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JewishHistoryעברית

Expulsion of Jews from the villages of Mogilev and Vitebsk

Date
11 April 1823 – January 1825Hebrew date: 30th of Nisan, 5583
Location
Mogilev and Vitebsk governoratesBelarus
Then part of
Russian Empire
Perpetrators
  • Emperor Alexander I (State)
  • Committee of Ministers (State)
  • Governor-General Khovanski of White Russia (State)
Killed (estimate)
No reliable estimate
Expelled (estimate)
20,000[1]More than 20,000 driven from the villages by January 1824 (source 1).
Country

0.42% – 0.51% of the Jewish population of Russian Empire (c. 1881)[19]

Worldwide

0.61% of the worldwide Jewish population (c. 1825)[14]

Category
Expulsion
Confidence
DisputedDubnow states that more than 20,000 Jews had been driven from the villages by January 1824 and that by early 1825 most rural Jews in the two governorates had been removed. He also quotes the Council of State in 1835 as saying that the measure had been carried into effect. Gessen records the 1823 resettlement decree and writes that the rural evictions of this era were carried out far from fully. The file keeps Dubnow's count in the summary and does not treat Gessen's general statement as a second head-count.

Summary

On 11 April 1823 Alexander I ordered the Jews of the Mogilev and Vitebsk governorates to give up village leases and inns by 1 January 1824 and to move from the villages into cities and towns by 1 January 1825. S. M. Dubnow states that local officials drove more than 20,000 Jewish men and women from the villages of both governorates by January 1824, and that by the beginning of 1825 most rural Jews there had been removed. Refugees crowded into the towns. Governor-General Khovanski, after touring the district, advised the Committee of Ministers to stop the expulsions. Yuly Gessen's Brockhaus-Efron article records the 1823 decree and states that the rural evictions of this period were carried out far from fully.

Sources

  1. S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume 1, pp. 406–407. Jewish Publication Society of America (1916)
  2. S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume 1, p. 407. Jewish Publication Society of America (1916)
  3. Yuly Gessen, Eviction of Jews in Russia. Brockhaus-Efron Jewish Encyclopedia

Jewish population (estimates)

  • Worldwide: 3,281,000[14]c. 1825DellaPergola's Fundamentals Table 2 gives 3,281,000 Jews worldwide in 1825.
  • Russian Empire: 3,932,000 – 4,748,640[19]c. 1881Bartal and Moss (Posen Library) give about 2,912,000 Jews in the Pale of Settlement and 1,020,000 in Congress Poland in 1881 (sum 3,932,000), excluding Jews outside those zones. Boustan cites about 4.1 million for the empire in 1881. A contemporary German compilation of Russian Jewish statistics (Freimann Sammlung) reconstructs 4,748,640 for 1879/1884 (Pale 2,920,639 + Poland ~1,078,000 + outside the Pale ~750,000) and says the total had by then passed five million. Figures cover the Russian Empire including Congress Poland.

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