Background
Joseph A. Rosen was born in Moscow. It is believed that he grew up in Tula, Russia. Little is known of his early life.
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Joseph A. Rosen
Edit ProfileEducation
He entered Moscow University in 1894. Later he studied at the University of Heidelberg. Then he was enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College in 1905, graduating in 1908. After 1917 he resumed his education at the University of Minnesota.
Career
Suspected of revolutionary activities, he was exiled to Siberia. Like many other dissidents of his generation, he escaped and made his way to Germany. Nothing is known of the six years he presumably spent in Germany before he moved to the United States in 1903.
Rosen's life as agronomist and resettlement expert combined the contributions of his Russian experiences, Jewish origin, and American assimilation. As an emancipated young Jew in late nineteenth-century Russia he was torn between the attractions of revolution and Western liberalism. He flirted briefly with the former, only to dedicate his life to the latter. He clearly rejected the ever more powerful third alternative of secular or religious Zionism.
By his actions, Rosen defined Jewish emancipation as the integration of the Jews into the larger society. This support of the so-called territorial rather than Zionist solution to the Jewish problem was shared, until World War II, by the leadership of the American Jewish Committee and its major philanthropic arm, the Joint Distribution Committee (J. D. C. ). Thus, while Rosen and the wealthy supporters of the J. D. C. could scarcely be suspected of sympathy with Bolshevism, Rosen was able to harness the efforts of the J. D. C. and the Soviet state in the 1920's and 1930's for an almost revolutionary project of Jewish agricultural resettlement and training, while a similar process, under Zionist inspiration, produced the kibbutz movement in Palestine.
Rosen shared little more than a common Russian Jewish origin and poverty with contemporary Russian immigrants. He came alone; he was educated; and he avoided urban areas. He worked his way to Michigan, became a farmhand for two years. He wrote a series of articles for Russian journals on aspects of American agriculture. These articles prompted the provincial zemstvo of Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) to engage him as head of a branch office in Minneapolis for the collection and distribution in Russia of relevant American agricultural information. Rosen effectively performed this task, with one interruption, until the 1917 Revolution.
During World War I Rosen headed the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School in Woodbine, N. J. ,, and became New York representative of a Russian bank. In 1921, Felix M. Warburg and James N. Rosenberg persuaded him to join Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration in Russia as representative of the J. D. C. He had found his true mission. He recruited a staff of young Jewish agricultural specialists and was the first to introduce tractors into the famine-stricken USSR for the rehabilitation of destroyed Jewish farms. His system of centralized repair facilities later served as a prototype for the tractor stations of collectivized Soviet agriculture. The successful application of massive relief to destitute Jewish peasants spawned the revolutionary idea of a mass transformation of petty-bourgeois Jews into a self-reliant peasantry.
Political and economic deprivation and traditional Russian peasant anti-Semitism could at last be banished within the compulsory socialist framework. While the cure of past ills had to be socialist in content, the means were found in traditional Jewish appeals to wealthy Western Jews for financial support. J. D. C. appointed Rosen as head of a subsidiary, the American Joint Agricultural Society (Agro-Joint), to cooperate with the Soviet Society for Settlement of Jewish Toilers (KOMZET) in the task of resettlement and training. Between 1924 and 1936, 250, 000 Jews were sucessfully settled on three million acres in the Ukraine and the Crimea. J. D. C. contributed $16 million, largely subscribed by a few wealthy individuals, because of mass apathy toward a non-Zionist or assimilationist effort. Long before the Soviet government rejected further outside help in 1938, the Jewish collective farms had become models of productivity and organization. Herbert Hoover hailed Rosen's achievement as an amazing feat of "social engineering. "
During World War II, the farms were destroyed and their inhabitants were annihilated by the Germans. After the war, the Soviet government forbade reconstruction by the survivors. After returning to the United States in 1937, Rosen joined the Anglo-American commission to study British Guiana as a potential haven for German Jewish refugees. Lack of support from the American Jewish community and Rosen's own environmental objections led to a rejection of the proposal.
In 1940, he became vice-president of the J. D. C. , sponsored Dominican Resettlement Association (DORSA), which eventually succeeded in settling 500 of a projected 28, 000 Jews in the area of Sosua. While Rosen himself had doubts about the future of the Dominican experiment, the holocaust of World War II would make this and all other purely territorial solutions irrelevant. Rosen died of a stroke in New York City on April 2, 1949.
Achievements
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In March 1909, Rosen presented to Michigan Agricultural College a pound of Russian rye seeds, which were named Rosen rye in his honor. Due to its high yield, Rosen rye soon gained dominance over other strains in the Midwest. In the 1920s-1930s he organized the activities to help the Jews in poverty in the Soviet Union. He endeavored to develop Jewish settlements and contributed to the organization of Jewish factories, cooperatives, schools, and health care facilities.
Connections
Rosen was married to Katherine N. Shoubine. They had two sons, Eugene and Leo.
