The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation.

It extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line inside the country, westwards to the Imperial Russian border with the Kingdom of Prussia (later the German Empire) and Austria-Hungary.

Furthermore, it comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia and largely corresponded to historical lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Cossack Hetmanate, the Ottoman Empire (with Yedisan), Crimean Khanate, and eastern Principality of Moldavia (Bessarabia).

Most people relied on small service or artisan work that could not support the number of inhabitants, which resulted in emigration, especially in the late 19th century.

The Russian Empire during the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the area included in the Pale with its large minorities of Jewish, Roman Catholic and until mid-19th century Eastern Catholic population (although much of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are predominantly Eastern Orthodox).

[2][3] The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.

The Pale came into being under the rule of Catherine the Great in 1791,[5] initially as a measure to speed colonization of territory on the Black Sea recently acquired from the Ottoman Empire.

[7] The dramatic westward expansion of the Russian Empire through the annexation of Polish–Lithuanian territory substantially increased the Jewish population.

[6] At times, by imperial decree Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities, or certain cities, (as in Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta), and were forced to move to small provincial towns, thus fostering the rise of the shtetls.

[citation needed] Jewish merchants of the First Guild (купцы первой гильдии, the wealthiest sosloviye of merchants in the Russian Empire), people with higher or special education, university students, artisans, army tailors, ennobled Jews, soldiers (drafted in accordance with the Recruit Charter of 1810), and their families had the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement.

The extremely restrictive decrees and recurrent pogroms led to much emigration from the Pale, mainly to the United States and Western Europe.

However, emigration could not keep up with birth rates and expulsion of Jews from other parts of the Russian Empire, and thus the Jewish population of the Pale continued to grow.

[6] During World War I, the Pale lost its rigid hold on the Jewish population when large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior to escape the invading German army.

Various organizations supplied clothes to poor students, provided kosher food to Jewish soldiers conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army, dispensed free medical treatment for the poor, offered dowries and household gifts to destitute brides, and arranged for technical education for orphans.

[citation needed] Amid the difficult conditions in which the Jewish population lived and worked, the courts of Hasidic dynasties flourished in the Pale.

[24] In 1912–1914, S. An-sky led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to the Pale, which visited around 70 shtetls in Volyn, Podolia, and Galicia, gathering folk stories and artifacts, recording music, and making photos, as an attempt to preserve and salvage traditional Ashkenazim culture that was vanishing because of modernization, pogroms, and emigration.