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Some Proposed Jewish Homelands
(Other than Palestine)
Leslie Rübner
[Written in 2011]
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, there was a realisation that the Jewish people needed a homeland. The Jews saw the need for a safe haven from the rabid anti-Semitism endemic in Europe and, at the same time, the host communities wanted to rid themselves of their Jews.
I will describe some of the more interesting proposed projects:
Ararat City
Mordecai Manuel Noah was born in Philadelphia in 19th July 1785, to a German-Jewish father and a Sephardi mother. Noah studied law in Charleston, South Carolina. As an ardent American patriot, already at the tender age of 26, he wrote editorials in a Charleston newspaper denigrating Great Britain. Noah, an ambitious man, petitioned Secretary of State, Robert Smith, to grant him a consular position in the State Department, pointing out that the appointment of a Jew to the diplomatic corps would favourably impress Jewish voters. His argument worked and Noah was appointed US consul to Riga and thereafter, Tunis. In his journeys to and from his posts, he saw the terrible living conditions that the Jewish people had to endure in Europe and North Africa. He hit on the idea of establishing a Jewish refuge in the US where there would be free practise of religion without fear and where the Jews and Gentiles would enjoy equal opportunities. In 1825, he published a plan for the establishment of “a city of refuge for the Jews”, on Grand Island, in the Niagara River, near the Niagara Falls, not far from Buffalo, New York State. He named this proposed new settlement Ararat (a play upon his surname). With great fanfare and the firing of a cannon, and with the participation of state and federal officials, Christian clergymen, masonic officers, and even American Indians, whom Noah identified as the “lost tribes” of Israel, and who were also to find refuge at this new safe haven, the foundation stone of Ararat City was laid on 2nd September 1825. As it was inconvenient to hold these ceremonies on Grand Island itself, they were performed in an Episcopal church in Buffalo. After having appointed himself “judge and governor” of Israel, he issued a “proclamation”. In this “state paper”, he announced the setting up a Jewish state on Grand Island, as a preliminary to the restoration of Israel in Palestine. He proposed to finance this project by levelling taxes on World Jewry. Needless to say, all this pomp and ceremony was for nothing. Jews did not come to Ararat and it was not built and Noah had never set foot on Grand Island.
Today, on Grand Island Town Hall sits a cornerstone engraved with the Sh’ma in Hebrew and the following inscription:
ARARAT
A City of Refuge for the Jews
Founded by Mordecai Manuel Noah in the month of Tizri 5586
Sept. 1825 and in the 50th Year of American Independence.
The Uganda Program
In 1903, 5000 square miles of the Mau Plateau in Uganda (now in Kenya) was offered by Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain to Theodore Herzl’s Zionist group for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. This offer was brought to the attention of the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903. The idea was debated. Those for the motion argued that it would serve as an ante-chamber to the proper ancestral Jewish home in Palestine, but those against felt that it would make it more difficult to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Feelings were running high; the delegates from Russia, those who suffered the most at the time, had stormed out in protest from the hall before it came to a vote. This was a tactical mistake; the motion was passed by 295 votes to 177. It was decided to send out a team to Africa to examine the proposed territory. They found the terrain quite suitable for settlement by Europeans. As the plateau had a high elevation, the climate was temperate. But what frightened them most was the fact that ‘dangerous wild animals’ were roaming free and the warlike Masai did not seem amenable to the influx of a lot of Europeans. In 1905, the Congress decided to politely decline the British offer.
The Madagascar Plan
As early as 1885, Paul de Lagarde, a German biblical scholar, orientalist and violent anti-Semite, suggested that the German Empire occupy those areas of central and Eastern Europe not part of the German Empire, for the sole purpose of rounding the Jews up and deporting them to Madagascar.
Why Madagascar?
This 600,000 square kilometre piece of land (about the same size as its imperial master, France), with only about 3.5 million natives, was under populated and, being an island, easily controlled. It was envisaged that the different European Navies would blockade it, not letting anything in or anyone off the island. Madagascar was inhospitable with almost no infrastructure, so totally unsuitable for European settlement. In 1931, a German publicist wrote: “the entire Jewish nation sooner or later must be confined to an island. This would afford the possibility of control and minimise the danger of infection.”
European anti-Semites regularly held secret meetings to discuss ways of solving the “Jewish problem”. Incarcerating them in Madagascar was the most popular solution at the time at these meetings. The British anti-Semite, Henry Hamilton Beamish, in the 1920s, was one of the earliest devotees of the Madagascar Plan. Beamish produced a leaflet announcing that the “problem” of Zionism could be solved by shipping the Jews to the “New Zion”, Madagascar. According to Beamish, 100 million people could easily be re-settled there. Another “gentleman”, a Hungarian, who wrote under different pseudonyms, published a book called “Full Zionism”. He displayed a map of Madagascar on the title page and like Beamish, he suggested concentrating the Jews there. In 1937/1938 in Poland, the idea of dumping her Jews on Madagascar gained currency. When the French foreign ministry agreed to consider the matter, the Polish media and some politicians made much of it and sent a three-man commission to Madagascar to investigate. The leader of the commission, Major Mieczyslaw Lepecki, believed that it would be possible to settle 40,000 to 60,000 people in Madagascar. The two Jewish members of the commission didn’t agree and Leon Alter, the director of the Jewish Emigration Association in Warsaw, thought maybe 2,000 people could be settled there, but Salomi Dyk, a Tel Aviv agricultural engineer’s estimate was only a few hundred. In 1939, Germany attacked Poland and with this, all negotiations came to an end.
On 12th November 1938, Hermann Goering told the German Cabinet that Hitler was going to suggest to the West that the European Jewry be deported to Madagascar. The Reichsbank president tried to secure a loan to finance the undertaking during a discussion in London. In December 1939, during a meeting with the Pope, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, included the relocation of the Continental Jewry to Madagascar as part of a peace proposal with Britain.
A Madagascar Plan was drawn up in Berlin, dated 3rd July 1940.
Here is an excerpt from this document:
“As Madagascar will only be a Mandate, the Jews living there will not acquire German citizenship. On the other hand, the Jews deported to Madagascar will lose their citizenship of European countries from the date of deportation. Instead, they will become residents of the Mandate of Madagascar. This arrangement would prevent the possible establishment in Palestine by the Jews of a Vatican State of their own, and the opportunity for them to exploit for their own purposes the symbolic importance which Jerusalem has for the Christian and Mohammedan parts of the world. Moreover, the Jews will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good behaviour of the members of their race in America”.
The Madagascar Plan was only a smoke screen as Hitler made it clear in Mein Kampf. He wanted the Jews vanished from the face of the Earth, not just shifting them to a far corner of the globe.
In June 1941, the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union. The Nazi leadership dropped all pretence and proceeded with liquidating the Jews. To this end the Einsatzgruppen (SS paramilitary death squads) had been established. The extermination mechanism of Germany swung into high gear and the Madagascar Plan was discussed no more.
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The Fugu Plan
In 1895, the Russians leased a land concession from China to build an extension of the cross-country Trans-Siberian line, the Chinese Eastern Railway, across Manchuria. Tsar Nikolai II was eager to establish a Russian economic hold on the territory and, to this end, he offered Jews a life without restrictions and without anti-Semitism in Manchuria. Jewish newcomers were to be free to settle anywhere, but most of them established themselves in the premier city of Harbin (“place of drying fish nets” in Chinese), nesting at the convergence of the Songhua and Heilong or Amur Rivers. Jews from the Pale of Settlement, as well as from just across the border, from Siberia, had heard the Tsar and some of them packed their belongings, collected their families and undertook the arduous journey to Harbin. The first Jew, S.I. Bertsel, arrived in 1899. Indeed, just as the Tsar had promised, the new railway offered good opportunities for the newcomers to thrive financially and the local Chinese, not being Christians, had no tradition of anti-Semitism.
In February 1904, in search of raw materials for her industries, Japan attacked Russia. Right at the start, Japan realised that they had bitten off more than they can chew. Russia had limitless resources, manpower and money and the Japanese desperately needed funding for their war effort from the international money market. By April, the vice-Governor of the Bank of Japan, Baron Korekiyo Takahashi, was dispatched to London to organise a line of credit. But he was offered only half the amount required and under the most humiliating terms. Before returning home, Talahashi was invited to a formal dinner party given by one of the bankers. There he was desperately complaining to all who would listen about the difficulties he had in obtaining capital. The Jewish banker, Jacob Schiff (who hated Nikolai II for the pogroms in Kishinev), a partner in the American investment bank of Kuhn-Loeb, was sitting next to Takahashi and he arranged for his to bank underwrite the Japanese loan. Takahashi and Sieff became lifelong friends.
After 1919, the Japanese and White Russians (White Russians were fighting the Reds, the Bolsheviks) joined forces against the Soviets and were fighting side by side in Siberia. The White Russians, especially General Gregorii Semononv, as rabid anti-Semites, were each issued with a copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. This libellous forgery was taken as the absolute truth by these people. Captain Norihiro Yasue, a Russian language specialist in the Japanese Army, who translated the “Protocol” into Japanese, was posted to General Semenov’s staff. Koreshige Inuzuka, a naval officer who was stationed on a battleship off Vladivostok, as well as a few others, came to the firm conclusion, after reading the “Protocol”, that the Jews, not having a country of their own, had been conspiring for years to make the entire world do their bidding. These two military officers and a small band of fellow travellers began collecting data about this ‘Jewish threat’. Newspaper and magazine columns were published on the subject by these “Jew experts”. In 1926, Yasue was sent to Palestine to investigate Jewish intentions. Yasue travelled up and down the country, spoke to the Jewish political leaders, trying to elicit proof for his prejudice.
Japan was struggling with the problem of over-population and it seemed logical to persuade some of the Japanese to relocate to the newly ‘independent’ state of Manchukuo. It was imperative for Japan to develop and exploit Manchukuo’s vast natural wealth, but capital like that was not easily available in the early 30s. The plan was to bring Jews from Europe to Manchuria, paid for by American Jewish finance and investment. A grateful American Jewry would then influence the U.S. government to acquiesce to Japanese colonial interests in East Asia and Oceania.
The Harbin Jewish population grew to 20,000 by the 1920s. There were Jews in every walk of life. The community was proud of the two synagogues, the Old Synagogue and the New Synagogue, a library and Talmud Torah, an elementary and a secondary school. They had a hospital which treated everyone, a home for the aged and their own cemetery. The Jewish-owned Hotel Moderne could boast a restaurant, a cinema, a billiard room, a bar and a barber shop. There were about 20 Jewish newspapers and magazine publications, all in Yiddish, except one. With the arrival of the fiercely anti-Semitic White Russians, everything changed. There were discriminations, obductions and kidnappings of Jews.
In 1931, the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria and in 1932, occupied Harbin. The city became part of the puppet state of Manchukuo.
Gisuke Ayukawa, an industrialist who created a major steel works (later Nissan Industries), imported scrap metal from the USA and through his business activities, had extensive contact with American Jews. Ayukawa and the “Jew experts”, together with the Japanese foreign minister, discussed the idea of settling Jews in Manchukuo. And so, in June and July 1939, two memorandums “Concrete Measures to be Employed to Turn Friendly to Japan the Public Opinion Far East Diplomatic Policy Close Circle of President of USA by Manipulating Influential Jews in China,” and “The Study and Analysis of Introducing Jewish Capital” were reviewed and approved by the Japanese in China. They named the project the “Fugu Plan” because, like this fish delicacy, wrongly handled will poison you. Should the plan succeed those participating would reap all the benefits, but if the project failed, the consequences would be dire. They were planning to settle from 18,000 to 600,000 Jews with complete freedom of religion, culture and education.
Emissaries were sent to the U.S. to talk to prominent Jews. Gisuke Ayukawa tried to arrange that his suppliers should contact Washington and influence American policy (how naïve can you get?!). Dr Abraham I. Kaufman, the head of the Harbin Jewish Community, tried to persuade Rabbi Steven Wise, Honorary President of the American Jewish Congress, to use his considerable influence to the same end. Rabbi Wise did not even bother to reply.
While these activities were going on, the situation for the Jews in Harbin deteriorated. White Russian criminal gangs carried out systematic harassment of the Jews while the Japanese looked the other way (the Harbin Russian Fascist Party was established in 1931, two years before the Japanese occupation of Harbin). Citizens were kidnapped, tortured and often murdered by the occupying army and its White Russian collaborators. Simeon Kaspé, a 24-year-old naturalised French concert pianist (son of the Russian-born Joseph Kaspé, the owner of the Hotel Moderne, a large jewellery store and a chain of theatres), was kidnapped by White Russian bandits in 1933. When, on the advice of the French Consul, Joseph refused to negotiate with the kidnappers, they sent him his son’s ears. Simeon was tortured for months and all this time Japan ignored both the French Consul’s protests and widespread international outrage. 95 days later, Simeon was found shot dead in a shallow grave. As a consequence, the Jews began leaving Harbin and Manchukuo for Shanghai, or if it was at all possible, abroad.
On 7th December 1941, the Empire of the Rising Sun attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and the U.S. entered the War on the side of the Allies. The Fugu Plan had been overtaken by events.
As a footnote to this, I have to mention that although towards the end of the war, the Japanese had confined all the stateless Jews of Shanghai in a ghetto where they underwent all sorts of hardships, thousands of Jews in Harbin, Shanghai and in Japan survived.
>Read Leslie's article 'A Tale of Three Cities' for more information on the Jews in Shanghai and Japan<
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast
As early as 1913, in the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie, Stalin published an article defining nationality as “a historically formed, stable community of people, united by community of language, of territory, of economic life, and of psychological make-up, which expresses itself in community of culture”. This definition could be applied to most nationals, except the Jews had no common language, territory or economic life, but in the Soviet identity documents “Jewish” was entered as a nationality. Stalin decided to make the Jews fit into his description of a nation by creating a Jewish homeland with Yiddish (beside Russian) as the official language. He relished the idea of having the Jewish people out of the way, in a remote corner of Siberia. But some Jews also looked forward to a life in a place that would welcome them, contrasting the increasingly anti-Semitic USSR.
On 28th March 1928, the President of the General Executive Committee of the USSR, passed the decree: “On the attaching for ‘Komzet’ (standing for Committee for the Settlement of Working Jews on the Land) of free territory near the Amur River in the Far East for settlement of the working Jews.” This decree made it possible to establish a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union. Earlier attempts to settle the Soviet Jews on dedicated land in the Ukraine, and later in Crimea, did not succeed in turning those “unproductive” Jews into “honest” agricultural workers.
On 20th August 1930, the General Executive Committee of the Russian Socialist Republic accepted the decree “On formation of the Birobidzhan national region in the structure of the Far Eastern Territory”. Birobidzhan had neither Jewish history, nor Jewish identity, and none of the connections to Jewry that Israel would later have. Very few Jews came, but those who did were from all over the world. For example, a Jewish Communist organisation in North America, successfully encouraged the immigration of some US residents; the Jewish population of Birobidzhan never reached more than 14,000 people, or more than one-fifth of the population. Life in the territory was hard. Unfortunately for the migrants, there was a good reason why virtually nobody lived in this region: the winters were extremely harsh, the summers were hot and the place was infested with flies and the like, the roads were practically non-existent, and the land was swampy. These town-dweller newcomers were expected to make a virgin, barren land productive. Like the Chalutzim (people who moved to Israel to help establish modern agricultural settlements), they also had to drain swamps, clear rocks from fields and get used to the climate. Disease was rampant. Religious activities were strictly forbidden. There was not a single synagogue, but there was a well-attended Yiddish theatre.
Stalin showed his true colours in the in the mid-1930s. During the first campaign of purges, the Soviet authorities arrested and executed Birobodzhan’s Communist Jewish leaders, and Yiddish schools, the theatre and anything else to do with the Jews were shut down.
After the War, there was a small revival of Jewish life in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. With the fall of Communism, a good number of Birobidzhanis went on Aliyah (emigration to Israel). A good number of them settled in Maalot, but some of them found it hard to adjust: a few of the elderly had trouble with the Hebrew language, and others complained of discrimination and returned to the Oblast. The New Russia dismantled the autonomous territories, but the Jewish Oblast remained, despite the fact that Jews make up less than 2% of the population. There is a beautiful synagogue now and they have even have a Rabbi from Israel.
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