Pale of Settlement


The Pale of Settlement was a western region of Imperial Russia with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A limited number of 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 the servants of these. The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word :wikt:palus#Latin, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.
The Pale of Settlement included all of Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, much of Ukraine, parts of eastern Latvia, eastern Poland, and some parts of western Russia, roughly corresponding to the Kresy macroregion and modern-day western border of Russia. It extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line, to the Russian border with the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Furthermore, it composed about 20% of the territory of European Russia and largely corresponded to historical lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Cossack Hetmanate, and the Ottoman Empire. 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—emigration, especially in the late 19th century, resulted. Even so, Jewish culture, especially in Yiddish, developed in the shtetls, and intellectual culture developed in the yeshiva, and were also carried abroad.
The Russian Empire in the period of the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian. The area included in the Pale—with its large Jewish, Uniate and Catholic populations—was acquired through a series of military conquests and diplomatic maneuvers, between 1654 and 1815. While the religious nature of the edicts creating the Pale is clear, historians argue that the motivations for its creation and maintenance were primarily economic and nationalistic in nature.
The end of the enforcement and formal demarcation of the Pale coincided with the beginning of World War I in 1914, and then ultimately, the fall of the Russian Empire in the February and October Revolutions of 1917.

History

The territory that would become the Pale first began to enter Russian hands in 1772, with the First Partition of Poland. At the time, most Jews were restricted in their movements. The Pale came into being under the rule of Catherine the Great in 1791, initially as a measure to speed colonization of newly acquired territory on the Black Sea. Jews were allowed to expand the territory available to them, but in exchange Jewish merchants could no longer do business in non-Pale Russia.
The institution of the Pale became more significant following the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, since, until then, Russia's Jewish population had been rather limited. The dramatic westward expansion of the Russian Empire through the annexation of Polish-Lithuanian territory substantially increased the Jewish population. At its height, the Pale, including the new Polish and Lithuanian territories, had a Jewish population of over five million, and represented the largest component of the world Jewish population at that time. The freedom of movement of non-Jewish Russians was greatly increased, but the freedom of movement of Jews was greatly restricted and officially kept within the boundaries of the pale.
The name "Pale of settlement" first arose under the rule of Nicholas I. Under his rule, the Pale gradually shrank, and became more restrictive. In 1827, Jews living in Kiev were severely restricted. In 1835 the provinces of Astrakhan and the northern Caucasus were removed from the Pale. Nicholas tried to remove all Jews from within 50 miles of the Austrian border in 1843. In practice, this was very difficult to enforce, and the restrictions were lessened in 1858.
Alexander II, who ruled 1855 to 1881, 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. These hopes vanished when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Rumors spread that he had been assassinated by Jews, and in the aftermath anti-Jewish sentiment skyrocketed. Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the country from 1881 through 1884. The reactionary Temporary Laws, also called the May Laws, 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 Russia.
At times, Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities, or certain cities,, and were forced to move to small provincial towns, thus fostering the rise of the shtetls. Jewish merchants of the First Guild, people with higher or special education, university students, artisans, army tailors, ennobled Jews, soldiers, and their families had the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement. 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 Russia, and thus the Jewish population of the Pale continued to grow.
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. By August 1915, the boundaries of the Pale were de facto unenforceable. The Pale formally came to an end soon after the abdication of Nicholas II, and as revolution gripped Russia. On March 20, 1917, the Pale was abolished by the Provisional Government decree, On the abolition of religious and national restrictions. The Second Polish Republic was reformed from much of the former territory of the Pale in the aftermath of World War I. Subsequently, most of the Jewish population of the area would perish in the Holocaust one generation later.

Jewish life in the Pale

Jewish life in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement was hard and poverty-stricken. Following the Jewish religious tradition of tzedakah, 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 Tsar's 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.
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. These, along with the repressive May Laws, often devastated whole communities. Though attacks occurred throughout the existence of the Pale, particularly devastating anti-Jewish pogroms occurred from 1881–83 and from 1903–1906, targeting hundreds of communities, assaulting thousands of Jews, and causing considerable property damage.
Most Jews could not engage in agriculture due to the nature of the Pale, 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. 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.
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 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.
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. The quotas in the capitals, however, were increased slightly in 1908 and 1915.
Amidst the difficult conditions in which the Jewish population lived and worked, the courts of Hasidic dynasties flourished in the Pale. Thousands of followers of rebbes such as the Gerrer Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, the Chernobyler Rebbe, and the Vizhnitzer Rebbe flocked to their towns for the Jewish holidays and followed their rebbes' minhagim in their own homes.
The tribulations of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement were immortalized in the writings of Yiddish authors such as humorist Sholom Aleichem, whose novel Tevye der Milchiger forms the basis of the theatrical 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.

Territories of the Pale

The Pale of Settlement included the following areas.

1791

The ukase of Catherine the Great of December 23, 1791 limited the Pale to:
After the Second Partition of Poland, the ukase of June 23, 1794, the following areas were added:
After the Third Partition of Poland, the following areas were added:
After 1805 the Pale gradually shrank, and became limited to the following areas:
Congress Poland did not belong to the Pale of Settlement
Rural areas for from the western border were closed for new settlement of the Jews.

Final demographics

According to the 1897 census, the guberniyas had the following percentages of Jews:
  1. Vilna Governorate
  2. Kovno Governorate
  3. Grodno Governorate
  4. Minsk Governorate
  5. Mogilev Governorate
  6. Vitebsk Governorate
  1. Kiev Governorate
  2. Volhynian Governorate
  3. Podolia Governorate
  1. Warsaw guberniya
  2. Lublin guberniya
  3. Płock guberniya
  4. Kalisz guberniya
  5. Piotrkow guberniya
  6. Kielce guberniya
  7. Radom guberniya
  8. Siedlce guberniya
  9. Augustów guberniya, split into:
Others:
  1. Chernigov Governorate
  2. Poltava Governorate
  3. Taurida Governorate
  4. Kherson Governorate
  5. Bessarabia Governorate
  6. Yekaterinoslav Governorate
In 1882 it was forbidden for Jews to settle in rural areas.
The following cities within the Pale were excluded from it: