Abstract
The Pale of Settlement and the larger international system were constantly changing during the nineteenth century. Both natural and man-made disasters along with new technologies, intellectual and cultural trends, market disruption, population movements, and Russian nation-building were sources of disorder that required life-changing responses by both Jews and their neighbors. Regions differed in their life-changing pressures and responses to them. Jews were geographically mobile but most migration occurred within the Pale itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Whereas the Haskalah promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought and enquiry, Hassidism’s different branches focused more on the spiritual aspects of Jewish life. Some scholars associate Haskalah with the written Torah and Hassidism with the oral Torah. Christianity has analogous differences. The religious divide between different streams of Judaism masks considerable variation within each and among as well as within different regions.
- 2.
Family histories often reference myths—such as that names of arriving passengers were changed by immigration officials. For one corrective source on this, see Marian L. Smith, American Names: Declaring Independence, https://www.ilw.com/articles/2005,0808-smith.shtm as well as the New York Public Librarian Philip Sutton, Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was), available online at https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island. The earlier referenced “The Emigration from Suwalk” provides statistics on the number of Suwalki Jews who failed to present themselves for several drafts. “The recruitment for service in the Russian army appeared to be a main stimulus for immigration,” although, again, this does not explain the emigration of women.
- 3.
See Robert Mitchell, A Concise History of Economists’ Assumptions About Markets, 109 ff.
- 4.
Today’s institutional and behavioral economists build on and extend this line of thinking. See the present author’s two books on how economists think as well as Block and Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique.
- 5.
For this list and the locations of these thirty-five provinces, see Polonsky, Map 7.
- 6.
For some of the consequences that food shortages had on England and France during their wars with one another, see Richard Bourke, Empire Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015).
- 7.
See the earlier references to famines (as enumerated by Ira Glazier) and the Volga region’s suffering. The US government, the Quakers, and others sent grain and money to the suffering populations. See David P. Lilly, The Russian T Famine of 1891–92, available online at http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1994-5/Lilly.htm.
- 8.
For a list of major pandemics, see http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Myadel/Pandemics.htm.
- 9.
Masha Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community (Gefen, 1995), 178.
- 10.
In his chapter titled “Attempts to Transform the Jews,” Polonsky summarized the changing draft laws pertaining to Jews. The Jews of Russian and Poland, 81–82. “In all, during the reign of Nicholas I about 70,000 Jews served in the Russian army; between 4.5 and 6.5 percent of the Jews in Russia were conscripted” and subjected to Russian Orthodox proselytizing. According to Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern in his YIVO encyclopedia contribution, Russia “followed a policy consistent with European enlightened monarchies, which sought to transform ‘their’ Jews from a medieval corporate entity into useful subjects integrated into the society with which Jews shared rights and obligations. Such was the pattern found in Austria under the reign of Joseph II” (r. 1780–1790). It subjected Jews to the state bureaucracy, imposed upon them an obligatory German-based education, significantly expanded their residential, trade, and economic rights and drafted them into the army. See http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Military_Service_in_Russia.
- 11.
Levin, 29.
- 12.
Nancy Sinkoff covers these developments in her Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Brown Judaic Studies 336, 2004).
- 13.
Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Ghetto, 94.
- 14.
For more on the settlement of this new soil-rich area, see The Golden Ghetto, 95.
- 15.
Spitzer, Pogroms, Networks and Migration, 25.
- 16.
Hal Bookfinder, “Changing Borders of Eastern Europe,” in Jewish Genealogy Yearbook (The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, 2000), 74.
- 17.
Spitzer’s analysis of the Ellis Island immigration records focused on Jews only. It should be possible to extend this line of research to include non-Jews to see if rates of emigration differed for those living in the same towns and provinces. His database does not include the over eight million immigrants who entered America through Castle Garden between 1855 and 1890. There were other American and Canadian arrival ports as well. Spitzer is clear that he does not cover much of the Jewish experience both in the Pale and in their new lives in America. There are suggestions that the earlier arrivals, including my own paternal ancestors, paved the way for those who arrived later at Ellis Island.
- 18.
Thomas Balkelis, “Opening Gates to the West: Lithuanian and Jewish Migrations from the Lithuanian Provinces, 1867–1914,” available online at http://easteurotopo.org/articles/balkelis/ where he provides the sources of his statistics.
- 19.
Polonsky, 53.
- 20.
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London.
- 21.
Reprinted from the Bureau of Labor, US Department of Commerce and Labor , 1907, available online at https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:6502502$1i.
- 22.
Yannay Spitzer, Occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement , available online at https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/09/30/jewish-occupations-in-the-pale-of-settlement/.
- 23.
For example, reports from the American Joint Distribution Committee and Arcadius Kahan, “The Impact of industrialization in Tsarist Russia on the Socioeconomic Conditions of the Jewish Population,” in Arcadius Kahan and Roger Weiss, eds., Essays in Jewish Social and Economic Conditions (University of Chicago, 1986).
- 24.
Greenbaum, 166–167.
- 25.
Irving Howe, The World of our Fathers, 10.
- 26.
According to the Bureau of Statistics, US Treasury Department, Immigration into the United States, showing Number, Nationality, Sex, Age, Occupation, Destination, etc. from 1820 to 1903, in 1880, 58% of immigrants entered the USA through NY. By 1890 and 1900, it has become 80%. 4–7% passed through Boston; 4–5%, Philadelphia; 4–7% Baltimore. One of my great aunts arrived in Canada and then traveled to Michigan. Vincent Cannato covers Castle Garden in his American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). “Castle Garden was a state operation, created largely at the behest of immigrant aid societies, designed to protect and aid new arrivals to America. Ellis Island was a federal operation, created in response to the national uproar in perceived changes in the type and nature of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century” with an emphasis on only allowing the “fittest, ablest, and safest” into America. He references the 1888 congressional investigation of immigration that included criticisms of the “absolute false” statements made by steam-ship agents. Given the importance that other studies placed on the information and advice that newly arrived immigrants received from relatives and others already in America, it is not clear whether the congressional criticism applied to Jews from the Pale.
- 27.
Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts, Chapter 10 “Russia and the Independent Heartland.” Also see Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation from 1470 to the Present (Basic Books, 2017).
- 28.
Roger P. Bartlett, The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge, 1979), 23–30.
- 29.
Eliach, 257–258. My paternal ancestors and their Jewish neighbors living on the border with East Prussia were obviously not relocated before First World War. That war led to forced and cruel relocations and perhaps to my great grandfather’s fateful end. He sent eight or so of his children to America but would not make the same one-way trip.
- 30.
Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1986), 156.
- 31.
Petrovsky-Shtern, 147. He also describes the numerous other outrages against Jews, not just deadly pogroms .
- 32.
Petrovsky-Shtern, 157.
- 33.
There is a large literature on the Bund including a summary at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Bund. Ansky was opposed to those who would find the salvation of the Jews by settling in Palestine. The Bund sowed hatred toward Eretz Yisrael, “a land of holy graves” that would not solve the problems of the Jews. Instead, the Bundists argued for a change in the Russian governing body as the best way to solve the Jewish problem. “In order to deepen their influence among the youths, the Bundists established a library, which served as a center for the dissemination of their ideology . Meetings of youths and adults were held there. It was the only cultural center in town.” See “The Origins of the Zionist Movement” from Rokitno’s Yizkor book available online at https://www.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/1596222360399913.
- 34.
Polonsky, 86. Moreover, as referenced earlier with regard to the clothing of my great grandparents, there were class differences in what Jews (and others) wore.
- 35.
Greenbaum, 192.
- 36.
See Michael Goldfarb, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
- 37.
The author of the January 25, 2017 Wikipedia article on Spinoza noted, “Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do.” Answers were not bound in the Talmud or the rich interpretations of it. One must look to a new more comprehensive a science of man and the world. This was also a criticism of Descartes’s mind–body dualism.
- 38.
Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews Volume Two: Belonging: 1492–1900 (Ecco, 2017).
- 39.
For those not familiar with the competitive multi-Islamic sects, see Reza Aslan’s readable No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Random House, 2005).
- 40.
Wikipedia entry on January 25, 2017. Contrary to claims that Wikipedia items should never be referenced in academic publications, numerous studies that can be accessed online report that this source is as valuable as what is found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- 41.
Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880–1930 (Putnam Pub Group and Marek, February 1983), 93.
- 42.
In their The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Touchstone, 2002) the Israeli archeologists Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein used modern archaeological findings to fact check and correct the stories of the earliest Israelites. In many of his academic publications, Bart Ehrman similarly demythologized much of early Christian fables that are also repeated in the founding Islamic texts. During his trading trips to Bosra (the former capital of the Nabataean Empire), the Prophet Muhammad supposedly learned about Christian thinking from the Christian monk Bahira. Linguistic historians have argued that the Qur’an or Koran is written in the dialect of Bosra, not that of Mecca or Medina. The Syrian Bosra is not to be confused with the Iraqi Basra. During my visit to Bosra some years ago, I was shown the place where Bahira supposedly tutored Mohammed. Islam is still awaiting its demythologizing Bert Ehrman. G. W. Bowersock, The Crucible of Islam (Harvard, 2017) moves somewhat in that direction by exploring why arid Arabia proved to be such fertile ground for Muhammad’s prophetic message and why that message spread so quickly to the wider world.
- 43.
John Robertson, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 44.
For a well-received history of those opposed to the northern rationalists, see Marc Shapiro, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015). The publisher’s summary of this book on Amazon.com begins with “Changing the Immutable focuses on how segments of Judaism’s Orthodox society have taken it upon themselves to rewrite the past by covering up and literally cutting out that which does not fit their own world view. For reasons ranging from theological considerations to internal religious politics to changing religious standards, such Jewish self-censorship abounds, and author Marc B. Shapiro discusses examples from each category.” There was a real world and one invented by some traditional Jewish theologians. This again was a tussle between the Enlightenment and old think.
- 45.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark made a beginning on this field in their The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers, 2005).
- 46.
In addition to Spitzer’s research, Gur Alroey, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear (pages 38 ff.) reports the higher rates of emigration from the northern Pale and that pogroms do not explain the timing of emigration.
- 47.
Samuel Kassow, “The Shtetl in Interwar Poland,” in Katz, ed., The Shtetl: New Evaluations, 28.
- 48.
Page 162. For a history of the Yiddish popular press in Poland, see Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi : And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
- 49.
Polonsky, 120.
- 50.
Petrovsky-Shtern, 334–335.
- 51.
One can read this publication online at http://www.jpress.nli.org.il/Olive/APA/NLI/?action=tab&tab=browse&pub=HMZ#panel=browse. The online list of donors to famine relief appeals published by this paper map communities that were more supportive of world Jewish causes. See http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1425. My grandfather’s home village, Vishtinetz, was second only to Kovno in the number of donors.
- 52.
David L. Langenberg has circulated a number of excellent but mostly unpublished articles including What is a Litvak? Again, that was the home settlement of my paternal ancestors.
- 53.
- 54.
Both of these long inserts are from Mikhail Krutikov’s entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Yiddish_Literature/Yiddish_Literature_after_1800.
- 55.
For essays on how Jews were balancing tradition with modernity, see Central and East European Jews at the Crossroads of Tradition and Modernity, Jurgita Šiauč iunaitė-Verbickienė and Larisa Lempertienė, eds. (Vilnius, 2006). Also see Robert D. Crews, "Fear and Loathing in the Russian Empire,” in James Renton and Ben Gidley, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mitchell, R.E. (2019). Nineteenth-Century Disorder in the Pale and Elsewhere. In: Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99145-0_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99145-0_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99144-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99145-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)