Pale of Settlement
Pale of Settlement, the area of territory in the Russian Empire—ultimately including nearly 500,000 square miles (1.2 million square km) and either large parts or the whole of modern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova—in which Jewish people could legally reside.
The immediate catalyst for the establishment of the Pale was the territorial gains made by Russia after the Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Up until 1772 it had been illegal for any Jew to reside in Russian territory, but by the end of the third partition, in 1795, Russia had the largest Jewish population in Europe. Rather than attempting to expel hundreds of thousands of people, the government of Catherine the Great sought to achieve a balance between taking advantage of the presence of the distinctive population and insulating Russian merchants and craftspeople from competition with their Jewish counterparts. Thus, the government combined a form of enlightened absolutism with traditional anti-Jewish sentiments and prejudices in the Christian population.
The geography of the Pale was somewhat fluid. Initially, it included only lands where Jews were already living at the time of partition. After the annexation of territories around the Black Sea, Jews were allowed (and, in fact, sometimes encouraged) to move to these newly Russian areas, thus aiding the Russian colonial project in the region. However, various restrictions within the Pale also applied. Jews were not allowed to reside within certain municipalities, particularly rural ones. Thus, despite European Russian society being predominantly rural, the Jewish Russian population was highly urbanized. In fact, many Jews lived in towns that were majority or entirely Jewish. There nonetheless remained tension between urban Jews and their neighbors, sometimes culminating in incidents such as the decree expelling all Jewish residents of Kyiv in 1827. In the mid-1800s Jews were forbidden from taking up residency within roughly 30 miles (48 km) of the western border of the empire, though Jews already living in those areas were allowed to stay.
Within the Pale Jews were restricted to certain professions. The majority of Jews were either merchants or craftspeople, leading to a massively lopsided representation in certain professions—there were roughly three times as many artisans in the Pale as in the rest of Russia. For a time, Jews in the Pale were allowed to participate in city government, including voting for local officials. This meant they actually had more access to the rights of citizenship than Jews living in other parts of Europe.
Tension persisted between the Jewish population and the Russian state, and, over the course of the early 19th century, Russian officials worked to wear away at Jewish autonomy and integrate Jews into the larger society, without changing the anti-Semitism of the larger population or legal realities of discrimination. Perhaps the most infamous way that the state attempted to intervene in Jewish life was with a conscription statute passed in 1827. Under this law, tens of thousands of boys as young as 12 were forcibly taken from their families and entered into the army for a minimum of 25 years, during which time they were pressured to convert to Christianity. In addition, while Jewish communities had previously enjoyed a level of self-government under groups called kahals, the power of such groups was slowly chipped away until their abolition in 1844. At the same time, state schools for Jews (in which teachers were required to speak Russian) were established in many cities and towns of the Pale, displacing the traditional Jewish schools that had previously been popular.
Under Tsar Alexander II, relations between the state and the Jews in the Pale began to improve, and increasingly large groups of Jews were given permission to settle outside of the Pale. This included merchants belonging to the richest merchant guild, holders of academic degrees, military veterans, and master craft workers. Jews were also allowed to leave the Pale to study for higher degrees. Many Jews attended universities and joined revolutionary or politically subversive movements, and Jews living outside the Pale were increasingly integrated into the rest of Russian society.
This process was cut short by the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Though his assassins were not Jewish, the ensuing chaos led to a sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence. Hundreds of pogroms against Jews, often implicitly or borderline explicitly supported by local state actors, took place in the next years. The national government of Alexander II’s heir, Alexander III, demonstrated its support for this anti-Semitism by passing “temporary laws,” commonly called the “May Laws,” in 1882. These laws reimposed all previous restrictions on Jewish settlement outside the Pale. A quota was also imposed on universities, limiting the number of spaces available to Jews and stymieing any continued mobility within Russian society. Christian residents of municipalities gained the power to petition the government to expel all Jews from an area. In response to these restrictions and the rising violence, more than three million Jews immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The May Laws determined the status quo throughout the Pale until World War I. In 1915 large sections of the Pale became a conflict zone. Russian soldiers expelled all civilians in some areas, and many people were forced to flee the fighting. As thousands of Jews became refugees and were displaced to the east, the government lifted restrictions on Jews in all areas except Moscow and St. Petersburg. After the Revolution the provisional government abolished the Pale of Settlement and all other anti-Semitic laws in 1917.
A thorough Russian census completed in 1897 has preserved remarkably precise information about the Jews of the Pale. Ninety-nine percent of Jews in the Pale spoke Yiddish. Some two-fifths of the world’s Jews lived in the Pale.
At the turn of the 20th century, roughly five million Jews were living within its borders (and 200,000 resided in other parts of Russia), forming a unique cultural entity. This society was virtually destroyed by the turmoil of the 20th century, most notably the Holocaust. For instance, in the 1930s Jews made up about half of the urban population of Belarus. By 1989 they made up only 1.1 percent of the population.