fyeaheasterneurope:

The Pale of Settlement

There have been Jews in Russia for well over a thousand years, but Russian rulers have often been conflicted on how to treat them. Several attempts to expel them or forcibly convert them to Christianity failed. But in 1791, Catherine the Great came up with a plan that stuck when she created the Pale of Settlement - a specific region in which Jews were allowed to live.

In 1793, the Russian Empire acquired massive parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Second Partition of Poland), and with it millions of new Jewish residents. The Pale was expanded to include these new territories, and the Russian Empire became home to the world’s largest Jewish population - with about 5 million Jews, the Pale was home to 40% of world Jewry.

Life in the Pale wasn’t easy. Even within the boundaries of the Pale, many cities were closed to Jews, and so they primarily lived in shtetls - small, predominantly Jewish towns. The concentration of Jews within the Pale and in shtetls made them an easy target for pogroms and millions emigrated, primarily to the United States. (Including several ancestors of yours truly; intriguingly, one of my ancestors was from Estonia, which was outside the Pale. Small numbers of Jews with specific skills were allowed to live outside the Pale. I wish I knew the backstory behind how my people got there!) 

During World War I, the German army invaded western Russia, and many Jews abandoned the Pale to flee inland. Finally, in the spring of 1917, the Pale was officially abolished by the Russian government.

(Map on the left shows percentage of the population that was Jewish within the Pale, map on the right has more specific borders.)