The Ukrainians have been giving numbers of ‘settlements’ that they have recovered. A friend asked whether the word used by English-speaking broadcasters was influenced by the Pale of Settlement of Czarist times. I was surprised and tried to find out.
As a starting point, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth established the Warsaw Confederation in 1573, giving religious liberty to Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews and Muslims. This developed after 1791 (when Russia took over Poland and Lithuania) into a system by which Jews, principally, could live under restrictions only in territory on the marches of Russia. The Pale of Settlement took in much of today’s Ukraine, with White Russia (Belarus), Lithuania and Bessarabia (part of Moldova). The English phrase Pale of Settlement, however, was not used until 1891, translating the Russia chertá osédlosti. The Pale of Settlement in English was modelled linguistically on the Pale in Ireland, where English rule had held sway, and the Pale of Calais.
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