Dispelling the myth of Ashkenazi Jews as disconnected from the earth
There’s a common assumption that because Jews were often prohibited from owning land in Europe and were forced into professions like merchants, moneylenders, and tailors, that we were disconnected from the earth.
As if connection to the earth requires ownership of land.
The reality is that everyone alive 100 years ago was more connected to the earth than most people today. Jews and European peasants alike (also not landowners) bought and traded at local open-air markets overflowing with seasonal goods, shopped at small dry goods stores stocked from local growers or nearby cities, and foraged berries and mushrooms in nearby forests for subsistence and sale. They also grew food in their backyards, kept chickens, cows, and goats, made their own butter, and put up pickles, jams, syrups, and plant medicines for the winter.
Many of the foods we know today as Ashkenazi Jewish are evidence of all of this: borscht, pickles, potato latkes, stuffed cabbage. These foodways also had massive overlap with their non-Jewish neighbors’, because they were rooted in the same land and seasons (see Woven Roots by Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel). As I’ve previously written, land shapes culture .
This all meant that folks were very familiar with the seasons, soils, microclimates, what medicinal and foraged plants grew where and when — and passed down this knowledge over dozens of generations. That is land relationship — whether or not a family had a deed to their property or not. (Most shtetl Jews owned their houses but leased the land, which included space to garden.)
Even traders and middlemen were steeped in agricultural cycles and regional ecologies — that was simply the nature of the work.
Beyond subsistence, the Yizkor (memory) books of hundreds of European shtetls offer us a glimpse into the earthy texture of daily life in the Pale and beyond up until World War II. They include hundreds of photos and stories of humans enjoying the earth: children swimming in ponds and rivers, young people walking and kissing in forests, elders playing cards under old trees, and revolutionaries hatching plans in the woods.
Ashkenazi Jews — your ancestors did not just sit around reading books all day. Especially the women.
Going Deeper: We Meet Our Ancestors Through the Land
When folks ask why we focus so much on the earth when doing ancestral recovery work — rather than sticking primarily with the historical, cultural, political, or even the plant and foodways work mentioned above — I can also point to something deeper that sits at the intersection of biology and mystery. This one may feel less tangible, but I have felt it deeply and so have participants in our program.
Our bodies themselves carry a physical connection to the lands our ancestors walked.
For 1000 years our people were buried in that soil. Their bones fed the earth, the earth grew food, that food became part of the bodies of their children — and their children’s children — until eventually, the nutrients of those lands became part of us.
Put another way, as my co-facilitator Cyrise says, “we are like wine, made of the terroir of our ancestral lands.”
So when we make contact with the land, if we are open to it, we can sense that connection on a cellular level. Our bodies remember and relax — they know what our minds forgot. We feel held by our ancestors and the lands they loved. The connection remains, underneath even the most painful histories and the challenges that persist today.
Because the land itself is neutral . No matter what happened there, we get to connect with it on its own terms. It’s true that certain places can feel “traumatized.” Sometimes we aren’t ready to make contact. Sometimes the land isn’t either. But I have also experienced a deep holding from land, even at a former death camp — on the second day of our program, we make medicines from the wild herbs growing at Plaszow, outside Krakow. And the dazzling rainbow of wildflowers and butterflies at Treblinka blows me away every time.
The earth truly has its own mysterious ways of healing.
People will say “there’s nothing there”
People often say of former shtetls, or Jewish Eastern Europe in general, that there’s nothing left, so why go? But when I visited Ostrów Mazowiecka — the town where two of my great-grandparents were born — I decided to look for what couldn’t be destroyed. With no Jewish buildings remaining, I found the sadzawka , the pond mentioned in the town’s Yizkor book:
“Who does not remember the sadzawka from childhood, the natural pond where children caught small fish? Also, during the summer, the elders would rest in the shade of the beautiful trees and in winter, there were skaters on the frozen pond.”
I took off my shoes, sat by the water, and felt the pond’s peaceful, enduring presence. It had witnessed everything: the laughter, the destruction, the forgetting. And it was still there. I felt the cool, damp grass beneath me, and made a few offerings in gratitude.
We encountered this same quality of witness in Lublin, where a 300-year-old willow tree still stands in what was once a thriving Jewish quarter. We had just come from Majdanek, the death camp where most of Lublin’s 45,000 Jews were murdered. When we found that tree — ancient, enormous, still rooted in the soil of a world that no longer exists — our whole group wept tears of massive release. This tree had seen everything. And it was still here.
So why the story of Ashkenazi landlessness?
Part of the answer is simply modernization. Jewish immigration to America largely happened as industrialization was severing everyone’s connection to land, seasons, and local food systems. Jews left their familiar homes, arrived in modern cities, shopping in stores and living without land to tend, and for many within a generation or two, the old ways faded — as they did for most people making that transition. This forgetting is not uniquely Jewish. It’s the story of modernity.
But part of the story was deliberately constructed. Zionism’s founding project required replacing the ‘weak, poor ghetto Jew’ with a new archetype: muscular, armed, and working land that he owned — in one very specific place. There was no honoring of the places our people came from, only erasure. The Bund’s vision of doikayt — hereness, rootedness in the lands where Jews lived for eons — was laughed off as naive. Enforcing the lie that Jews could only truly belong to land in one place, the State of Israel, required erasing a millennium of Ashkenazi belonging in Europe — not to mention other Jewish communities around the world.
This erasure also requires us to forget that Judaism is, at its heart, an earth-based tradition. Our holiday cycle is rooted in the agricultural seasons of Eretz Yisrael — the historical and religious land (distinct from the modern state) — and in the pre-Hebraic earth traditions that preceded it. That connection to land is woven into Torah itself. But Diaspora did not sever it. Jews carried their relationship with the earth wherever we went, and grew new roots in new soils around the world.
I’m not here to sugar coat the past. Jews were targeted and unwanted at many different points in Europe, and that unwantedness culminated in devastating violence and in many cases, nowhere to go. And yet — violence against a people who lived somewhere for a thousand years does not erase their relationship to that place or their ability to root again. Oppression and rootedness can coexist. They did then, and they do now.
Reclaiming this rootedness and a more earth-based Ashkenazi identity is not romanticizing the past, but recovering something that was taken — first by genocide, then by assimilation and modernization, then by a political project that told us to forget.
When we learn the earth-infused ways of our ancestors, when we tend the plants they tended, cook their foods, connect with the land on its own terms, and simply allow ourselves to love a place — whether that’s an ancestral place or the one we’re in now — we are living an evolution of doikayt called Radical Diasporism.
Radical Diasporism guides us to make our homes where we are in an ethical way.
It calls us to both the gift and the responsibility of a place: to fight for justice alongside our neighbors and to live in right relationship with the Indigenous peoples whose land we now inhabit. It emphasizes embracing Jewish cultural diversity, resisting both assimilation and nationalism, and challenging the notion of Israel as the Jewish homeland and only possible place of Jewish safety.
And it includes ancestral recovery — honoring our past and the lands we were rooted in for hundreds of years.
