First, a review of some facts about Jewish life in Eastern Europe would provide historical context and inform our understanding of what kind of settlements Jews inhabited.

Source: The Jewish Virtual Library

This is a commonly cited map of the Pale of Settlement – which is another name for the region to which Jewish residential communities were restricted – and not without reason, for it gives an overview of this region in both geographic and demographic dimensions.

Some quick facts to get us acquainted:

The Pale

• extended from present-day western Russia, notably short of the capitol city of Moscow, to the former imperial border with the kingdoms of Prussia and Austria-Hungary.
• comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia
• included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia
• covered an area of about 1 million sq. km. (386,100 sq. mi.) from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea
• was inhabited by 4,483,300 Jews in 1897, 40% of the total Jewish population of the world and 94% of the total Jewish population of the Russia Empire

This was their breakdown in the Russian Empire:

Source: East European Jews in Two Worlds

The separate territories that we see above all had certain ethnic majorities. Ukrainians, Moldovans, Poles, and so on, each had a province where they were the majority ethnicity. They were likelier to have experience a sense of a homeland. The Jews, however, were a minority in every province, from 17.5% in the province of Grodno to 3.8% in the province of Taurida.

What about the remaining 6% outside of the Pale?

From its imperial establishment  in 1791  until its revolutionary demise in 1917, the Pale’s boundaries were constantly shifting.  Some groups were, however, granted legal rights to residence beyond the demarcation lines. These included renowned artisans, Jewish merchants of the 1st guild, people with a higher/special education, and soldiers drafted in accordance with the 1810 Recruit Charter.

So now we know where Jews lived. But how did they live there?