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Pale of Settlement

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Pale of Settlement
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As a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the acquisition of the central and eastern provinces of Poland by the Russian Empire during the late eighteenth century, the area extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea became known as the Russian "Pale of Settlement." Originally established by Catherine the Great in 1791, the Pale (meaning "border") eventually covered roughly 286,000 square miles (740,700 square kilometers) of territory and grew to include twenty-five provinces (fifteen Russian and ten Polish), including Kiev, Grodno, Minsk, Lublin, Bessarabia, and Mogilev. Along with the favorable acquisition of Polish land, the Russian government was faced with a population of ethnic groups that came with the various territories. Although the territories consisted of various groups, including Byzantine Catholics, Germans, Armenians, Tartars, Scots, and Dutchmen, it was the large number of Jews (10% of the Polish population) that was most troubling to the tsars.

In 1804, intending to protect the Russian population from the Jewish people, Alexander I issued a decree that prevented Jews from living outside the territories of the Pale, the first of many statutes designed to limit the freedoms of Russia's new Jewry. With more than five million Jews eventually living and working within its borders, Russian lawmakers used the confines of the Pale as an opportunity to limit Jewish participation in most facets of social, economic, and political life. With few exceptions, Jews were forced to reside within the Pale's overcrowded cities and small towns called shtetls, restricted from traveling, prevented from entering various professions (including agriculture), levied with extra taxation, forbidden to receive higher education, and kept from engaging in various forms of trade to subsidize their livelihood. Although Jews in the Pale were destined to a endure a life of poverty and restriction, most managed to make their way into the local economies by working as tailors, cobblers, peddlers, and small shopkeepers. Others, who were less fortunate, survived only by committed mutual aid efforts and strong local networks of support.

As the Russian Empire started experiencing the early stages of industrialization during the 1880s, the Pale began to witness a steady decline in its agricultural, artisanal, and petty entrepreneurial economies. Because of this transition, many independent producers of goods and services could no longer subsist and were forced to find jobs in factories. Very few, especially the Jewish artisans and tailors, were able to continue producing independently or as middlemen to larger manufacturing plants. By the start of the twentieth century, the manufacturing sector was increasingly becoming the primary source of employment in the Pale, with wage laborers producing cigarettes, cigars, knit goods, gloves, textiles, artificial flowers, buttons, glass, bricks, soap, candy, and various other goods. It was ultimately the deteriorating economy within the Pale, coupled with years of anti-Semitism, that served as catalyst for more than two million Jews to emigrate to America between 1881 and 1914. Not long after this exodus, the Pale of Settlement was abolished with the overthrow of the tsarist regime in 1917.

Bibliography

Klier, John. (1986). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the "Jewish Question" in Russia, 1772 - 1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

Ro'i, Yaacov, ed. (1995). Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.

—DIANA FISHER

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Wikipedia: Pale of Settlement
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Map of the Pale of Settlement

The Pale of Settlement (Russian: Черта́ осе́длости, cherta osedlosti) was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia, along its western border, in which permanent residence of Jews was allowed, and beyond which Jewish residence was generally prohibited. It extended from the pale or demarcation line to the Russian border with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

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, Bessarabia, 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.

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

Contents

History

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

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 attempted to ensure the growth of a non-Jewish middle class.

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-Lithuanian territory increased the Jewish population substantially. At its heyday, the Pale, which included the new Polish and Lithuanian 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 (from Yiddish שטעטל shtetl "little village"). 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 Einsatzgruppen in one of the Nazis' largest planned systematic operations 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 Pale

Life in the shtetls (Yiddish שטעטלעך shtetlekh "little towns") 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 (charity). 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, 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 Jewish father in 19th-century Podolia.

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").

The Jewish quota existed for education: after 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 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 the wars of 1918–1920 also resulted in many pogroms and military excesses—over 1,236 of them in the Ukraine alone during which, conservatively, 31,000 Jews were killed (Abramson, Henry).

Territories of the Pale

The Pale of Settlement included the following areas.

1791

The Ukase of Catherine II of December 23, 1791 limited the Pale to:

1794

After the Second partition of Poland, the ukase of June 23, 1794, the following areas were added:

1795

After the Third Partition of Poland, the following areas were added:

1805–1835

After 1805 the Pale gradually shrinks, by the exclusion of the following areas:

Rural areas for 50 verst (kilometers) from the western border were closed from new settlement.

Final

  1. Vilna guberniya
  2. Kovno guberniya
  3. Grodno guberniya
  4. Minsk guberniya
  5. Mogilev guberniya
  6. Vitebsk guberniya (some parts of it are in Pskov Oblast and Smolensk Oblast now)
  1. Kiev guberniya
  2. Volhynia guberniya
  3. Podolia guberniya
  1. Warsaw guberniya (Варшавская губерния (Мазовецкая губерния 1837-1844))
  2. Lublin guberniya (Люблинская губерния)
  3. Płock guberniya (Плоцкая губерния)
  4. Kalisz guberniya (Калишская губерния)
  5. Piotrkow guberniya (Петроковская губерния)
  6. Kielce guberniya (Келецкая губерния (Краковская губерния 1837-1844))
  7. Radom guberniya (Радомская губерния)
  8. Siedlce guberniya (Седлецкая губерния (Подлясская губерния 1837-1844))
  9. Augustow guberniya (Августовская губерния 1837–1867), split into:
  1. Suwałki guberniya (Сувалкская губерния)
  2. Łomża guberniya (Ломжинская губерния)

Others:

  1. Chernigov guberniya (some parts of it are in Bryansk Oblast now)
  2. Poltava guberniya
  3. Tavrida guberniya (Crimea)
  4. Kherson guberniya
  5. Bessarabia guberniya
  6. Ekaterinoslav guberniya

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

The following cities within the Pale were excluded from it:

See also

References

  1. ^ An area of Russia where Jews were most oppressed, the Pale of Settlement gave rise to amazingly good things.
  • Abramson, Henry, "Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920", Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 542-550.

External links


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