The Pale of Settlement was a region or line of demarcation which existed between 1791 and 1917 within the Russian Empire and which delineated between parts of the empire that Jewish people could live within and parts of it within which they could not. The Pale was effectively a line which ran from around the Gulf of Riga in the north south-eastwards from what are now Lithuania and Latvia through modern-day Belarus and Ukraine to the Sea of Azov. The Pale was established in advance of the Second and Third Partitions of Poland, through which Russia acquired extensive parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that contained the largest Jewish community anywhere in Europe. Thus, the Pale was established to prevent the migration of Jewish people into Russia itself. Beyond simply delineating where Jewish people could live within the Russian Empire, the Pale of Settlement led to economic and social discrimination against Jewish people there and drove the mass migration of at least two million Jewish people from the lands ruled by Russia up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. A huge proportion relocated to the United States and form the basis of much of the Jewish American community today.[1]
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Pale of Settlement chronology of events
In the eighteenth century the Russian Empire expanded to become one of the major European powers, after being a rather distant state on the periphery of the continent for several centuries. It expanded at the expense of several of its neighbors, acquiring an outlet to the Baltic Sea through war with the Kingdom of Sweden and to the Black Sea and Caucasus via conflict with the Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman Empire.[2] By the 1770s it was intent on acquiring land from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a very large East European state which in early modern times controlled not just Poland, but Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and much of Ukraine. The Commonwealth had declined drastically from the late seventeenth century onwards and in 1772 its three more powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia and Austria, engaged in the first of three Partitions of Poland. The Second and Third Partitions would follow in 1793 and 1795.[3]
Poland had been welcoming of Europe’s Jewish people since medieval times, during centuries in which kingdoms like England and France had expelled their Jewish people. As a result, over half of Europe’s Jewish people were living in Eastern Europe in the lands of the Commonwealth by the time of the Partitions. In a move which was designed to prevent Jewish migration from the lands they were acquiring in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, the Russian government established the Pale of Settlement in 1791, a line east of which Jewish people were prohibited from settling. The word ‘Pale’ comes from the Latin palus, meaning a stake or boundary marker. Although the exact line of demarcation would change slightly during the nineteenth century, the Pale of Settlement essentially ran from the Gulf of Riga in the north south-eastwards through Belarus and Ukraine to the Sea of Azov north of the Black Sea.[4]
It was not simply that the Pale of Settlement placed severe (though not absolute) restrictions on Jewish migration east of this line. It also laid the seeds for extensive socio-economic discrimination towards the Jewish people within the Russian Empire. Moreover, as the nineteenth century went on the number of regions in which Jewish people were allowed to live was restricted further, just at a time when Russia was beginning to develop economically as industrialization began. By restricting Jewish people from moving eastwards to new centers of economic development in Russia, it reduced the economic opportunities available to the empire’s Jewish inhabitants.[5]
Extent of migration caused by the Pale of Settlement
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By its very nature, the imposition of the Pale of Settlement was designed to restrict migration from Russian-controlled lands in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus further east into Russia itself. However, in the long run it contributed to a mass exodus of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. Some two million Jewish people left the empire in the period between 1880 and 1920, though some studies place the figure as high as two and a half million.[6] Of these, approximately three-quarters migrated to the United States, while others went to Britain, Canada or other parts of continental Europe, while some were amongst the growing number of Jewish people returning to the Levant, which was still under Ottoman control at the time.[7] The Pale of Settlement was far from the only factor driving this Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire. Other factors like the Russian famine of 1891 to 1892, a wave of mass movement from Europe to the Americas during this era and the growth of anti-Semitism that manifested as pogroms against Jewish communities in the Russian lands were just as significant, but it played a role.[8]
Demographic impact of the Pale of Settlement
The demographic impact of the Pale of Settlement was multi-faceted. In the more immediate sense it limited the ability of Jewish people within the Russian Empire to migrate eastwards to places like St Petersburg, Moscow and Tsaritsyn (modern-day Volgograd), cities to which many rural dwelling Jewish people in eastern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine might have been drawn in the nineteenth century as the empire urbanized and industrialized had it not been for the restrictive rules imposed by the Pale of Settlement. As a result, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine remained the parts of Europe with the highest Jewish population down to the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust.[9]
More broadly, the discrimination which was attendant on the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire and the mass migration of Jewish denizens of the empire abroad between 1881 and 1914 has had a major demographic impact on the United States. A majority of the more than seven million Jewish Americans in the US today are descended from Jewish people who left the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This demographic impact is particularly strong in New York City, a metropolitan region with over two million Jewish inhabitants. It was the epicenter of the Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire to the US during this era. While the Pale of Settlement was not the sole reason for this mass migration, it is a considerable factor in the fact that millions of Americans today will have an ancestor that left Eastern Europe in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.[10]
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See also
Explore more about the Pale of Settlement
- Russia, Births and Baptisms, 1755-1917 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Marriages, 1793-1919 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Deaths and Burials, 1815-1917 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Cemetery Records records collection on MyHeritage
- Russians Immigrating to the United States records collection on MyHeritage
- Lithuanian-Jewish Records from LitvakSIG, 1795-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Worldwide Jewish Burial Registry from JewishGen records collection on MyHeritage
- Where is That? Using Eastern European Atlases, Maps and Gazetteers at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching Eastern European Archives from Your Easy Chair at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-pale-of-settlement
- ↑ William Woodruff, ‘The Expansion of the Russian Empire’, in William Woodruff, A Concise History of the Modern World (London, 1991), chapter 4.
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/partitions-of-poland-and-lithuania/
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-pale-of-settlement
- ↑ Irena Grosfeld, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, ‘Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire’, in The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 87, No. 1 (January, 2020), pp. 289–342.
- ↑ https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-emigration-in-the-19th-century/
- ↑ https://jwa.org/article/immigrant-experience-in-nyc-1880-1920
- ↑ https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/political-and-economic-drivers-pogroms
- ↑ William L. Blackwell, Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton, 1968).
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html