What is (or was) the Pale of Settlement?

rfcneil

It was a name given to a place in Russia where Jews were allowed to live. It was prohibited for a Jew to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement Dec 25 09, 2:33 PM

looney_tunes

A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground and — by an obvious-enough extension — to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word pole is from the same source, as are impale and paling). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses — a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. The idea of an enclosed area still exists in some English dialects. In particular, the term was used to describe various defended enclosures of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English possession in that country. The best-known modern example is the Russian Pale, between 1791 and the Revolution of 1917, which were specified provinces and districts within which Russian Jews were required to live. Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England had direct jurisdiction — it varied from time to time, but was an area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446–7. Though there was an attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence around it. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pal2.htm Dec 25 09, 2:56 PM

Arpeggionist

The "Pale of Settlement" was not just for Russian Jews, but its territory extended into Poland and eastern Germanic territories as well. (My own great-grandparents were "Palisher" Jews - that is, Jews from the Pale - from Warsaw and the Dnyeper Valley region.) Dec 26 09, 5:14 PM