Pale of Settlement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Pale of Settlement (Russian: Черта оседлости — cherta osedlosti) was a western border region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residence of Jews was allowed, extending from the pale or demarcation line, to near the border with central Europe.

The word pale derives ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning stake. (Palisade is derived from the same root.) From this came the figurative meaning of 'boundary', and the concept of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid. The phrase "beyond the pale" derives from this meaning of pale.

Though comprising only 20% of the territory of European Russia, the Pale corresponded to historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia. Additionally, a number of cities within the pale were excluded from it. A limited number of categories of Jews were allowed to live outside the pale.

Map of the Pale of Settlement
Map of the Pale of Settlement

Contents

For more information about life in the Pale, see: History of the Jews in Poland and History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

The Pale was first created by Catherine the Great in 1791, after several failed attempts by her predecessors, notably the Empress Elizabeth, to remove Jews from Russia entirely unless they converted to Russian Orthodoxy. The reasons for its creation were primarily economic and nationalist. While Russian society had traditionally been divided mainly into nobles, serfs, and clergy, industrial progress led to the emergence of a middle class, which was rapidly being filled by Jews, who did not belong to any sector. By limiting their area of residence, the imperial powers were ensuring the growth of a non-Jewish middle class. Catherine can be said to have established the Pale as a compromise between those members of government who continued advocating the complete expulsion of the Jews, her own liberal tendencies, and the interests of the local population of the provinces, who suffered economically from the lack of a mercantile class of Jews.

The institution of the Pale became especially important to the Russian authorities following the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. While Russia's Jewish population had, until then, been rather limited, the annexation of Polish territory increased the Jewish population substantially. At its heyday, the Pale, which included the new Polish territories, had a Jewish population of over 5 million, which represented the largest concentration (40 percent) of world Jewry at that time.

Between 1791 and 1917, when the Pale officially ceased to exist, there were various reconfigurations of its boundaries, so that certain areas were open or shut to Jewish settlement, such as the Caucasus. Similarly, Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities (as well as in Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta), and forced to move to small provincial towns, fostering the rise of the shtetls (literally, "little cities," from the German stadt). Jewish merchants of the 1st guild, people with higher or special education, artisans, soldiers, drafted in accordance with the Recruit Charter of 1810, and their descendants 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 Saint Petersburg and Moscow as late as 1891. During the Second World War, the whole area of the former Pale found itself within the furthest extent of Nazi German control on the Eastern front, resulting in many mass killing sites by the so-called Einsatzgruppen in one of the Nazis' largest planned systematic operation of Jewish extermination, as part of the Holocaust. This led to the virtual disappearance of Jewish life in the area of its once greatest concentration.

Life in the shtetls (villages) of the Pale of Settlement was hard and stricken by poverty. A sophisticated system of volunteer Jewish social welfare organizations developed to meet the needs of the population, following the time-honored Jewish tradition of tzedakah. Various organizations supplied clothes to poor students, provided kosher food to Jewish soldiers conscripted into the Czar'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 [1].

The concentration of Jews in the Pale made them an easy target for pogroms and massive (and often government-sponsored), anti-Jewish riots. These, along with the repressive May Laws, often devastated whole communities. Though pogroms were staged throughout the existence of the Pale, particularly devastating attacks occurred from 1881-1883 and from 1903-1906, targeting hundreds of communities, killing thousands of Jews, and causing tens of thousands of rubles in property damage.

A Melamed (teacher) in 19th-century Podolia. Most primary schools taught only religious texts in a one-room schoolhouse.
A Melamed (teacher) in 19th-century Podolia. Most primary schools taught only religious texts in a one-room schoolhouse.

A positive outgrowth of the concentration of Jews in a circumscribed area was the development of the modern yeshiva system. Until the beginning of the 19th century, each town supported its own advanced students who learned in the local synagogue with the rabbinical head of the community. Each student would eat his meals in a different home each day, a system known as "essen teg" ("eating days"). In 1803, Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, the prime disciple of the Vilna Gaon, opened the Volozhin Yeshiva, which attracted young men from throughout the Pale and was supported by the donations of many communities. At its height, 450 students enrolled in the Volozhin Yeshiva, which also fed and housed students using donations collected in Europe and abroad. However, the yeshiva was forced to decide its own future in 1892, when the Russian government demanded that all faculty members hold degrees from recognized Russian educational institutions and teach Russian language and culture in the curriculum. Rather than sacrifice its purely Torah-oriented focus, the yeshiva opted to close its doors. Its rabbis and students went on to found other yeshivot in Russia and the United States.

The Jewish quota existed for education: since 1886, the percentage of Jewish students could be no more than 10% within the Pale, 5% outside the Pale and 3% in the capitals (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev). The quotas in the capitals were slightly increased in 1908 and 1915.

Despite the difficult conditions under 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 (known as the Sfas Emes), the Chernobyler Rebbe and the Vizhnitzer Rebbe flocked to their towns for the Jewish holidays and followed their rebbes' minhagim (Jewish practices) 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 stories of Tevye der Milchiger (Tevye the Milkman) in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka form the basis of Fiddler on the Roof. Because of the harsh conditions of day-to-day life in the Pale, some 2 million Jews—primarily non-religious—emigrated from there between 1881 and 1914, mainly to the United States (see History of the Jews in the United States). However, this exodus did not affect the stability of the Jewish population of the Pale, which remained at 5 million people due to the high birthrate.

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. On March 20 (April 2), 1917, the Pale was abolished by the Provisional Government decree, On abolition of confessional and national restrictions (Об отмене вероисповедных и национальных ограничений). A large portion of the Pale, together with its Jewish population, became part of Poland (see History of the Jews in Poland). The Bolshevik Revolution and revolutions of 1918-1920 also resulted in some of the worst pogroms and military excesses—over 1,236 of them in the Ukraine alone during which, conservatively, 31,000 Jews were killed (Abramson, Henry).

The Pale of Settlement included the following areas.

Ukase of Catherine II, December 23, 1791

After the Second partition of Poland, the ukase of June 23, 1794 added more areas.

After the Third Partition of Poland, the following areas are added

The Pale gradually shrinks.

Rural areas for 50 verst from the Western border closed from new settlement.

In 1882 it was forbidden for Jews to settle in rural areas.

The following cities within the Pale were excluded from it:

  • Abramson, Henry, "Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920," Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 542-550.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/a/l/Pale_of_Settlement_42c9.html"
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.