The Jews have been without a homeland of their own ever since they were dispersed across the world by the Romans who defeated a Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem in 70 AD. They lived in many countries but return to the land of Israel, the land of their forefathers, remained a perpetual longing during the prayers among Diaspora Jews.
This aspiration for a Jewish homeland remained unfulfilled for various reasons, the main one being the occupation of their ancestral homeland by other peoples. It was not possible to come back and settle down without provoking a conflict.
The situation prompted many to come out with proposals for an alternative homeland in other regions of the world, though some of these were not exactly aimed at solving the problems of the Jews.
A Homeland in Uganda
Theodore Herzl, under whose leadership the first Zionist Congress convened (1897 AD) and called for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland, suggested an alternative homeland, though a temporary one, in Uganda. His immediate purpose was to find a place where the European Jews could escape to from the bias and prejudices they were subjected to in the European countries.
A Southern Siberian Homeland
Russia under Stalin wanted to bundle off the unwanted Jewish population in its European and Central Asian provinces. There were plans to create a Jewish homeland in the Ukraine and Crimea.
Soon an ingenious idea of carving out a Jewish homeland in the far east in the southern Siberian swamps on the Chinese border was evolved, in order to keep the Jews away from the national mainstream. The Jewish Autonomous Region thus created in Birobidzhan near the Amur river in 1928 by a decree of the General Executive Committee of RSFSR was formally made into a Jewish Oblast (republic) within the Russian Federation in May 1934. The area was largely a swampland with harsh climatic conditions and Jews were forcibly transported to the region.
Stalin’s plan, which had the support of some Communist Jews in the eastern European countries, was also prompted by his perceived threat of Judaism to the Soviet Union whose state policy was atheism, and his opposition to the creation of a modern state of Israel in the Middle East which he thought was against the Communist definition of ‘nation’.
In fact Stalin was not particularly sympathetic of the Jews, as can be seen from his pact with the Nazis of Germany who were systematically exterminating the Jews. (Russia turned against Nazi Germany only because the ambitious Germany under Hitler invaded it). Stalin's Russia persecuted Jews in the post WW II years.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast miserably failed as a homeland and it remains a misnomer in today’s Russia. Jews made up only 5% of its population in the 1980s.
An Indian Haven
Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian freedom fighter who later became the first prime minister of the country, had offered to invite the Jews to settle in India in order to save them from Nazi persecution. Nehru was apparently moved by the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.
