UC Berkeley Gets Papers of ‘World-Class’ Farm Pioneer

Personal papers of the late Sam Hamburg, a farming pioneer in both California and Israel, have been donated to the Western Jewish History Center in Berkeley.

The center, located in the Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum, plans to host a symposium on Hamburg and may publicly exhibit his papers and photographs.

“Sam Hamburg is a world-class figure,” explained Ruth Rafael, the museum’s archivist. “He is one of the two really important Jewish agricultural figures.”

She said the other was David Lubin, a pioneer farmer in the Sacramento Valley who exported his knowledge to Europe to help Jews around the turn of the century.

Started Cotton Industry

Papers presented to the museum by Hamburg’s family show that he was credited with establishing a cotton industry in the new nation of Israel during the 1950s and ‘60s, drawing on expertise gained in farming semi-desert land near Los Banos in the western San Joaquin Valley.

One letter in the collection from Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, states: “I will never forget what you have done for our country, which is no less than your country.”

Hamburg was born in Russia in 1898 and was sent to school in Palestine in 1912. There, he learned Hebrew and farming and tried with some friends to establish a collective farm, a forerunner of the kibbutz collectives for which modern-day Israel is famous.

After World War I, Hamburg came to the United States to study agriculture at the University of California.

Over the next decades, he developed an 8,000-acre farm, designing an irrigation system to overcome the arid nature of the western San Joaquin Valley. Working with engineers, Hamburg developed a system that lifted water 266 feet from rivers and canals to his land.

“He was not your normal everyday farmer,” said Tom Caljian. “The guy was highly educated. He started with nothing and worked for years trying to make ends meet. He owed money to everybody when he first started, but he got it all paid off.”

Upgraded Worker Housing

He also was credited with building worker housing that included indoor plumbing and air coolers, benefits that were far from typical for those times.

“When we were known here as ‘Grapes of Wrath’ country, I was visiting Sam, and I asked him about his housing,” recalls Rabbi David Greenberg of Fresno. “He said, ‘They can’t criticize me for poor housing.’ He took me around and showed me. He was proud of the housing he had for workers.”

Hamburg was so proud that he nearly killed himself when he held a grand opening and burned down an old outhouse his workers had used.

“He had a five-gallon can of gasoline that he poured over the outhouse,” said Randall Fawcett, a longtime Los Banos farmer. “He lit it and blew the whole thing up, him with it. He was lucky to live.”

But Hamburg did live, and in the early 1950s returned to Israel to help develop irrigation principles that made the desert bloom there as he had done in California.

He used his own money to get machinery and irrigation equipment from California to Israel and supervised construction of a pump system to lift water 220 feet from the Jordan River.

“He would take seeds, pesticides, sprinkler heads, whatever was needed, in suitcases on the plane to Israel,” says his widow, Alice Hamburg.

Well Known in Israel

The result: Cotton was established in Israel, and Hamburg became better known there than he was at home in California.

“The newspapers are . . . full of praise of you,” A. Amir, an Israeli agricultural official, wrote Hamburg in California. “You should be here . . . it is your achievement.”

Hamburg’s pace slowed after the mid-1960s when Guilaume-Barre disease left him deaf and paralyzed below the waist. He sold his California farm in 1972 and died four years later.

Selling his farm must have made Hamburg very sad, said his widow, Alice. The couple had separated several years earlier.

“Sam always talked about how, in the past, Jews owned no land,” she said. “He wanted to make his farm permanent.”