5587–5616 AM · 1827 CE — 1856 CE

The Pale of Settlement and the Cantonists

The Russian Empire confined millions of Jews to its western provinces, and under Nicholas I began taking Jewish boys as soldiers for twenty-five years to baptise them.

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.

How we know

The Statutes concerning the Jews of 1804 and 1835; the Jewish conscription statute of 26 August 1827. Cantonist memoirs recorded in the later nineteenth century. Rabbinic responses appear in the responsa of Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor and in the correspondence of communities in the Pale.

Sources

Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar

Jerusalem Talmud, Terumot 8:4 — the ban on handing over one man to save many

Rishonim

Rambam, Yesodei HaTorah 5:5 — the same prohibition in Rambam’s code

Documents of the period

the conscription statute 1827 — twenty-five years of service and the cantonist battalions
the Statute on the Jews 1835 — the borders of the Pale of Settlement in imperial law

Basis: tradition.

People and places

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin · Chatam Sofer · Rabbi Yisrael Salanter · Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin · Chofetz Chaim · The Tzemach Tzedek · The kahal—how a community was governed · Kazan · The Maharash—Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn

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