Most of the Jews who arrived in England were like those in “Fiddler on the Roof”.  They lived in little villages called shtetls (little towns). Some of these shtetls were big towns, which strictly speaking should have been called Shtods (shtetl is the dimunitive of shtod). Owing to the fact that European Jews were not allowed to belong to the professions, and were restricted both geographically and economically by the Russian government, they became tanners, millers, shoemakers (like Mendel), rag and bone and empty bottle merchants (to become my father’s rags to almost-riches story), and any other kind of job too coarse for a goy. The shtetls were situated in the “Pale (Border) of Settlement”, which was the area within which Jews were allowed to live – the Pale of “Shtetlment.”

(The hands on the map refer to specific cities mentioned in a genealogy of the Jewish “Turkel” family, on whose website I found this map and the map of pogroms in the Pale).

The “Pale” stretched from the Baltic down to the Black Sea, which, at the time was a part of Western Russia that included the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Byelo-Russia and Russian Poland. The Russian Jews were expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg and had to live in the Pale. Later, they had to vacate  the rural areas within the Pale and were sent to the shtetls. All non-Jews had the “privilege” denied to Jews; the privilege of living “beyond the pale”

About four million European Jews left the “Pale of settlement”. Many Jews wanted to leave but it was difficult to do so, because, after 1882, they were subjected to an increasingly harsh level of official persecution. Between 1871 and 1906, there were many pogroms and acts of anti-Jewish violence.

In theory, the Russian government was prepared to let them go, but in practice made it very difficult for them to do so. It was often much easier  for Jews to arrange to have themselves smuggled over the border. No one trusted the government anyhow, so even if you managed to get official permission to leave, the smuggler’s route was the safer option. The Pale was dismantled in 1917, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution.