Abstract
The Pale had diverse physical geographies along with a wide variety of human geographies consisting of differently-sized and spatially-dispersed individual settlements recorded both in the Russian Census of 1897 and in other number-heavy sources. Not all Jews shared the same social, economic and political challenges, the same physical geography, the same non-Jewish neighbors nor the same problems of life and order. Individual communities also differed in their rates and patterns of change and the challenge of adjusting to them. There were many different Jewish communities and Jews themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
Data processing of the individual census forms took 8 years using Hollerith card machines, the same IBM-provided devices I used during my own Columbia University graduate school days in the 1950s.
- 2.
For a history of different Yiddish dialects, see Alexander Beider, Origins of Yiddish Dialects (Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 3.
One of JewishGen’s many tools allows a researcher to click on a shtetl ’s name to discover smaller close-by mostly unrecorded settlements some of which had Jewish residents.
- 4.
See Spitzer’s, Pogroms Networks, and Migration: The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States 1881–1191, available online at https://yannayspitzer.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/spitzer_pogromsnetworksmigration_150529.pdf. Some towns and villages had the legal authority to exclude Jewish residents. I have not seen how many settlements within a larger Jewish population catchment area did not have any Jewish residents or how lives in these settlements differed from lives in settlements that differed in their proportion and number of Jewish residents. Again if not all settlements were the same then it is reasonable to assume that not all Jews were essentially the same either. It is not clear whether “religion” is the appropriate term. Being a Jew or a Pole or someone else is what others labeled you. Russia was not the only country to identify residents by religious and other criteria. Over time the American government changed its classifications. According to Spitzer, among other sources, “Starting July 1898, the immigration authorities in Ellis Island (and since 1903 in other ports of arrival) began requiring that shipping companies add to the passengers lists they had to submit an identification of the ‘race or people’ to which each immigrant belonged, in addition to the previously required ‘nationality’ field recording the country of origin.” Yannay Spitzer, “Who-Is-a-Jew Algorithm,” https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/11/24/who-is-a-jew-algorithm/. More on this later.
- 5.
“Who-Is-a-Jew Algorithm.”
- 6.
Polonsky, 120.
- 7.
The census does not indicate who in the household provided the census taker with information.
- 8.
For more on the “ethnic” composition of different regions, see Piotr Eberhardt and Jan Owsinski, Ethnic Groups and Population Changes in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe: History, Data and Analysis (Routledge, 2002). Thanks to the work of expert genealogists, it is possible to search online for one’s ancestors listed in the 1897 census. See, for example, Howard Margol and Peggy Mosinger Freedman, Russia, Jewish Families in Russian Empire Census, 1897 [Database on-line] Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2008. Avotaynu Online has more information on the census at, http://www.avotaynuonline.com/2008/10/the-1897-all-empire-russian-census-by-alexander-dunai/. Several companies offer online search services that cover not just this census but many other sources as well.
- 9.
For interrelations among Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews, see Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Cornell University Press, 2013).
- 10.
There were numerous rules to restrict outside visitors to the non-Pale Russia. The popular theatre play, The Yellow Ticket, in the early 1900s (later to become a silent movie) described some of the barriers that Jewish women encountered in order to enter Russia. My Aunt Belle Mitchell started her very long stage and movie career with the lead role in the stage production of this play before moving on to Hollywood where she appeared in over 100 films and TV productions between 1915 and 1978.
- 11.
Nancy Schoenburg and Stuart Schoenburg, Lithuanian Jewish Communities (Jason Aronson, 1996), 29.
- 12.
Polonsky, op. cit., 89.
- 13.
For an historical series of maps and information on them, see the Harvard University Source, Imperiia: Mapping the Russian Empire, at https://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire. For the territorial history of Poland, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Poland. For some historical maps of Lithuania, see http://lithuanianmaps.com.
- 14.
Filial societies were created in Vilnius, Kiev, and elsewhere. In 1847, the Society distributed an ethnographic questionnaire asking more than 7000 recipients to provide information on the (1) the appearance, (2) the language, (3) the domestic way of life, (4) the features of social life, (5) the mental and moral faculties and education, and (6) the folk tales and monuments of their communities. https://www.rgo.ru/en/archive. The work of the folklorist Ansky is covered in Part 3.
- 15.
For a history of Russian ethnography, see Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Central European University Press, 2014).
- 16.
Martin Gilbert has produced a number of historical atlases of the Jewish people. See his The Atlas of Jewish History. Cartography offices were among the first governmental units created in many countries.
- 17.
For example, YIVO’s Map at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/pale_of_settlement as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_showing_the_percentage_of_Jews_in_the_Pale_of_Settlement_and_Congress_Poland,_The_Jewish_Encyclopedia_(1905).jpg.; and http://www.berdichev.org/mappaleofsettlement.htm.
- 18.
These population numbers can be found in different sources including Map 7 in Polonsky’s The Jews in Poland Russia. Hal Bookfinder, a leading genealogist and expert on the Pale, drew on other sources with different totals. See his “The Changing Borders of Eastern Europe,” http://www.iajgs.org/jgscv/pdf/2006-05-07%20handout.pdf. Spitzer, my major source, has other numbers. Among the many other population numbers, see Steven T. Katz, The Shtetl, New Evaluations (New York University Press, 2007) and Gershon David Hundert’s, “The importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East-Central Europe.” He references Raphael Mahler’s analysis of a 1764–1765 tax capitation tax that when corrected suggested that there were 549,000 Jews living in Poland and 201,000 in Lithuania.
- 19.
In his Table 1, Dov Levin, op.cit., provides the separate populations for twelve different Lithuanian regions as reported in a 1765 census. There were 76,474 Jews at the time. See his The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania. He also has tables on Jewish and non-Jewish taxpayers, male and female, in towns and regions.
- 20.
Hundert, op. cit. reported that Warsaw’s Jews were a very small minority population prior to the mid-eighteenth century.
- 21.
Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl, Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 17.
- 22.
Ibid., 13. These are sizably different estimates.
- 23.
See Moses Shulvass, From East to West: The Westward Migration of Jews from Eastern Europe During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Wayne State University Press, 1971). For the commercialization of agriculture in the Ukraine and the dominating role Odessa played in this market, see Polonsky, op. cit., 77.
- 24.
Sinkoff, 19.
- 25.
There were many administrative reforms and name changes over time.
- 26.
One cannot be sure that the home village listed in genealogical records accurately place one’s ancestors. Jacob Rubenstein, for example, reported that he came from Vishtinetz but that his grandparents were from a close-by smaller settlement, “Liubove, a townlet even smaller than Vishtinetz, about 15 miles away.” His own father was not a native of Vishtinetz. In Bert Oppenheim, The Oppenheim Family History, 1750–1995 (Robert Reed Publishers, 1995). Some people living within an approximate 30-mile radius of a larger settlement would claim a larger settlement as their own. Harold Rhodes believes that “our ancestors did not come from one particular shtetl . They came from many shtetls, often some distance from each other. Jews were a tremendously mobile people.” Ibid., 44. Still other sources suggest that people would claim they hailed from the largest settlement in their gubernia.
- 27.
Compiled by Gary Mokotoff and (Avotaynu: First Edition, 1991). For a list of villages and towns depopulated of Jews during the Holocaust, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_villages_and_towns_depopulated_of_Jews_during_the_Holocaust, and Blackbook of Localities Whose Jewish Population Was Exterminated by the Nazis (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1965). The number of villages excluding Moldova is 11,237. Recent research suggests that the Jewish communities that were destroyed differed from those that survived. The surviving cities (now without their Jewish populations) have grown less, and both cities and administrative districts (oblasts) where the Holocaust had the largest impact later had worse economic and political outcomes. D. Acemoglu, T. A. Hassan, and James Robinson, “Social Structure and Development: A Legacy of the Holocaust in Russia,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126.2 (May 1, 2011). That is, some of the communities that contributed most to the larger economy were completely destroyed during the Shoah.
- 28.
Many villages had multiple alternative names. See the following reference to a later edition of Where Once We Walked.
- 29.
This master database of Jewish Communities throughout the world unifies and links together all of JewishGen’s resources about each community. Available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/communities/About.htm. It includes information on about 6000 Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The Lithuanian Special Interest Group’s map of Lithuanian shtetlach identifies individual settlements absent in Spitzer’s map that only sited towns of at least 500 residents of whom at least ten percent were Jews. See https://www.litvaksig.org/research/map/.
- 30.
Yannay Spitzer, A New Map of Jewish Communities in the Russian Empire, available online at https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/07/22/a-new-map-of-jewish-communities-in-the-russian-empire/.
- 31.
Gary Mokotoff, “Shtetl Geography,” in Sallyann Amdur Sack and Gary Mokotoff, ed., Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy (Avotaynu, 2004). This guide is an invaluable resource for both historians and genealogists. Many towns have the same name. For example, there are 100 Polish towns named Dabrowa. Ibid., p. 18.
- 32.
Spitzer, Occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement .
- 33.
Jerry Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010) places his non-quantitative history of Jewish capitalism in a general intellectual and theological European perspective rather than in the nineteenth-century Pale.
- 34.
For one of a large number of reviews of US federal policies to reduce racial segregation in American cities, see Robert E. Mitchell and Richard Smith, “Race and Housing: A Review and Comments on the Content and Effects of Federal Policy,” Annals (January, 1979). Many authors, including Spitzer, wrote that high birth rates (rates of natural population increase) in relatively stagnant economic areas with few occupational opportunities contributed to residential mobility within the Pale as well as to other countries.
- 35.
Spitzer, Pale in Comparison, p. 27. Even a district might be too limited a service area for some skills such as wood carver and carpenter, my great grandfather’s (presumed) occupation.
- 36.
Osterhammel, 687. His source was Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Moscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (University of California, 1985), 16.
- 37.
In his On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued for the social and individual value of diversity.
- 38.
There were settlements where Jews were not just in a majority but a very large one. These different profiles provide researchers with opportunities to explore the possible causes and consequences of living in minority versus differently weighted majority communities. Also see Kogan’s the earlier summary of the different “estates” within Russia and the Pale.
- 39.
Only slightly over two percent did that.
- 40.
Remember that his data exclude two populations: localities with fewer than 500 residents and larger settlements with fewer than ten percent Jews. Districts, according to Spitzer, were at least twice the size of the average American county.
- 41.
See, “The Emigration from Suwalk,” Landsmen (Fall 1990).
- 42.
Justizrat Bernhard Breslauer, The Emigration of Jews from the Province of Posen (Berlin: Berthold Levy, 1909).
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Mitchell, R.E. (2019). The Human Geography of the Pale. In: Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99145-0_3
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