The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

by Ran Abramitzky

Overview

How the kibbutz movement thrived despite its inherent economic contradictions and why it eventually declined

The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and resources equally among its members, the kibbutz system created strong incentives to free ride or—as in the case of the most educated and skilled—to depart for the city. Yet for much of the twentieth century kibbutzim thrived, and kibbutz life was perceived as idyllic both by members and the outside world. In The Mystery of the Kibbutz, Ran Abramitzky blends economic perspectives with personal insights to examine how kibbutzim successfully maintained equal sharing for so long despite their inherent incentive problems.

Weaving the story of his own family’s experiences as kibbutz members with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky sheds light on the idealism and historic circumstances that helped kibbutzim overcome their economic contradictions. He illuminates how the design of kibbutzim met the challenges of thriving as enclaves in a capitalist world and evaluates kibbutzim’s success at sustaining economic equality. By drawing on extensive historical data and the stories of his pioneering grandmother who founded a kibbutz, his uncle who remained in a kibbutz his entire adult life, and his mother who was raised in and left the kibbutz, Abramitzky brings to life the rise and fall of the kibbutz movement.

The lessons that The Mystery of the Kibbutz draws from this unique social experiment extend far beyond the kibbutz gates, serving as a guide to societies that strive to foster economic and social equality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691202242
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Series:	The Princeton Economic History of the Western World , #73
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ran Abramitzky is associate professor of economics at Stanford University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

How my grandparents helped create a kibbutz

My grandmother, Breindel, was born on June 1, 1910, in Poryck, a small town in Eastern Europe located on a lake. More than half of the town's two thousand inhabitants were Jewish and the rest were Polish or Ukrainian. Jews had been present in town since at least the sixteenth century; most worked in commerce and manufacturing, and owned little shops and plants. The town had a synagogue, a Hebrew school (called Tarbut, Hebrew for "culture"), and a Hebrew library; it seems the Jewish residents coexisted peacefully with the non-Jewish residents. At the end of the nineteenth century, more restrictions on Jews and Jewish settlements were introduced, and by the outbreak of the First World War, Poryck was a town in decline. Poryck's Jews found themselves in a dismal situation, suffering from pogroms and persecution.

Breindel's father, Mordechai Brezner, was a prosperous pharmacist in Poryck, and the family was relatively wealthy. My grandmother even told us they had a pony she loved to ride. Like some other Jews in Poryck, the Brezner family was Zionist. Breindel was among the founders of her town's branch of the Ha'shomer Ha'tzair movement, and she was active in the local group's cultural and social life. Ha'shomer Ha'tzair, which translates as "The Youth Guard," was a Socialist-Zionist Jewish movement that believed that the Jewish youth could be liberated by making aliyah. Members of Ha'shomer Ha'tzair would later settle in Palestine, found a number of kibbutzim, and, in 1927, form the Kibbutz Artzi Federation.

With friends from Ha'shomer Ha'tzair, Breindel moved to the nearby city of Lvov to study in hopes of becoming a Hebrew teacher. Lvov, located in what is now Ukraine, had a population of over 300,000 and was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland. In 1933, when she was twenty-three years old, her studies were interrupted when her friends decided to make aliyah and continue their training in Israel. We don't know why the group decided to leave right then, rather than waiting until graduation. But the alarming rise in anti-Semitism during the 1930s in Lvov must have been a contributing factor: anti-Semitism had moved beyond social exclusion and economic discrimination to include physical assaults on Jews.

My grandmother decided not to join her friends in making aliyah. Life in Poland was quite comfortable for her, and the Zionist idea of hafrachat hamidbar (Hebrew for "making the desert bloom") in the hot and humid Middle East sounded better in theory than in practice. She was also very close to her family; as an only daughter with three older brothers, she had always been coddled by her parents and siblings. For reasons that are not entirely clear, she said goodbye to her friends, wished them good luck, and returned to her hometown and family.

The decision to not join her friends and make aliyah must have been difficult, especially since her high school sweetheart, Baruch "Buzik" Honig decided to not stay with her and joined the rest of the group in Palestine. Buzik and some of his friends from Ha'shomer Ha'tzair had been training for a number of years to become agricultural workers in Palestine and to live a communal life there in a kibbutz of the type that had recently begun springing up in that region.

Buzik was more committed to making aliyah and joining a kibbutz than his girlfriend Breindel. His childhood friend Dov recalled years later that Buzik was "among the founders of Ha'shomer Ha'tzair in town, and he devoted all his energy to the educational activities [of the group] and to training youths in self-fulfillment and making aliyah to Israel," and that "at the gathering point he was the driving force. With his good humor, he influenced all the members, and, from the first moment, a strong tie between him and the rest of [those who would later become] the kibbutz members was formed."

But, like Breindel, Buzik was the youngest son. His parents "could not accept the idea that their beloved youngest son would leave them, and they were opposed to his aliyah." They did everything they could to stop him. Dov recalled that "one afternoon he escaped from home and went out of town to the gathering point of those who planned to immigrate to Palestine, but his family came and brought him back home. Buzik didn't give up his plan and after a short while escaped again, only this time he was successful."

Buzik and his group were fascinated by the social experiment of kibbutzim. In July 1939, they decided to establish their own kibbutz, called Negba, in the northern Negev. The land belonged to the Jewish National Fund, which had bought and developed land for Jewish Settlement, and was the southernmost Jewish settlement at the time. Their effort was part of the "tower-and-stockade enterprise," a settlement method used by Zionist settlers during the 1936–39 Arab revolt, in which dozens of kibbutzim and several moshavim were established throughout Palestine. Palestine at the time was under British mandate, and the British authorities had placed legal restrictions on the establishment of new Jewish settlements. However, Ottoman law, which was still in effect, provided a loophole: even an illegal building or settlement cannot be demolished once the roof has been completed. Hence, the Jews would build an entire settlement in the middle of the night, and by the time morning came it would be complete and couldn't be demolished. This tower-and-stockade enterprise was tolerated by British authorities as a means of countering the Arab revolt. Like kibbutzim, moshavim were established as cooperative agricultural communities; but unlike the kibbutz, farms in the moshav were individually rather than collectively owned.

In the summer of 1939, Buzik fulfilled his dream and became a proud founder of Kibbutz Negba. The creation of Kibbutz Negba is described in Negba's archives (my translation):

In terms of security, the place was very dangerous and the tower-and-stockade system addressed this problem very well. At the time this settlement point was established, we had to watch out for both the Arabs and the English who ruled the land at the time. All the buildings required were constructed and prepared at the center of the country and the operation of settlement on the land took place during the night. About 40 trucks arrived at dawn at the designated point (near the Arab villages of Beit Afa and Iraq-Suweidan), and through the hectic work of hundreds of people, the settlement was standing on the ground before 10am. The entire settlement was inside the wall, and in the middle stood a tower with a strong spotlight to overlook the area day and night. That same day, we decided on the name "Negba" [southward], because the tower served as a landmark for other settlements towards the south and the desert. We developed a successful agricultural farm and we made our living from vegetables, milk, wheat and fruits that our farm produced. Another source of livelihood was working at establishing military camps for the English in the region with the onset of the Second World War in Europe at the time. We tried to have a good neighborly relationship with the Arabs in the nearby villages. They were impressed by our mechanized and advanced agriculture, and tried to learn from us, and it looked like we would live in peace for a long time.

Buzik and his friends were motivated, driven, and hardworking, even though nobody was supervising. Cooperation was viewed as key. Kibbutz members were required to give the collective all their private property, including clothing and other personal items. All decisions were made collectively, from small things like what the members should wear and when they could get new shoes, all the way to what food the members would eat in the dining hall, what tasks and jobs the members would perform, and whether and what the members could study outside the kibbutz. Even the showers were communal (separate for men and women).

However, Buzik's happiness was not complete. His love was still in the diaspora — in Poryck — and Buzik missed her greatly. To make matters worse, members of Kibbutz Negba became increasingly aware that war was approaching the borders of Poland, and they worried greatly about anti-Semitism and persecution in Europe. Shika, a childhood friend of my grandparents and a fellow settler of Kibbutz Negba, travelled to Europe on a mission on behalf of the kibbutz to bring members of their shtetl (Yiddish for a small town with large Jewish population in prewar Eastern Europe) back to Palestine. One day early in 1939, Shika knocked on the door of the Brezner family. Buzik had asked him to do everything he possibly could to bring Breindel to Negba.

In a rare moment of sharing, my grandmother later told her daughters (my mother and aunt) that her first reaction was "absolutely not." There was no way she was leaving her beloved family behind, and she knew they were not going to join her. Her plan had always been to take care of her parents as they got older, and she couldn't just go. At the same time, the war was getting closer to Poland, and Breindel must have already felt that making aliyah was a smart move. What's more, Shika presented a pessimistic picture: he said his friends and the members of his kibbutz all agreed that joining him and making aliyah was the only way possible for Jews in Europe to survive.

In the toughest decision my grandmother ever had to make, she decided to join Shika — Palestine's borders at the time were almost closed to aliyah — and the two decided to take no risks. They fictitiously married so Breindel could enter Palestine without trouble.

When Shika came to take my grandmother to Palestine, did the Brezner family suspect a German invasion was imminent? Did they have any inkling that later that year, Poland would be partitioned between Germany and the Soviets? Did they suspect that Jews would no longer be allowed to leave and that many of them would become refugees or would die? Unfortunately, we don't know the answers to these questions. We suspect that the Brezner family must have felt increasingly pressured and unwelcome in Poland. During the 1930s, with bad economic conditions in Poland, the Polish government increasingly promoted anti-Semitic policies that restricted Jews in the labor market and encouraged them to leave the country. At the same time, however, Jewish cultural and political activities thrived, so it hard to know how they weighed the good against the bad.

Did my grandmother try to convince her parents and brothers to join her to Palestine? Did she get their blessings or did she leave against their will? Did she know she would never see them again? Did she feel guilty for leaving her family behind? My family members asked ourselves these questions many times, but we never dared to ask my grandmother because we knew she wouldn't talk about her past and that these topics were off-limits. What we do know is that only several years after my grandmother left with Shika to reunite with her boyfriend in Kibbutz Negba, her parents and brothers all perished in the Holocaust, along with six million other European Jews.

In Negba, Breindel joined her high school boyfriend Buzik, who "felt he was the happiest person in the world." Negba's kibbutz members helped Breindel cope with the loss of her beloved birth family in Europe. This would not be the last time in her life the kibbutz assisted her through tough events and provided her with tremendous support.

After Breindel was officially divorced from her fictitious marriage to Shika, in 1942 my grandparents finally married. When I look at their marriage certificate today, I can almost feel how proud they were to report "merchant" as the occupations of their parents and "worker" as their own occupations and the occupations of their two witnesses. They were now part of Socialist Zionism (Labor Zionism), a movement that believed that the Jewish state could only be created once Jews started to work again in "productive occupations," as laborers and peasants, rather than as merchants and professionals, professions to which Jews were driven in the diaspora. Of course, most economists today would dismiss this notion that merchants and professionals are not productive occupations. In any case, Labor Zionism held that a Jewish state should be established through the Jewish working class settling in Palestine and creating kibbutzim and moshavim.

The ideology of kibbutzim was Socialist Zionism, but socialism and Zionism didn't always coexist harmoniously. Arab workers were fellows under the socialist ideology but often enemies under the Zionist ideology. The attitudes toward new Jewish immigrants who arrived from Middle Eastern countries, discussed in the next chapter, also illustrate the tension between the socialist and Zionist missions of kibbutzim.

Buzik had left his old world behind him. He lost his parents and most of his siblings in the Holocaust, and it seems as though he didn't think there was room in Negba for whatever remained from his old world. This became clear when his older brother, Yosef, was about to visit him in Negba in the early 1940s. The two brothers were very close, and yet Yosef had moved to the United States and Buzik to Palestine. Buzik was concerned about how the kibbutz members would treat his brother and whether he would get along with them. His fellow members could be rather critical about Jews who worked as professionals, let alone ones who chose to move to the United States rather than make aliyah. Regardless, Negba members were very hospitable toward Yosef and he became a friend of the kibbutz.

Soon after my grandparents married, their first daughter Naomi (my aunt) was born in 1943. Reuniting with one another and having a healthy and smart daughter of their own, my grandparents must have been hopeful for a great future.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War changed everything. In May 1948, following the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Egyptian army captured a number of Arab villages near the kibbutz, as well as Iraq-Suweidan, a police fort constructed during the British mandate that controlled the route to the Negev. The Egyptians bombed Kibbutz Negba from the air and ground, and Egyptian tanks made it to the gates of Negba in June and July of 1948. The battle of Negba was fierce and left many Egyptians and Israelis dead, including forty kibbutz members (about a tenth of the entire kibbutz population).

My grandfather served as a wireless operator, in charge of Kibbutz Negba's connection with the outside world, a skill that the kibbutz had sent him to acquire in a course run by the Haganah, the Jewish military organization that later became the Israeli Defense Force. Dov recalled, "As always, Buzik gave all his heart to acquire the skill, he never knew a limit, always gave his all."

Much property and many buildings in Negba were destroyed in the heavy fighting. In November 1948, Israel captured the police fort, thus saving Negba. An Egyptian tank and the old kibbutz water tower, full of bullet holes, stand in Negba to this day as a testimony to the battle, along with a Monument to the Negba Defenders that features an Israeli soldier, a kibbutz pioneer, and a nurse holding hands.

During the war, my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, Bracha (born in June 1948). Otherwise, she might have been expected to participate in the war effort herself. Like other kibbutzim, Negba strove for gender equality, meaning that women were expected to work in the same jobs as men, wear similar clothing, and take a role similar to that of men in raising their children. During wartime, the women fought too. It was decided by Negba's general assembly that only one spouse from each family would fight in Negba, while the other would be taken away from the kibbutz "so as to prevent the possibility of both spouses getting hit and, heaven forbid, leaving orphans with neither mother nor father." They decided it made more sense for Buzik to stay and fight and for Breindel to go to a safer place outside the kibbutz.

A few years later, in 1953, during army practice at an officers' course, Buzik injured his leg. Nobody alive today knows exactly what the injury was or how it occurred, only that my grandfather later died in the hospital from complications. He was forty-two. I remember one time in the 1980s when we visited my grandmother and someone raised the topic. The room fell silent. Tears welled in my grandmother's eyes, and then she snapped with atypical anger that his nurses at the hospital were terrible and would not listen to her, that Buzik was not supposed to die that day, and why didn't we get back to eating our cookies and stop talking about it. In any event, in 1953, Breindel was left a single mother with two daughters, aged five and ten.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The kibbutz puzzle 1

I THE RISE 19

1 How my grandparents helped create a kibbutz 21

2 A bird’s-eye view 39

3 Why an economist might create a kibbutz 59

II THE SURVIVAL 75

4 On the creation versus survival of societies 79

5 The free-rider problem 87

6 The adverse selection and brain drain problems 105

7 The problem of human capital investment 161

III THE FALL 179

8 The shift away from equal sharing 181

9 Why some kibbutzim remained egalitarian and others did not 198

10 The consequences of rising income inequality 224

11 On the (lack of) stability of communes: an economic perspective 250

12 Economic lessons in a nutshell 283

13 Epilogue 292

Kibbutz timeline 297

Acknowledgments 301

References 305

Index 325

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Can egalitarian and voluntary communities thrive within a capitalist society? Bringing together social sciences and modern economic tools, this book provides a fascinating and rich analysis of the Israeli kibbutz experience."—Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley

"Ran Abramitzky has written a fascinating, important book infused with both deep personal insight and incisive economic analysis. I predict it will be a lasting contribution to the literature on the kibbutz movement."—Al Roth, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

"The Mystery of the Kibbutz is a brilliant economic analysis of how individuals' equality in income and consumption in a collective-production society could survive but eventually collapse. Ran Abramitzky provides a touching and enlightening description using unique data on almost the entire population of the kibbutzim from 1910 to 2000."—Zvi Eckstein, IDC Herzliya, Israel, coauthor of The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

"This beautifully written book brings economics alive through the lens of a unique social experiment in communal living, teaching us how economic incentives and social contracts shape our society today. Highly recommended both for those well versed in economics and those looking for a lively introduction to the field."—Raj Chetty, Stanford University

Editorial Reviews

"[This book] draws on extensive statistical data to analyse this paradox, along with many stories of his relatives who forged, embraced and sometimes rejected the kibbutz way of life."-- "Times Higher Education"

From the Publisher

"[This book] draws on extensive statistical data to analyse this paradox, along with many stories of his relatives who forged, embraced and sometimes rejected the kibbutz way of life."

Times Higher Education