What Was the Pale of Settlement?
On 1 January 1827, the Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery issued a circular to all the governors of the western provinces: a Jewish father of a conscript-age family would, on request, be entitled to “temporary residence” outside the Pale. The exception was small, but the document is a good illustration of how the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti) was administered. The Pale itself was a list — formalised in the Statute of 1835 and revised several times between 1835 and 1917 — of the western provinces of the Russian Empire in which the Jewish population of the empire was required to live. In 1897 the Pale held about 4.9 million of the empire’s 5.2 million Jews. Outside the Pale, Jews could live only in special categories: long-term merchants, university graduates, medical professionals, certain artisans, certain war veterans (see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 2002; Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History, 2001).
The origins
The Pale was the product of a particular historical accident: the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), which brought the largest Jewish population in the world into the Russian Empire. In 1791, two years after the second partition, Catherine the Great issued an instruction limiting the new Jewish population to the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had been incorporated into Russia. The instruction was the foundation of the Pale. The system was tightened in the reigns of Paul I and Alexander I; the Statute of 1804 introduced the formal categories of Jewish merchant, Jewish artisan, and Jewish agriculturalist, with the latter offered the right to settle outside the Pale in the new Russian provinces of the south.
The Pale was codified by the Statute of 1804, the Statute of 1835, the 1881 temporary regulations, the 1882 May Laws, and a long series of ministerial and gubernatorial orders. The Pale was, in effect, a Russian legal innovation; no other European state had a comparable territorial restriction on a religious group. The Pale lasted, with various modifications, until 1917 (Nathans, 2002).
Life in the Pale
The Jewish population of the Pale in 1897 was about 4.9 million, the largest Jewish population in the world. The Pale extended from the Baltic coast (the governorates of Kovno, Vilna, Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk) through the Ukrainian provinces (Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Poltava, Chernigov) to the new southern provinces (Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Taurida). The Jewish population of the Pale was concentrated in the towns and cities: Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, Kovno, Zhitomir, Berdichev, Odessa. The Jewish population of Berdichev in 1897 was about 41,000, of Vilna about 64,000, of Odessa about 138,000, of Warsaw about 220,000 (Nathans, 2002).
The economic life of the Jewish community was dominated by trade, crafts, and small-scale manufacturing. Jews were excluded from agriculture, the civil service, the military officer corps, and most state employment. The kupechestvo guild system, established by Catherine the Great in 1775, gave the Jewish merchant class a place in the imperial commercial structure, and the Jewish merchant class of the Pale was the principal financial intermediary for the agricultural and timber trade of the western and southwestern provinces. The Jewish artisans, the remeslenniki, were concentrated in the textile trade of the towns and cities. The Jewish intellectuals — the physicians, the lawyers, the engineers, the journalists — were concentrated in the cities, and they were a significant presence in the Russian professional classes of the late imperial period (Nathans, 2002).
Restrictions and disabilities
The Jewish population of the Pale faced a wide range of disabilities in addition to the residence restrictions. The Jews were excluded from most state employment, including the civil service, the military officer corps, and the judicial system. The Jews paid special taxes, including the korobka (the kosher meat tax) and the svyashchenichyi podushnyi nalog (the candle tax) for the maintenance of the state Jewish schools. The Jews were subject to a separate conscription quota, and the period of conscription was longer than for the rest of the population. The Jews were also subject to specific restrictions on the establishment of new synagogues and Jewish schools, and they were required to obtain special permits to travel outside the Pale.
The cantonist system, established by the Statute of 1827 and abolished in 1856, was the most brutal of the disabilities. The cantonist system drafted Jewish boys of 12-18, often through the krugovaya poruka of the village commune, for 25 years of military service. The cantonist boys were generally sent to the army or to special cantonist schools, and they were often under heavy pressure to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. The death rate among the cantonist boys was high; the conversion rate was even higher. The cantonist system was abolished in 1856, but the conscription of Jewish boys continued, and the conversion pressure continued, until 1917 (Nathans, 2002).
The May Laws of 1882 and the pogroms
The assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881 was the trigger for a series of pogroms in the Pale. The first wave of pogroms, in the summer of 1881, claimed about a dozen Jewish dead and was followed by a much larger wave in 1882-1884. The second wave was triggered by the Temporary Regulations of 3 May 1882, the “May Laws,” which restricted Jewish residence in the rural districts and required special permission for Jewish movement outside the Pale. The 1881-1884 pogroms and the May Laws produced the first large wave of Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire, mostly to the United States and to Palestine (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Nathans, 2002).
A third wave of pogroms, in 1903-1906, was triggered by the Kishinev pogrom of 6-8 April 1903 (about 49 Jewish dead, hundreds wounded, and 1,500 Jewish houses destroyed) and by the Odessa pogrom of October 1905 (about 400 Jewish dead, more than 300 Jewish houses destroyed). The 1903-1906 pogroms produced a second large wave of Jewish emigration, of about 2 million people in 1900-1914, mostly to the United States, to Britain, and to Palestine. The pogroms were an important factor in the development of the Zionist movement, the Jewish socialist movement (the Bund), and the broader Russian revolutionary movement (Figes, 2002).
The abolition of the Pale
The Pale was gradually relaxed in the late imperial period. The first relaxation came in 1860, when Jews with higher education were allowed to live outside the Pale. Further relaxations followed: the right of Jewish merchants to live outside the Pale (1861, 1879), the right of Jewish artisans to live in the cities (1865, 1879), the right of Jewish medical professionals to live outside the Pale (1879), the right of discharged Jewish soldiers to live outside the Pale (1867), and the partial right of Jewish agriculturalists to live outside the Pale (1861, 1879). The restrictions were formally abolished on 22 March 1917 (4 April new style), in the wake of the February Revolution, by the Provisional Government (Nathans, 2002).
The legacy
The Pale of Settlement was the largest territorial restriction on a religious group in modern European history. The Pale was an important factor in the development of the Russian-Jewish population, the development of the Zionist movement, the development of the Jewish socialist movement (the Bund), and the development of the larger Russian revolutionary movement. The Pale was also an important factor in the development of the modern state of Israel, of the Jewish population of the United States, and of the post-1945 global Jewish diaspora (Figes, 2002; Nathans, 2002).