This chapter has four overlapping objectives.
First, it explains why the book is organized into five parts and nine chapters that are collectively linked to the tradition of writings on the basis of order in society.
Second, this chapter provides an overview of the basic physical and human geographies of the Pale, an area whose boundaries were redrawn over time by successive Russian Tsars.
Third, readers are introduced to systems and reason analyses that together with standard statistics and various other methodologies assist researchers in framing and answering questions not always found in traditional narrative histories .
Fourth, readers are reminded that the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement had multiple non-Jewish neighbors and that while the Jews were a minority population in most settlements, they were a majority in others. The history of the Jews is tied to the history of non-Jews and to forces that drove changes throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.
Building on Earlier Narrative Histories
We will link two complementary genres of history used in studies of the Pale of Settlement . Narrative histories , the first genre, draw on a range of investigative tools to explore a diverse range of specific topics and questions. Quantitative histories , the second of several genres, typically focus on fairly well-defined measurable topics and questions such as responses to high unemployment or what explains changing marriage and family patterns. While recognizing the value of quantitative history , authors writing in the narrative tradition might question the absence of adequate historical context found in specific number-heavy studies.
I provide both fodder and challenge to traditional narrative histories with concrete examples of how the perspectives of geography , economics, sociology, and regional science can add to our understanding of (1) what helped give social and personal order to the lives of Jews and their neighbors in the Pale, (2) sources of disorder, and (3) the consequences associated with disorder over time, the longue durƩe. Missing in this non-narrative approach are theologies, biographies, intellectual currents, inter-ethnic relations, developments outside the Pale of Settlement , and the many other topics covered by narrative historians.
Narrative historians of course freely quote numbers (statistics), but they do so for illustrative rather than for explanatory purposes, a distinction to be referenced later.1 Statistically informed analysts seem to differ from traditional historians in the meaning of āexplainā versus āunderstandā (verstehen).
My rationale for drawing on the vocabularies and approaches of non-historians is partially based on Stuart Firesteinā claim in his Ignorance : How It Drives Science that understanding and science advance with the production of new questions, not just new facts.2 Advancement can also come from adopting the perspectives, vocabularies, and research methods specific to the various social sciences and other traditional academic disciplines such as architecture and geology.
Instead of relying on new evidence (there is some of that), the present study mines and reorders the evidence provided by legions of historians in order to respond to questions raised in the various social and physical sciences. Each of these disciplines has its own vocabulary.
The present study is not a narrative history of the Pale of Settlement and the Jews who both lived and left the Pale.
Narrative historians seldom use any of the 2500 key economic terms found in the The Oxford Dictionary of Economics (2009 edition) or in the eight-volume set of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2008). It runs to 7344 pages with 5.7 million words in 1900 different articles authored by some 1500 eminent contributors.
Geography , psychology, political science, economics, and sociology each have its own vocabulary to instruct their members how to frame, research, and understand the world.3 And the same holds for members of the clergy: The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1997) has 1136 pages of terms and explanations.4
Disciplinary dictionaries mix factual, historical, and value-based assumptions. They help practitioners and others to filter and organize the past and the present. However, even the very best historians make value assumptions. Simon Schama does not shy away from them in his Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492ā1900.5
Universities have been criticized for their non-overlapping silos of expertise and languages . Siloing is much less an issue in problem-oriented departments of urban regional planning and in area-study centers, both part of my own pre-Foreign Service academic career. As a Foreign Service officer assigned various titles including Behavioral Science Advisor and General Development Officer, I had long-term postings in the Near East and Africa by the US Agency for International Development. Early in my academic career, I was also a sinologist and director of social science research centers including four years in Hong Kong where in addition to multiple social research projects in the then-colony and throughout Southeast Asia I was a technical and marketing consultant with one of the regionās major market research firms.
Most if not all of my research was funded to help understand and solve fairly well-defined problems, not to follow important tangential challenges. Traditional narrative histories were essential to my understanding but as with so many others in the public and private sectors, I often had fairly narrowly defined problems to help understand and solve. That required a minimal background in various academic disciplines and a willingness to draw on experts outside my own limited field of practical experience. I am a multi-disciplinary generalist, not a specialist.
Yes, in the far past (not today), I had some minimal language skills (two Chinese dialects, street Arabic, and Portuguese) along with a portfolio of standard survey research and regional science capabilities, also very far in the past. Those are the minimal skills that I bring as a non-expert on Jewish and Russian history to a study of how the Pale of Settlement was organized and changed primarily during the nineteenth century.
The present book provides examples of how new historians and others are exploring what gave order to those who lived in the vast heterogenous areas within the Pale. While perhaps oversimplifying great diversity, there were common Pale-wide social-ordering principles that are central concerns of the present study.
This bookās nine chapters are grouped into five parts including the present overview.
Chapter 2 in Part II begins with the diverse physical geographies of Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine. There were variations in soils , topography, drainage, and climate . The multiple human geographies introduced in Chapter 3 sat on top of diverse physical geographies.
Much of this book is organized around different kinds of human geographies, their changes over time, and the meanings these geographies had for those who lived in the Pale. There was not single Pale of Settlement but many different human geographies.
Part IIIās three chapters explore where Jews lived, how their individual settlements were organized into larger networks , how the immediately built environment of individual residences shaped lives at home followed by some of the forces that help explain trends in oneās immediate family life: marriages, divorces , and remarriages .
Just as there were heterogeneous physical environments within the Pale, the populations of Jews and their neighbors were spatially dispersed as well. In some provinces, they were a large minority; in others, they were a small minority. And the same variations were found among the Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Germans who shared the same physical and economic spaces of their Jewish neighbors.
Yes, not only variations, but also spatially organizing forces explain why individual settlements are not randomly arrayed across space in the physical geography but instead consist of central places surrounded by smaller dependent villages and towns.
And yes, there were clear inter- as well as intra-regional differences in where Jews lived, but regional scientists also argue that settlements are not randomly arrayed across the widely diverse physical geographies described in Chapter 2. They are organized, as Chapter 4 in Part II reports, into identifiable networks that were systems of order.
We will see why those systems mutated over time and why the vocabulary of systems prov...