18th century
Legal persecution
23 déc. 1791·Empire russe
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Catherine II's ukase establishes the Pale of Settlement and restricts Jewish residence to the annexed provinces of Poland and the South
The partitions of Poland had made the Russian Empire, within a generation, the state with the greatest number of Jews in the world, even as its legislation barred them from residence. The ukase of Catherine II resolves the contradiction: Jews may remain and trade where they find themselves — the annexed provinces and the southern lands to be colonized — but nowhere else.
Thus is born the Pale of Settlement, which for more than a century will confine the majority of European Jewry within a delimited territory, with prohibitions on residence in villages, school quotas, and professional restrictions. It will disappear only with the imperial regime itself.
- Period :
- 18th century
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Empire russe
*Polnoïe sobranié zakonov Rossiiskoï imperii* ; Simon Doubnov, *History of the Jews in Russia and Poland* ; John Klier, *Russia Gathers Her Jews*.