Ghetto

Diaspora Jews in late antiquity and the European Middle Ages lived together voluntarily, for security and communal convenience, in urban neighborhoods that were called Judengasse, in German-speaking countries; giudecca, Judaica, juiverie, carrière, or judería in Romance-speaking countries; and, in Muslim countries, equivalents of Harat-al-Yahud, "the Jewish quarter." Besides these voluntary Jewish enclaves, in which non-Jews also lived, medieval governments occasionally attracted Jews to settle in undeveloped regions by reserving special areas for them. These voluntary Jewish districts were usually walled and gated.

A different form of restricted residence that affected millions of Jews was the Russian Pale of Settlement, covering four hundred thousand square miles between the Baltic and Black seas, defined in 1791 and abolished after the 1917 revolution. Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, which had no Jews, annexed Polish territory with a large Jewish population. It restricted Jewish residence to some of the annexed territory, which Czar Nicholas I (reigned 1835–1855) gave the name "Pale of Settlement." In the course of the nineteenth century, Jews, who were a minority in these territories, were expelled from villages and compelled to live in towns and cities, and were limited to certain occupations. These regulations, which by 1897 applied to nearly five million Jews, became onerous at a time when restrictions on other population groups were relaxed. Pauperization, legal restrictions, and hostility in the pale provoked mass Jewish emigration, which flowed to the ghettos in other countries.