Planned handicraft-agriculture colonies failed from planning and cultural ignorance.

Evidence

Eventually such a colony was established in 1911 in Ben Shemen on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) when a few families of Yemenite Jewish silversmiths were transferred there from Jerusalem. But the experiment in combining handicrafts and agriculture was brought to an end early in 1914. The causes varied from errors in planning and lack of understanding of the settlers’ culture to the low quality of land that was given to them and the unstable relationship between the Yemenite workers and their Ashkenazi foremen. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the legal-institutions reading: engineered social design failing when it ignores participants’ actual culture — cf. Milgrom and the gap between institutions and the people they govern. — connects to: Colonists mistook sophisticated Three Sisters gardens for ignorance of farming — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 452