Typical Living Arrangements
Where Did The Jews Live: Pale of Settlement
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¤ This situation had positive and negative consequences.
¤ On one hand, the Pale of Settlement was characterized by poverty and hardship
¤ On the other hand, the Jews had lived up to this point as tiny populations scattered throughout Europe.
¤ Now most of them were congregated and felt unity and nationalism (not a Russian one, but rather a Jewish one)
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Negative: (traditional Jewish occupations in small-scale commerce and artisanry couldn’t compete in the new capitalist economies).
Positive: Now, most of them were all in one place, and with the general population explosion in Europe in the 1800s, they became a mass of people. They started feeling like a nation, in the political sense of the word, and began regarding themselves in national terms – as a distinct people dispersed over many countries.
Photograph of a little house used for both living and artisanry situated in a Shtetl in Mogilev which in present day Lithuania/Belarus. Source: A World Of Our Fathers
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Where did the Jews live?
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¤ In the Pale, the Jews congregated into villages known as “Shtetls”
¤ Means village in Yiddish
¤ Jewish community within a village
¤ Christians lived there too – but 2 communities worlds apart
¤ Prejudice of Christians – tolerated them but did not accept them
¤ Separated also by laws, customs, kashrut, language (Yiddish)
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Residence Patterns
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¤ A shtetl usually had a few thousand inhabitants, was centered around a marketplace, and could be characterized by:
¤ Religious pillars: Rabbis and synagogues
¤ Sabbath was the unifying day for people of all classes
¤ Close living quarters
¤ Social Structure: Hierarchy
¤ Matrilineal Residence Patterns
¤ Busy streets and much entertainment
¤ Many organizations and community events
¤ All walks of life; political figures, religious, shopkeepers, merchants, artisans
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Shtetl: An Account
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¤ “The gentiles called the Jews Parach, a very negative expression which means an oozing, bleeding scab. Jewish boys often had these crusts on their heads, possibly because their hair was close-cropped or perhaps because genetic factors weakened their ability to resist this scourge. Small towns were practically inbred, with cousins marrying cousins. The whole small shtetl was related.”- Leon Wells
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¤ Many Jews were urban
¤ Warsaw(Poland) and Vilna(Lithuania) were heavily populated with Jews
¤ Rich, cultural urban life
¤ Not only religious, also secular Jews
¤ The Jewish population in Russia grew from 1.6 million in 1820 to 5.6 million in 1910
Men Studying in a Yeshiva; They couldn’t do this anywhere else because they were allowed to have Jewish activities out in the open. (Source: Shtetl, Hoffman, circa 1880)
Wedding Ceremony in a Kiev village. (1884)
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Factors Attributing To Emigration
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¤ Many factors including, but not limited to:
¤ Pogroms
¤ Discrimination
¤ Economic Opportunity
¤ Religious Freedom
¤ Prior Jewish Immigration
¤ Forced Urbanization
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Pogroms
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Russian term for “devastation”
1881 – assassination of Alexander II led to a wave of Pogroms in Southern Russia against the Jewish community
¾ of the 2 million Jews who left Europe between 1881 and 1914 came from the Russian Empire
The freeing of the serfs in 1861 meant that uneducated peasants flooded the cities looking for work. There they often ran into conflict with the better-educated and wealthier Jews, against whom they began to organize and riot
Photograph of a Pogrom in the Soviet Union, 1921. Source: Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, Klier, 2004
-In many towns the proportion of Jews without fixed employment reached 50 % or more by the end of the century.
-They have become so impoverished many went on wealth fare and were dependent on community programs
Men Studying in a Yeshiva; They couldn’t do this anywhere else because they were allowed to have Jewish activities out in the open. (Source: Shtetl, Hoffman, circa 1880)
