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| Jewish Agricultural Colony Novozlatopol circa 1893. |
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| Novozlatopil', Zaporizhia Oblast, Ukraine today. |
Russian German history doesn’t often cover the history of Jewish agricultural colonies except in relation to Mennonites being model farmers in some of Jewish colonies near the Chortitza and Molotschna settlements. In older Germans from Russia literature, they are referred to as the “Hebrew colonies.”
The Russian Empire had acquired large Jewish populations through the three Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) under Catherine the Great. In 1791, the Pale of Settlement was established as a region where Jews were forced to live and forbidden to leave unless they had permission to do so.
The movement toward establishing Jewish agricultural colonies in Russia began in the early 1800s under Tsar Alexander I (1801-1825). Russia was challenged with integrating its new Jewish communities in large part because the opinion among some at high levels was that the Jews were mostly engaged in trades and taverns rather than in “productive” agricultural labor. Jews in the Pale were not allowed to own agricultural land anywhere, making it impossible to be farmers even if they had wanted to. The Russian government believed that agricultural work would transform Jewish settlers into more “useful” citizens and assimilate them through productive labor. Given there was sparsely populated areas in Novorossiya—South Russia as our German ancestors knew it—they sought to settle Jewish colonists as another potential source of agricultural laborers in the same areas as the Germans and Mennonites.
Jewish agricultural settlement policy in the Russian Empire during this period came about through a series of statutes, decrees, and administrative orders that both opened and closed doors to Jewish colonists until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.
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| The Pale of Settlement at its largest extent (outlined in red) in 1804 before the provinces of Astrakhan and those in the North Caucasus (on the right) were removed. Source: Mapping the Pale of Settlement, https://easteurotopo.org/maps/pale-of-settlement/ |
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| Pale of Settlement map, showing the percentage of the Jewish population in 1884. By Central Statistical Committee of the Russian Empire - https://scalar.usc.edu/works/let-me-get-there/media/pale-of-settlement-1884, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149464745 |
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1804 — Decree on the Settlement of Jews in Little Russia [Указ о поселении евреев в Малой России]. Tsar Alexander I (1801-1825) formally encouraged Jewish agricultural settlement by offering various incentives. This decree allowed Jews to purchase state‑owned lands in territories acquired from Poland in the partitions (the provinces of Podolia and Volhynia) and from Turkey north of the Black Sea (Kherson and Ekaterinoslav). A five-year residency on a plot of at least 15 hectares (37 acres) was required for the land to be transferred. The decree also included exemption from taxes for the first three years and exemption from military service for Jewish farmers.
1805 — Resolution on the Establishment of Jewish Agricultural Colonies. [Постановление о создании еврейских сельскохозяйственных колоний]. This resolution established a state‑run “Colonization Council” (Колонизационный совет) under the Ministry of the Interior to issue permits. It mandated that each colony be self‑governing with a council of heads of households, and that a Jewish school be founded in every settlement. These echo what the Germans were doing in their colonies.
1835 — Regulations Concerning Jews [Положение о евреях]. 13 April 1835. Under Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855), there was some restructuring of the previous laws that historians view as “contradictory and coercive.” On one hand, Jews were granted the right to buy or rent lands from Christian owners and could establish agricultural colonies with as few as 40 families, making agricultural settlement more accessible. Aid were made available to Jewish farmers by the Russian government, including loans, additional tax exemptions, and building materials. They were encouraged to form private Jewish agriculture colonies, and the more families that were settled in a colony, the more rights person settling the colony would receive. For example, a Jew who purchased or lease land and settled 10 or more Jewish families in a colony received the right to brew beer and alcoholic beverages based on honey, for sale to local residents. The perks increased as the number of males and families increased, all the way up to receiving “honorary citizenship.” On the other hand, the same statute curtailed the rights of urban Jews. The province of Astrakhan and those in the northern Caucasus were excluded from the Pale (see “Mapping the Pale” above). This reduced the geographic area where Jews could reside. And, in accordance with Nicholas I’s 1827 (August 26) military conscription decree, this statute clarified that urban Jews were liable for military service and were subject to the same conscription quota as all other tax-paying residents, unlike Jewish farmers who received military service exemptions.
1847 — Additional Rules on the Settlement of Jews on State Lands. 5 March 1847. Upon inspection of the Jewish agricultural colonies, the Minister of State Property noted that they lagged far behind their neighbors due to the Jewish colonists being inexperienced farmers and managers. To improve the situation, additional rules were developed that allowed for German farmers to be resettled in Jewish colonies to serve as model farmers at a rate of one German family per 10 Jewish households. The German colonists had to present a certificate of good behavior from local authorities and prove they were sufficiently knowledgeable in agriculture. They also had to show that they were wealthy enough to acquire what they needed to set up their households, and obtain the consent of the community for resettlement. The Germans were chosen not only because of their farming abilities, but also because of similarity between the German and Yiddish languages. Both Mennonites and Lutherans served as model farmers in Jewish agricultural colonies in the provinces of Kherson and Ekaterinoslav.
1860 — Law on the Colonization of the Jewish Population [Закон о колонизации еврейского населения]. Under Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881, this law lowered the financial requirements for Jewish colonists. It reduced the minimum required plot size from 15 hectares (37 acres) to 10 hectares (24.7 acres) and introduced low‑interest state loans for purchase of land and and farm implements. It also allowed joint‑ownership by up to three families, lessening the financial burden on individual households. Finally, it gave the Ministry of Finance authority to grant tax holidays for up to five years based on agricultural output. This spurred a wave of new colonies just ahead of the emancipation of the serfs the following year.
1882 — Temporary Regulations concerning the Jews [Временные положения о евреях]. 15 May 1882. Known as the “May Laws,” under Tsar Alexander III (1881-1894, these regulations re‑affirmed the restriction that Jews could not own land outside the Pale. Furthermore, after the lease terms expire on land, the land plots of the colonies could neither be purchased nor rented by the colonists themselves. Jewish merchants were also banned from operating in villages with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants, cutting off many small‑town markets that colonists relied on for selling produce. A report from 1891 noted that the May Laws “put a stop to all immigration of the Jewish inhabitants of the towns into the villages, and indeed sent no less than 50,000 from the villages into the towns.” The May Laws did not repeal the earlier statutes, but they did stifle the economic growth of the Jewish agricultural colonies.
1883 Law on Jewish Agricultural Colonies [Закон о еврейских сельскохозяйственных колониях]. This law was specifically aimed at offsetting the damage done by the May Laws. Through a a special “Jewish Colonization Fund,” it funded the establishment of over 80 new colonies between 1884 and 1895, most of them in Crimea and in the Kuban province. It allocated state‑granted “free” land parcels up to 20 hectares (49.5 acres) for families that could prove they had three consecutive years of profitable harvests. Mandatory agricultural training was instituted with attendance of lectures on crop rotation, pest control, and animal husbandry required. This law also allowed women to inherit land on equal terms with men, intended to keep families together and reduce fragmentation of plots.
1891 — Statute on Jewish Agricultural Colonies [Устав о еврейских сельскохозяйственных колониях]. Once again, the standardized size of a “family plot” of land was reduced to 12 hectares or 29.5 acres (down from 15 hectares or 37 acres) ) to make land acquisition easier. A graduated tax schedule was introduced. Jewish colonies that reached a 30 % surplus over the previous year received a partial tax rebate of 2 % of the land tax. The statute established a central “Jewish Agricultural Council” (Еврейский сельскохозяйственный совет) in Kiev to coordinate research, publish a quarterly Kolonist journal, and lobby the Ministry of Agriculture. By the early 1890s the empire had over 200 Jewish agricultural colonies. The 1891 statute is credited with the peak productivity recorded in the 1900‑1905 statistical tables, with the average wheat yield comparable to non-Jewish farms in the same provinces.
1906-08 — Emergency Credit for Colonies. The Ministry of Agriculture under Tsar Nicholas II *1894-1917) issued a series of temporary orders after the 1905 Revolution that tried to keep the colonies afloat amid rising grain prices and political unrest. These were administrative rather than legislative, and they were dissolved in the 1917 Revolutions and the fall of the Russian Empire.
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More Jewish agricultural colonies have been added to the maps of this project in the provinces of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav and Bessarabia. They include the original “old colonies,” private colonies, as well as a few of the settlements established in the Soviet era, particularly northwest of Mariupol in the former Novozlatopol Jewish National District. What is on the map now is by no means an exhaustive list, nor does it cover Jewish agricultural colonies in all of the provinces in the Pale of Settlement or everywhere Jews lived in the empire. To avoid project scope creep, I stopped with what I’ve got now: 99 Jewish agricultural colonies that either had Germans living in them at one point or near them between 1803 and 1941. If you have read this far (thank you!), you can see the Jewish agricultural story is much bigger than what you see here and is well documented and mapped in other projects by experts on that subject. See the links below and the Sources page for more.
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| Click to view the map. |
To view the Jewish agricultural colonies in relation to the German colonies in the area, I recommend using either the map of South Russia or the map of the Black Sea Region.
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Related Posts and Sources:
- “Agricultural Colonies in Russia,” Herman Rosenthal, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906.
- “Chronology of Jewish agricultural colonies created in the Russian Empire,” CycloWiki.
- “Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire” [Полное Собрание Законов Российской Империи], Presidential Library of the Russian Federation.
- “Gazetteer of the Pale,” Topographic Maps of Eastern Europe: An Atlas of the Shtetl.
- “Jewish agricultural colonies of the South of Ukraine and Crimea,” Yakov Pasik, 2005.
- “Pale of Settlement,” Herman Rosenthal, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906,
- Jewish Agricultural Village Maps of the “Kankrin Colonies”
- Farewell Forever Kleinliebental (posted 15 October 2023)