America and where, until the middle of the twentieth century, they made a living primarily as merchants. In more recent decades, some American Jews have continued to find rural life attractive, but the Jewish experience in the countryside and in small towns has taken on a new character.

Jews began to settle in the American colonies as early as the seventeenth century, but large numbers of Jewish immigrants began to arrive in the U.S. only in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Jews who came then were primarily from Central Europe, while those who came in much larger numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mainly from Eastern Europe. The Jewish immigrants who set out for America were seeking both freedom from persecution and economic opportunity, and most settled in the country’s principal cities, where they established relatively large communities. In the 1870s, over 70 percent of Jewish Americans lived in communities of over 1,000 Jews, and in the 1920s, over 90 percent lived in such communities. In 1927, every incorporated place in the U.S. with a population of 25,000 or more had at least some Jewish residents, but only 31 percent of incorporated places with populations under 2,500 and a mere 7 percent of unincorporated places had Jewish inhabitants. The presence of Jews in rural and small-town settings was significant nonetheless.

For one thing, throughout much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Jewish peddlers were a common sight in rural America. Peddling was an attractive option for newly arrived Jewish immigrants because it required neither much training nor much command of the English language and because new immigrants could usually find an established merchant, often a fellow Jew, who would provide the capital needed to get started. Moreover, until the early twentieth century, inhabitants of the scattered farmsteads and villages of the American hinterland generally lacked access to major commercial centers or even to country stores, and so they depended on peddlers for commodities such as dry goods, hardware items and novelties. A good number of Jews discovered rural America as peddlers and it was often the decision of one of them to settle down in some country town that marked the origins of a Jewish community there.

Jewish farmers and ranchers were also present in various parts of the country. Some settled on the land independently, but more notable were those East European Jewish immigrants who attempted to establish agricultural collectives in the later part of the nineteenth century. Many of these were associated with a movement called Am Olam (“Eternal People”), founded in Russia in 1881 with the aim of promoting Jewish agricultural settlement in America. Inspired by both utopian socialism and a “back to the soil” ideology, Am Olam activists soon created a number of agricultural colonies in the U.S, including ones at Sicily Island, Louisiana; New Odessa, Oregon; Cremieux, South Dakota; Cotopaxi, Colorado; and Bad Axe, Michigan, where the settlement they established was named Palestine. Because those who founded these experimental farming communities had little or no experience in agriculture, and because they encountered problems ranging from poor site selection to droughts and factionalism, most of their communes lasted no more than a few years. The most successful of the Jewish agricultural colonies established in the 1880s were those in southern New Jersey around the towns of Vineland and Woodbine, notably the settlements of Alliance, Norma, Carmel, and Rosenhayn. These communities, which eventually added other economic pursuits to their agricultural base, survived into the 1920s.

The various Jewish agricultural settlements established in the late nineteenth century were often supported by Jewish philanthropic organizations that believed settling immigrant Jews on the land would not only provide them with employment, but also speed their Americanization and help counter the antisemitic accusation that Jews could not be productive workers. Among the key philanthropic agencies supporting Jewish agrarian ventures were the New York-based Baron de Hirsch Fund, established in 1891 by the German financier and philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch with the cooperation of American Jewish leaders such as Oscar Straus and Jacob Schiff, and its offshoot, the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, founded in 1900.

Early in the twentieth century, chicken ranching became a common pursuit among rural Jews in southern New Jersey, and later Jews also established poultry farms around towns such as Toms River, Farmingdale, and Lakewood, New Jersey; Colchester and Manchester, Connecticut; and Petaluma, California. The greatest concentration of Jewish farmers in America developed in the Catskill Mountains of New York, especially in Sullivan and Ulster counties, where Jews took up not only poultry raising, but also dairying, vegetable cultivation, and the operation of resorts, often catering to Jewish vacationers. At the end of World War II, there were about 20,000 Jewish farm families in the United States, with perhaps half that many a quarter century later, as the number of farm families in America generally dwindled. The Jewish Farmer, a journal established in 1908, ceased publication in 1959.

More than as peddlers or farmers, Jews have been represented in rural America as residents of small towns in the American hinterland. As early as 1880, there were already over 100 towns in the U.S. with populations under 30,000 that were home to communities of at least 100 but fewer than 1,000 Jews; some twothirds of these towns had populations below 15,000. By the 1920s, there were about 400 U.S. towns with populations under 30,000 that were home to triple-digit Jewish communities; again, some two-thirds of these towns had populations below 15,000.

Although some Jews gravitated to small towns because they were attracted to a rustic environment, or because they were seeking healthy surroundings, or simply by chance, most came in search of economic opportunity and, indeed, rural Jewish communities generally developed in those country towns that served as local or regional centers of economic activity. Those towns that were undergoing some sort of dramatic economic transformation were especially attractive. The Jews who came to such towns did not necessarily take jobs in the industries that sparked the transformation, but they were attracted to places with a growing population and thus a potential customer base for the businesses they would establish. In rural western Pennsylvania, for example, Jews were drawn to the town of Jeannette when it was founded as a glass manufacturing center in 1888, and they were attracted to Ellwood City when it became a resort town in 1889.

There were several ways in which potential Jewish settlers could learn about business or employment opportunities in small towns, but by far the most important source of such information was word from relatives or acquaintances who had arrived earlier. Indeed, family members often provided the jobs that brought new Jewish settlers to the American hinterland. One result of the large role played by this sort of chain migration was that many individuals in America’s smaller Jewish communities were related to each other in one way or another.

Although it was primarily informal networks of family and friends that channeled Jews to small towns, in the early years of the twentieth century there was also a particular Jewish agency working to disperse Jews widely throughout the country. This was the Industrial Removal Office (IRO), created in 1901 to provide relief for unemployed Jewish immigrants by dispatching them to locations beyond the major metropolitan centers of the East. In the first 10 years of its existence alone, the IRO resettled nearly 50,000 individuals, and a fair number of these ended up in rural locales. In Illinois, to take but one example, the IRO dispatched immigrant Jews in 69 different cities and towns.

The Jewish communities of small towns were quite unlike the communities of larger urban centers in several important ways. They were, for example, different in their occupational profiles. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the middle of the twentieth, smaller Jewish settlements all over the U.S. were essentially merchant communities. Most Jewish families rooted in small towns were involved in retail or wholesale trade, and even those individuals who did not own their own businesses were generally employed as salespeople, clerks or bookkeepers in mercantile establishments. Typically, the stores operated by small-town Jewish merchants dealt in basic consumer necessities such as groceries, dry goods, furniture, hardware, clothing and shoes. When it came to wholesale trade, cattle dealing was a common occupation, as was the collection and resale of scrap metal and other castoffs. Of the 65 male heads of household in the Jewish community of Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1920, for example, at least 53 were owners of their own businesses. These included 11 grocers, nine junk dealers, eight proprietors of clothing stores, four dry goods merchants, and three shoe store owners.

The element most conspicuously missing from the occupational profiles of America’s small Jewish communities was a Jewish working class. Although there were a few examples of working-class elements in small-town settings—there was a population of Jewish cigarette rollers in late-nineteenth-century Durham, North Carolina, for instance—the typical small-town Jewish settlement was very much a community of middle-class businesspeople, their families and employees. Thus, the association usually made between immigrant Jews at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of labor unions and working-class politics was largely irrelevant in the context of America’s hundreds of rural Jewish centers.

Just as the occupational profiles of small communities did not replicate those of more substantial Jewish centers, neither did small-town congregational organization follow the pattern established in larger cities. Most significantly, while the infrastructure of larger Jewish communities generally included several different congregations, most small communities were served by only a single synagogue. Despite the fact that smalltown Jews, like their big-city counterparts, often differed in their liturgical traditions, in their ritual practices, and in their attitudes toward Reform Judaism (the more liberal branch of the faith developed during the nineteenth century), more often than not smalltown Jews were motivated to overcome their philosophical and liturgical disagreements in order to maintain a certain communal unity. Most Jewish communities in small-town settings simply lacked the critical mass necessary to maintain multiple congregations and to pay the salaries of more than one rabbi, if they could attract a rabbi to a small-town pulpit at all. Thus, although there were some communities that were internally split, congregations in small towns tended to function on the basis of negotiation and compromise. A survey conducted in 1927 found that over two-thirds of America’s triple-digit Jewish communities supported only a single synagogue, while about one-tenth of these communities could not support even one congregation.

Although many Jews living in rural and small town America were well integrated into local society and came to play prominent roles in public life, often joining local fraternal organizations and even holding public office, Christian prejudices and the stereotyping of Jews as shrewd, aggressive and clannish created some tensions between Jews and their gentile neighbors and made some Jews feel alienated. Moreover, Jews living beyond America’s urban centers faced certain limitations where maintaining a Jewish lifestyle was concerned. Their choices of congregational affiliation were narrow and their opportunities to provide an intensive Jewish education for their children were limited. Orthodox religious practice was especially difficult to maintain in a rural or small-town setting, for it involved such things as strict adherence to Jewish dietary laws and daily communal prayer with a minimum of 10 adult men. Observing the traditional prohibition against work on the Sabbath was particularly hard and often abandoned, since Saturday was the primary shopping day in rural America and so many small-town Jews were involved in retail trade.

Still, small communities persisted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they offered economic opportunities and because most were able to provide at least the basics needed to maintain Jewish religious and cultural traditions: a synagogue or Reform temple (sometimes both), an afternoon or Sunday religious school program, and perhaps even some access to kosher food. Moreover, small communities created close-knit social networks that many Jews appreciated, even if they were based in part on their exclusion from the mainstream of rural society. For small-town Jews of East European background, the sense of being part of an extended family was reinforced by ethnic and cultural connections based on the Yiddish language.

In more recent decades, the nature of small-town Jewish life in America has changed dramatically. The arrival of chain stores devastated many of the family businesses that once served as the foundations of Jewish life in the American hinterland, and the college-educated children of rural and small-town Jewish families often decided not to return to the places they grew up. A few small communities founded in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries have grown and others have simply been absorbed by larger metropolitan communities in the vicinity, but a great many have declined or disappeared completely. Moreover, those smaller Jewish settlements that have survived, as well as those that have been created more recently in emerging business hubs, in college towns, in resort settings, and in retirement havens, are very different in character from the small communities of times past. Jews in small towns today are often professionals, educators or retirees, rather than small-scale entrepreneurs or artisans looking to make a way in business, and they are seldom socially marginalized in small-town society the way their predecessors often were.

Because the cohesive and supportive small-town Jewish culture of the past is now gone, leading a Jewish life in a rural setting has become in some ways more difficult. On the other hand, in recent decades Jews in the hinterland have been able to take advantage of modern resources such as interstate highways and the Internet, and so living Jewishly in a small community has become in some ways easier. Indeed, something of a trend toward rural living has emerged within American Jewry. The Jewish population of the rural state of Vermont doubled to some 5,700 individuals between 1980 and 2000, for example, and in recent years new synagogues have been established in places such as Bainbridge Island, Washington; Hickory, North Carolina; and Keene, New Hampshire. As in times past, there are both costs and benefits associated with living a Jewish life in the country or in a small town, but it is clear that Jews attracted to a rural lifestyle need not sacrifice their Jewish identity.