440 A History of Judaism
have been marginalized, and sometimes the victims of antisemitism of
one kind or another, in most of the societies in which they have lived.
The position of the Jewish population of eastern Europe in the late
eighteenth century, when the culture of yeshivot was at its height and
Hasidism was beginning to take root, was greatly affected by the expan-
sion of the power of tsarist Russia into Poland from 1772. Jews were
largely excluded from Russia itself, and the tsars, who in general
imposed strict controls on movement within their territories, estab-
lished limits to Jewish settlement. The size of what came to be called
from the late eighteenth century the ‘Pale of Settlement’ varied over the
next century and a quarter. It included at various times much of modern
Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Ukraine as well as parts of
western Russia. From the late 1850s rights of residence elsewhere in
Russia began to be granted to the richest merchants, and to university
graduates, medical professionals and some craftsmen, but such excep-
tions were ended in 1882, when, after pogroms in southern Russia in
1881 brought to the attention of the state the tensions between Jewish
and Russian merchants in the villages, the May Laws also restricted
new settlement by Jews in the towns and townlets within the Pale so as
to protect the interests of the Russian villagers.
The intense religious life of the shtetl (a Yiddish term for a market
town inhabited mostly by Jews, such as were common in eastern Europe)
came increasingly under threat. For generations Jewish communities
had thrived in such small towns, which were originally owned by
the Polish nobility and settled by Jews in order to provide services to
the surrounding villagers (such as mills, inns and breweries) or to exer-
cise special rights (such as the collection of duties and taxes for the
state). The Jews acted as middlemen between the aristocracy and the
peasantry as they had done from the late Middle Ages. In these com-
munities, traditional ideals of piety, learning, scholarship, communal
justice and charity were fused, against a background of constant graft
by each family to ensure an income sufficient to buy chicken or fish for
the Sabbath and unleavened bread for Pesach. In the synagogue, where
study, assembly and prayer all concentrated, men of learning, substance
and status sat near the ark, faced by the established householders, with
the ignorant and poor ranged behind and beggars dependent on com-
munal charity by the western wall. At home, according to the idealized
stories of the great Yiddish author Shalom Aleichem, the patriarch
enjoyed his Yiddishkeyt (an evocative Yiddish word meaning ‘a Jewish