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The Fall of the Pale of Settlement (1905-1915)

Sam Aronow

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Sources:

Henry Abramson
"Shalom Aleichem and the History of Yiddish Literature"
Shalom Aleichem and the History of Yiddish...

Art History School
"Persecution, Exile, Confrontation; Marc Chagall the Painter of Love and Light"
Marc Chagall The Visionary Painter Who Bro...

Shimon Dubnov
The History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume III
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47212...

Shnayer Z. Leiman
"Benzion Katz: Mrs. Baba Bathra"
Tradition, Vol. 42, No. 2
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23264183

Alexander Orbach
"The Emergence of Ethnic Politics in 1905: The League for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jews of Russia"
Russian History, Vol. 37, No. 4
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24664551

Léon Poliakov
The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 4: Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933
https://amzn.to/447A22Q

Oleksandr Skrypnyk
"Mykola Krasovsky: From the Beilis affair to the Intelligence Service of the Ukrainian National Republic"
https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/...

0:00 Prologue: Two Artists
3:37 The Russian Revolution of 1905
5:53 The Duma
10:48 The Emperor and the Black Hundreds
13:46 The Beilis Trial
21:09 Exodus
24:58 The Fall of the Pale of Settlement

20 Comments

@SamAronow Creator 3 years ago (edited) Pinned

Notes/Corrections/etc.

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Correction: the Polish flag is not depicted upside-down; that is the flag of Austrian Galicia.
Omission: I didn't talk about the other side of my family. My great-grandfather Nahum Schenker and his family also fled their homes in Priluky near Poltava during the Black Hundreds pogroms and resettled in Odessa, where they made chocolate, before relocating to Cleveland in 1911. His future wife's family, the Chernick Wassermans, settled variously in Cleveland, Montreal, and Winnipeg, but I don't know as much about them. I'm saving that side for when we get to Prohibition.

@yochaigal 3 years ago

"Never mourned, but always remembered." That's exactly how I feel. My family is (on both sides) from the Pale, and it really hits home to think this way.

@TheronGJr 3 years ago

"You are going to New York, America? I am going to Chicago, America. We'll be neighbors!"

@a.bastianwiik5592 3 years ago

2:35 "Is there a proper blessing... for the Tsar?
Rabbi: A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!"

@kennyroberts9687 3 years ago

This is all so cool! I actually wrote my bachelor's thesis on the 1905 Revolution, the Kishinev Pogrom, and the resulting reactions from Zionist Jews, Anti-Zionist Jews, and the antisemitic Black Hundreds. This is so cool to see stuff that I researched and worked many hours on being taught to a wider audience. Thank you so much for this!

@Kattekwaad7 3 years ago

In my hometown in rural Holland, the prewar Jewish population was 32. 30 were murdered during the war and the 2 that survived hid on my grandfathers farms. After the war, they moved to what was then the British Palestine mandate.
All the Jewish heritage in my town was erased and the only thing remaining is an old Jewish cemetery (now protected by monument status).

The cemetery always made me sad, a community with so much history reduced to just a small monumental graveyard.

I really enjoy learning about Jewish history on this channel and it makes me wish my town still had a Jewish community.

@sjenner76 3 years ago

This was when my father’s family left the Russian Empire for East London. And then a large part of the extended family moved from there to this new town everyone was talking about; Hollywood.

@Great_Olaf5 3 years ago

Sam, I don't know if you hear this very often enough, so I'll say it here. You have become a truly amazing storyteller. 8 haven't been watching your channel from the beginning, the first video I watched is one you've since taken down, the one on Hebrew linguistics (I think the relationship between it and the other Semitic languages, but I can't recall exactly), which, despite your misgivings 8 enjoyed greatly. After that, I proceeded to watch your entire backlog up to that point, and have watched every new video nearly as soon as it comes out. It didn't take you long to hit your stride, but you've never stopped improving. Keep up the good work. Now, I'm going to rewatch this video, because you've reached the point where it's both very enjoyable to do so, and practically necessary to actually absorb everything.

@rezajafari6395 3 years ago

16:42 fun fact: this Vladimir Nabokov is the father of the guy who wrote Lolita

@fireball-yj8fl 3 years ago

I died at 19:50 with the "We finally found a non-problematic Ukrainian Nationalist Hero" like why don't they use this guy over Bandera of all people

@patrickkelmer6290 3 years ago

Strangely enough, Chagalls art was one of the things that made me begin to feel drawn to Judaism at 14.

@elligilberg1564 3 years ago

In 1916 My grandparents came from a shtetl in the Polish/Russian border region. They knew each other from home, came separately and married in Chicago. My grandmother was the most beautiful girl in the shtetl and my grandfather loved her from afar, but won her heart in the new country and gave her a good life. My grandfather had 12 brothers, he and five of them escaped to the States, Palestine and Argentina. So I and my many cousins are here today and in Israel. But 7 of the brothers did not leave, and their wives and children, 40 people in all died at Auschwitz. Thank you for your sharing your research, the story of your family and this part of Jewish history.

@oshergordon6406 3 years ago

1905 is when my great grandfather emigrated from Budapest to Jerusalem as a child with some of his family. (His sister who remained behind was murdered in 1944.)

@SanFranFan30 3 years ago (edited)

My great grandfather was in also from the Pale of Settlement on the coast on the Black sea, and from what I could gather from family stories his family made the move to the US (roughly around 1905) to both avoid pogroms and avoid the possibility of conscription as a child. His family landed in New York and then bounced around the north east for a bit between New Jersey and Boston before he spotted an ad as a young adult for tract of land for homesteading in what is now Alberta, Canada as a part of the Dominion Lands act, inadvertently escaping victimization from one empire into participating in the theft of indigenous land on behalf of another empire.

@D.L.Hunter.Palmer 1 year ago

These stories are so full of tragedy and incredible strength from both Jews and gentiles willing to see injustice even when it is not their own. It's incredible that the humanity that can initiate pogroms, murder their own son or knowingly charge an innocent man, can also defend that man, stand up to bigotry and build a nation.

@jonyprepperisrael60 3 years ago

my great granduncle was a Jewish painter from Ukraine, somewhere before 1909.
when he was either a kid or a teen he was arrested with his father and other people from his community by the police for a small Zionist meeting and was sent to a Tsarist Gulag.
from there he was released and he escaped for Austria and them later to America.

@The_Electric_Angel 3 years ago (edited)

When your a jew hating priest and a you fail to not only study the old but new testament.
I think you need to rethink even more then just your hatred.

@ilx1 3 years ago

positively surprised to see Finland mentioned in one of your videos, even more positively surprised to see it's something to be proud of! great stuff as always, keep the videos coming!