Pale of Settlement

The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 (de facto until 1915) in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel, and their dependents including families and sometimes servants. Pale is an archaic term meaning an enclosed area. Outside the Pale, Jews were also allowed to settle in certain colonies such as in Siberia.

The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation. It extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line inside the Russian Empire, westwards to the border with the Kingdom of Prussia (later the German Empire) and Austria-Hungary. It comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia and largely corresponded to historical lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Cossack Hetmanate, Ottoman Empire (with Yedisan), Crimean Khanate, and eastern Moldavia (Bessarabia).

Life in the Pale for many was economically bleak. Most people relied on small service or artisan work that could not support the number of inhabitants, which resulted in emigration, especially in the late 19th century. Even so, Jewish culture, especially Yiddish, developed in the shtetls (small towns), intellectual culture developed in the yeshivas (religious schools), and it was also carried abroad.

The Russian Empire during the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the Pale with its large minorities of Jewish, Roman Catholic, and, until mid-19th century, Eastern Catholic population (although much of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are predominantly Eastern Orthodox). While the religious nature of the edicts governing the Pale is clear (conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, the state religion, released individuals from the strictures), historians argue that the motivations for its creation and maintenance were primarily economic and nationalist in nature.

The end of the enforcement and formal demarcation of the Pale coincided with the beginning of World War I in 1914, when large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior to escape the invading Imperial German Army. It officially ended in 1917 after the February Revolution and end of the Russian Empire.