The Pale of Settlement[a] was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 (de facto until 1915) in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary,[1] was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. Pale is an archaic term meaning an enclosed area.
Life in the Pale for many was economically bleak. Most people relied on small service or artisan work that could not support the number of inhabitants, which resulted in emigration, especially in the late 19th century. Even so, Jewish culture, especially in Yiddish, developed in the shtetls (small towns), and intellectual culture developed in the yeshivot (religious schools) and was also carried abroad.
The Russian Empire during the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the area included in the Pale with its large minorities of Jewish, Roman Catholic and until mid-19th century Eastern Catholic population (although much of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are predominantly Eastern Orthodox). While the religious nature of the edicts creating the Pale is clear (conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, the state religion, released individuals from the strictures), historians argue that the motivations for its creation and maintenance were primarily economic and nationalist in nature.
The end of the enforcement and formal demarcation of the Pale coincided with the beginning of World War I in 1914, when large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior to escape the invading German army, and then ultimately in 1917 with the end of the Russian Empire as a result of the February Revolution.[2][3]
Etymology
The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.[4]
The territory that would become the Pale first began to enter Imperial Russian hands in 1772, with the First Partition of Poland. At the time, most Jews (and in fact most imperial subjects) were restricted in their movements. The Pale came into being under the rule of Catherine the Great in 1791,[5] initially as a measure to speed colonization of territory on the Black Searecently acquired from the Ottoman Empire. Jews were allowed to expand the territory available to them, but in exchange Jewish merchants could no longer do business in non-Pale Russia.[6]
The institution of the Pale became more significant following the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, since, until then, the empire's (former Muscovy's) Jewish population had been rather limited.[7] The dramatic westward expansion of the Russian Empire through the annexation of Polish–Lithuanian territory substantially increased the Jewish population.[8] At its height, the Pale had a Jewish population of over five million, and represented the largest component (40 percent) of the world's Jewish population at that time.[9] The freedom of movement of non-Jewish imperial subjects was greatly increased, but the freedom of movement of Jews was greatly restricted and officially kept within the boundaries of the pale.[6]
The name "Pale of Settlement" first arose under the rule of Tsar Nicholas I. Under his rule (1825 to 1855), the Pale gradually shrank and became more restrictive. In 1827, Jews living in Kiev were severely restricted by imperial decree. In 1835 the provinces of Astrakhan and the North Caucasus were removed from the Pale. Nicholas tried to remove all Jews from within 80 kilometres (50mi) of the Austrian Empire's border in 1843. In practice, this was very difficult to enforce, and the restrictions were lessened in 1858.[6]
Tsar Alexander II, who ruled 1855 to 1881,[10] expanded the rights of rich and educated Jews to leave and live beyond the Pale, which led many Jews to believe that the Pale might soon be abolished.[6] These hopes vanished when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.[10] Rumors spread that he had been assassinated by Jews,[11][12] and in the aftermath anti-Jewish sentiment skyrocketed. Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the country from 1881 through 1884. The reactionary Temporary regulations regarding the Jews of 1881 prohibited any new Jewish settlement outside of the Pale. The laws also granted peasants the right to demand the expulsion of Jews in their towns. The laws were anything but temporary, and would be in full effect until at least 1903. In 1910, Jewish members of the State Duma proposed the abolition of the Pale, but the power dynamic of Duma meant that the bill never had a realistic chance to pass. Far-right political elements in the Duma responded by proposing that all Jews be expelled from the Russian Empire.[6]
At times, by imperial decree Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities, or certain cities, (as in Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta), and were forced to move to small provincial towns, thus fostering the rise of the shtetls.[citation needed] Jewish merchants of the First Guild (купцы первой гильдии, the wealthiest sosloviye of merchants in the Russian Empire), people with higher or special education, university students, artisans, army tailors, ennobled Jews, soldiers (drafted in accordance with the Recruit Charter of 1810), and their families had the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement.[13] In some periods, special dispensations were given for Jews to live in the major imperial cities, but these were tenuous, and several thousand Jews were expelled to the Pale from Moscow as late as 1891. The extremely restrictive decrees and recurrent pogroms led to much emigration from the Pale, mainly to the United States and Western Europe. However, emigration could not keep up with birth rates and expulsion of Jews from other parts of the Russian Empire, and thus the Jewish population of the Pale continued to grow.[6]
During World War I, the Pale lost its rigid hold on the Jewish population when large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior to escape the invading German army. The Pale of Settlement de facto ceased to exist on August 19, 1915, when the administrator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs allowed, in view of the emergency circumstances of wartime, the residence of Jews in urban settlements outside the Pale of Settlement, with the exception of capitals and localities under the jurisdiction of the ministers of the imperial court and the military (that is, palace suburbs of Petrograd and the frontline).[14][15] The Pale formally came to an end soon after the abdication of Nicholas II, and as revolution gripped Russia. On March 20 (April 2 N.S.), 1917, the Pale was abolished by the Russian Provisional Government decree, On the abolition of religious and national restrictions.[16][6] The Second Polish Republic was reconstituted from much of the former territory of the Pale in the aftermath of World War I.[17] Subsequently, most of the Jewish population of the area would perish in the Holocaust one generation later.[6]
Jewish life in the Pale
Geographic distribution of Jewish languages (such as Yiddish) in the Russian Empire according to 1897 census. The Pale of Settlement can be seen in the west, top left.A melamed (Jewish teacher) in 19th century Podolia
Jewish life in the shtetls (Yiddish: שטעטלעךshtetlekh "little towns") of the Pale of Settlement was hard and poverty-stricken.[18] Following the Jewish religious tradition of tzedakah (charity), a sophisticated system of volunteer Jewish social welfare organizations developed to meet the needs of the population. Various organizations supplied clothes to poor students, provided kosher food to Jewish soldiers conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army, dispensed free medical treatment for the poor, offered dowries and household gifts to destitute brides, and arranged for technical education for orphans. According to historian Martin Gilbert's Atlas of Jewish History, no province in the Pale had less than 14% of Jews on relief; Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews supported as much as 22% of their poor populations.[19]
The concentration of Jews in the Pale, coupled with Tsar Alexander III's "fierce hatred of the Jews", and the rumors that Jews had been involved in the assassination of his father Tsar Alexander II, made them easy targets for pogroms and anti-Jewish riots by the majority population.[20] These, along with the repressive May Laws, often devastated whole communities.[citation needed] Though attacks occurred throughout the existence of the Pale, particularly devastating Russian pogroms occurred from 1881 to 1883 and from 1903 to 1906,[21] targeting hundreds of communities, assaulting thousands of Jews, and causing considerable property damage.[citation needed]
Jews typically could not engage in agriculture due to restrictions on Jews owning land and farming in the Pale,[22] and were thus predominantly merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers. This made poverty a serious issue among the Jews. However, a robust Jewish community welfare system arose; by the end of the 19th century nearly 1 in 3 Jews in the Pale were being supported by Jewish welfare organizations.[23][6] This Jewish support system included, but was not limited to, providing free medicine to the poor, giving dowries to poor brides, kosher food to Jewish soldiers, and education to orphans.[5]
One outgrowth of the concentration of Jews in a circumscribed area was the development of the modern yeshiva system. Prior to the Pale, schools to study the Talmud were a luxury. This began to change when the rabbi Chaim of Volozhin began a sort of national-level yeshiva. In 1803, he founded the Volozhin Yeshiva and began to attract large number of students from around the Pale. The Tsarist authorities were not pleased with the school and sought to make it more secular, eventually closing it in 1879. The authorities re-opened it in 1881, but required all teachers to have diplomas from Russian institutions and to teach Russian language and culture. This requirement was not only untenable to the Jews, but essentially impossible, and the school closed for the last time in 1892. Regardless, the school had great impact: its students went on to form many new yeshivas in the Pale, and reignited the study of the Talmud in Russia.[5]
After 1886, the Jewish quota was applied to education, with the percentage of Jewish students limited to no more than 10% within the Pale, 5% outside the Pale and 3% in the capitals of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev.[citation needed] The quotas in the capitals, however, were increased slightly in 1908 and 1915.[citation needed]
The tribulations of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement were immortalized in the writings of Yiddish authors such as humorist Sholem Aleichem, whose novel Tevye der Milkhiger (Yiddish: טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, Tevye the Milkman, in the form of the narration of Tevye from a fictional shtetl of Anatevka to the author) forms the basis of the theatrical (and subsequent film) production Fiddler on the Roof. Because of the harsh conditions of day-to-day life in the Pale, some two million Jews emigrated from there between 1881 and 1914, mainly to the United States.[24]
Territories of the Pale
The Pale of Settlement included the following areas.
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places also became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest population of Jews in the world. Within these territories, the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms.
Shtetl or shtetel is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the context of former East European Jewish societies as mandated islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.
Volhynia or Volynia is a historic region in Central and Eastern Europe, between southeastern Poland, southwestern Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine. The borders of the region are not clearly defined, but in Ukraine it is roughly equivalent to Volyn and Rivne Oblasts; the territory that still carries the name is Volyn Oblast.
Cantonists were underage sons of conscripts in the Russian Empire. From 1721 on they were educated in special "cantonist schools" for future military service. The cantonist schools and the cantonist system were eventually abolished in 1857, following public and international criticism and the Russian defeat in the Crimean War.
Berdychiv is a historic city in Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Berdychiv Raion within the oblast. It is 44 km (27 mi) south of the administrative center of the oblast, Zhytomyr. Its population is approximately 73,046.
The history of the Jews in 19th-century Poland covers the period of Jewish-Polish history from the dismemberment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, until the beginning of the 20th century.
Justingrad was a Jewish community in present-day Uman Raion, Ukraine. The Justingrad shtetl was created after Jews were forced out of their homes in the village of Sokolivka, Cherkasy Oblast. These Jews from Sokolivka moved to the land on the other side of a quarter mile bridge/dam across a lake edge. This shtetl was named Justingrad in honor of Justina, wife of the nobleman who sold the land to the Jews. Many of these Ukrainian Jews left for a better life in the United States around 1900.
The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the modern territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus'. Important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, arose there. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes Europe's third-largest and the world's fifth-largest.
Kherson Governorate, known until 1803 as Nikolayev Governorate, was an administrative-territorial unit (guberniya) of the Russian Empire, with its capital in Kherson. It encompassed 71,936 square kilometres (27,775 sq mi) in area and had a population of 2,733,612 inhabitants. At the time of the census in 1897, it bordered Podolia Governorate to the northwest, Kiev Governorate to the north, Poltava Governorate to the northeast, Yekaterinoslav Governorate to the east, Taurida Governorate to the southeast, Black Sea to the south, and Bessarabia Governorate to the west. It roughly corresponds to what is now most of Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad and Odesa Oblasts in Ukraine and some parts of Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.
Lyubavichi is a rural locality in Rudnyansky District of Smolensk Oblast, Russia.
Makhnivka is a village in Khmilnyk Raion of Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine, located on the west bank of the Hnylopiat River. It was named Komsomolske from 1935 until 2016. As of 2017, it had a population of 3,415 people.
The Kiev pogroms of 1919 refers to a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Volunteer Army troops. The series of events concern the following districts:
Antisemitism in Ukraine has been a historical issue in the country, particularly in the twentieth century. The history of the Jewish community of the region dates back to the era when ancient Greek colonies existed in it. A third of the Jews of Europe previously lived in Ukraine between 1791 and 1917, within the Pale of Settlement. The large concentration of Jews in this region historically made them an easy target for anti-Jewish actions and pogroms.
Pogroms in the Russian Empire were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that began in the 19th century. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia, Lithuania and Crimea. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia, unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia was not restricted.
Kiev Governorate was an administrative-territorial unit (guberniya) of the Russian Empire from 1796 to 1919 and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1919 to 1925. It included the territory of the right-bank Ukraine and was formed after a division of the Kiev Viceroyalty into Kiev and Little Russia Governorates in 1796. Its capital was in Kiev. By the early 20th century, it consisted of 12 uyezds, 12 cities, 111 miasteczkos and 7344 other settlements. After the October Revolution, it became part of the administrative division of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1923 it was divided into several okrugs and on 6 June 1925 it was abolished by the Soviet administrative reforms.
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire included numerous pogroms and the designation of the Pale of Settlement from which Jews were forbidden to migrate into the interior of Russia, unless they converted to the Russian Orthodox state religion.
The Kiev pogrom of 1881 lasted for three days starting 26 April, 1881 in the city of Kiev and spread to villages in the surrounding region. Sporadic violence continued until winter. It is considered the worst of the pogroms that swept through south-western Imperial Russia in 1881. Pogroms continued on through the summer, spreading across the territory of modern-day Ukraine including Podolia Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others.
The expression Eastern European Jewry has two meanings. Its first meaning refers to the current political spheres of the Eastern European countries and its second meaning refers to the Jewish communities in Russia and Poland. The phrase 'Eastern European Jews' or 'Jews of the East' was established during the 20th century in the German Empire and in the western provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, aiming to distinguish the integrating Jews in Central Europe from those Jews who lived in the East. This feature deals with the second meaning of the concept of Eastern European Jewry—the Jewish groups that lived in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Romania, Hungary and modern-day Moldova in collective settlement, many of whom spoke Yiddish.
Yehupetz is a semifictional city in the Russian Empire, a portrayal of Kyiv (Ukraine) in Sholem Aleichem stories. It can be viewed as a transitional place between the classical shtetl and a modern city.
↑ Аронсон Г. Я. В борьбе за гражданские и национальные права: Общественные течения в русском еврействе // КРЕ-1. — С. 232.
↑ "pale, n.1." OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Retrieved October 24, 2016. The Pale was the part of medieval Ireland controlled by the English government.
1 2 Jankowski, Tomasz [attr.] (May 3, 2014). "Who could live outside the Pale of Settlement?"(blogpost). JewishFamilySearch.com. Retrieved September 29, 2016. Presents 14 groups of Jews to whom permission might be granted to live outside of the Pale, indicating additional conditions, and presenting three reasons for temporary permissions to leave, for the 13 governates of the Russian Empire; the blogpost is by an academic historian, and states: 'These rules was regulated by the Law on Social Estates and the Law on Passports printed in vol. 9 and 14 of Свод законов Российской империи.'
Abramson, Henry (1991). "Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920". Slavic Review. 50 (3): 542–550. doi:10.2307/2499851. JSTOR2499851. S2CID181641495.
Geraci, Robert (December 2019). "Pragmatism and Prejudice: Revisiting the Origin of the Pale of Jewish Settlement and Its Historiography". The Journal of Modern History. 91 (4): 776–814. doi:10.1086/706046. S2CID210482001.
Pipes, Richard (January 1975). "Catherine II and the Jews: The origins of the pale of settlement". Soviet Jewish Affairs. 5 (2): 3–20. doi:10.1080/13501677508577216. S2CID161658287.
Rowland, Richard H. (1986). "Geographical Patterns of the Jewish Population in the Pale of Settlement of Late Nineteenth Century Russia". Jewish Social Studies. 48 (3/4): 207–234. JSTOR4467338.
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