The Pale of Settlement and the Cantonists

After the partitions of Poland, Russia suddenly held the largest Jewish population in the world. Its answer was the Pale of Settlement: by Catherine II's decrees and the Statute concerning the Jews of 1804, Jews might live only in some twenty-five western provinces, barred from the interior and both capitals. By the end of the century about five million people lived in the Pale, crowded into small towns under limits on trades, land and schooling.

The harshest measure was the conscription statute Nicholas I signed on 26 August 1827. Jewish communities had to supply recruits; service lasted twenty-five years and boys could be taken from the age of twelve. They were sent to 'cantonist' battalions, where the years before adulthood did not count toward the term and the aim was baptism: those who refused were starved, beaten, made to kneel in snow. Selection was left to the kahal, which corroded the community from within and produced the khappers, catchers who took poor men's children in place of rich men's sons.

The generation called Nicholas's reign 'the time of the decrees'. Alexander II abolished the battalions in 1856, but the Pale endured until 1917, and it made Russian Jewry what it became: a world of shtetl poverty, yeshivot, Hasidic courts — and, from the 1880s, of mass emigration.