Pale of Settlement
[Russian, cherta osedlosti] - A region where
Jews were allowed to live designated by the tsarist government in the
Western guberniias of the Russian Empire.
After the second and third partitions of Poland, when most of the
Polish Jews found themselves in the Russian partition, the first ukazy
were issued resulting in the creation of a separate zone for them. They
were forbidden from moving from one place to another, and from settling
in cities within Russia proper; Jews also began to be forced out of the
countryside.
|
After the Napoleonic wars, Tsar Alexander I,
after a brief period when restrictions were less severe, made the Pale
of Settlement smaller. A ban was also introduced on Jews living along
the western border in a swath 50 versts wide. The borders of this zone
were defined in 1836, and included the guberniias of Volhynia, Grodno,
Wilno, Podole, Minsk, Ekaterinoslav and Bessarabia, the Kiev province
(without Kiev), Kherson (without Nikolaev), Taurida (without
Sevastopol), Mohyl and Vitebsk (without its rural settlements), some of
Chernihov and Poltava.
|
Further restrictions on Jews' freedom of
residence were imposed in 1882, when Tsar Alexander III established the
May Laws, on the basis of which it was decided to expel Jews from the
cities of Russia proper and from the countryside of the Pale of
Settlement. The resettlement program affected a total of approximately
one million people. The Pale of Settlement continued to exist until the
Russian Revolution.
(G.Z./CM)
|