By James Aitchison

It’s a common enough English saying.  When someone’s behaviour or actions are unacceptable and outside the bounds of normal limits, their conduct is deemed to be “beyond the pale”.  Being “beyond the pale” covers a plethora of sins: bad language, unseemly behaviour, offensive conduct, being out of order, out of line, or just plain outrageous.

It’s a curious phrase.  Like references to a “blue moon”, “a red letter day” or “barking up the wrong tree”, it’s an expression we take for granted.  But where did it come from?  And what is or was “the pale”?

“Pale” comes from the Latin word palus, meaning a wooden stake or fence.  Thus a “pale” came to mean an enclosed area surrounded by a fence, and sometimes a ditch.  

There were two famous “pales” in history, one English and one Russian.  

The English Pale in Ireland was an area controlled by the English crown, where people lived safely (and no doubt soberly).  The four “obedient shires” were marked by wooden fence posts hammered into the ground; later, a ten-foot deep ditch with eight-foot high banks, lined with thick thorny bushes, marked the boundary of the Pale.  Stepping beyond the Pale meant leaving the civilised settlement and venturing (God forbid) into the countryside of the wild Irish where untold savagery lurked.  The good citizens of the Pale were forbidden to intermarry with the Irish or speak Gaelic.

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While the English were concerned with keeping the Irish out, the Russians were concerned with keeping the Jews in!

The Pale of Settlement in Russia (in Russian, Cherta) was established by Catherine the Great in 1791.  Located in the western region of the Russian Empire, it corraled her Jewish subjects into a strictly controlled area of 1.2 million square kilometres (500,000 square miles): all of today’s Belarus, Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine, east-central Poland and a small part of Latvia.  It was the only Russian territory in which Jewish people could legally and permanently reside.  

Jews were prohibited from leaving the Pale.  Life was bleak.  The movie Fiddler on the Roof gave us a glimpse of life in a Jewish shtetl, a small settlement where Jewish culture thrived.  At its peak, The Pale held over five million Jewish residents, which represented 40 per cent of the world’s Jewish population at the time.  Jews could not own land in the Pale; they became merchants, artisans and shopkeepers.  Only a few rich educated Jews were allowed to live “beyond the pale”.

The Russian state was not content to pen the Jews into the Pale.  In 1827, tens of thousands of Jewish boys as young as 12 were forcibly removed from the Pale and conscripted into the Russian army for terms of 25 years.  They were also pressured to become Christians.

Significantly, the majority of citizens in the Pale were not Jewish.  Antisemitism was rife.  Fiercely hated by many Russians, especially the illiterate Russian peasantry, the Jews became easy targets for brutal repression (or pogroms).  The worst of the pogroms, from 1881 to 1883, and 1903 to 1906, were catastrophic.  Not surprisingly, more than two million Jews emigrated to the United States between 1881 and 1914.

The Pale, at its peak the size of today’s France, along with all laws governing Russian Jewry, was formally abolished on 2 April 1917.  Only later would Stalin make life harsh again for his Jewish citizens.

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The confluence of language and history are a source of continual surprise — especially when one goes exploring “beyond the pale”.