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Tsar Nicholas I created the Pale of Jewish Settlement in April 1835, a strip of land stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, running chiefly through the Polish provinces. Jews were driven from their homes and resettled into the Pale which included Lithuania, Poland, the south-western provinces, and White Russia with a few variations until its end in 1917. Save by special privilege, no Jew was allowed to make his home elsewhere than within this Pale. The consequence is that fully 95 per cent of the Jews in Russia are crowded into the Pale. Within the Pale, Jews were banned from most rural areas and some cities. They were prohibited from building synagogues near churches and using Hebrew in official documents; they were barred from agriculture, they instead earned a living as petty traders, middlemen, shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. By 1885 over 4 million Jews inhabited the Pale.

By the time the term "anti-Semitism" was first used in the late 1870s, the peasants in Russia viewed Jews as aliens; their religion, language, food, clothing, and manners were all different, strange, and mysterious - even the government discriminated against them. According to historian Shlomo Lambroza, "the official view was that Jews were a parasitic element in the Russian Empire who lived off the hard earned wages of the narod [people]". The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 threw the Russian government into chaos and directly preceded the first major outbreak of pogroms. Beginning with Elizabetgrad, a wave of pogroms spread throughout the southwestern regions, totaling 200 in 1881 alone. The authorities condoned pogroms through their inaction and indifference, sometimes even showing sympathy for the pogromists. In 1882, the Ministry of the Interior passed "temporary" May Laws in an attempt to chastise and reform the Jews, which lasted until 1917. These laws prohibited new Jewish settlement outside towns and shtetles, prohibited Jews from buying property in the countryside, and banned Jews from trading on Sunday mornings or Christian holidays. Instead of preventing further pogroms, these laws ushered in a new period of anti-Jewish discrimination and severe persecution. Regular pogrom outbreaks lasted until June 7, 1884, when the last pogrom of the series occurred in Nizhnii Novgorod; this pogrom was an exceptionally vicious one with its victims killed with axes and thrown from rooftops. The next wave of pogroms began in the spring of 1903, in the midst of chaos and anarchy in the countryside, demonstrations and rioting in the cities, and violent anti-Semitic campaigns. During 1903 and 1904, 45 pogroms occurred. However, the worst anti-Jewish violence broke out in 1905, after Tsar Nicholas II was forced to sign the October Manifesto, creating a constitutional monarchy. The most widespread response to the continued discrimination can be found in the mass emigration of Jews to America and Western Europe. From 1899 to 1907 some 55,000 refugees left for the United States alone. Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2 million Jews leave Russia.

For nearly three thousand years, the names of Jewish men in all Hebrew-language documents have been written "X ben Y" (X, son of Y), where X and Y are masculine given names. With rare exceptions, Jews who lived in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century had no hereditary names, a circumstance that created difficulties for the government of this massive population. Especially complex was the procedure of checking tax collections. The czarist administration was so concerned about these questions that the absence of surnames was taken into account even when preparing the first general legislation concerning Jews. Clause 3.32 of the ukase that appeared on December 9, 1804, stated that each Jew must have or assume a hereditary family name or sobriquet that must be used without any change in all transactions and registers.

The second general legislation concerning Jews, issued on May 31, 1835, defined the final state of Jewish Pale of Settlement and also addressed the surnaming process. Paragraph 16 of this document stated that each Jew of the Russian Empire must keep forever the hereditary or assumed family name without any change. The fact that this provision was included indicated that the law of 1804 had not been followed rigorously and that numerous Jews either had adopted no surnames or had changed them once adopted.

Legislation mandating surnames for Jews was not restricted to Russia, but followed a general European pattern. Austrian Emperor Joseph II had proclaimed the first law of this type in 1787 making Austrian Jews the first Askenazic Jews to adopt surnames. Although the Austrian process of Jewish surnaming occurred at the end of the 18th century, surnames did not appear until later in some regions; the law of February 21, 1805, particularly concerned surnames for Jews from western Galicia. The appearance of the ukase of 1804 in Russia preceded corresponding laws in other regions of Europe: Frankfurt-am-Main (1807), France (July 20, 1808), Baden (1809), Westphalia (1812), Prussia (March 11, 1812), Bavaria (1813), Württenberg (1828), Posen (Poznan')(1833) and Saxony (1834). The great majority of European Askenazic Jews took their surnames during the period from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century.

Kahal authorities were responsible for implementing the surnaming process in Russia, so Russians Jews assumed family names within their own communities. Unfortunately, no direct testimony survives to describe the process, although some information may be gleaned by analyzing lists of Jewish surnames from various regions at the beginning of the 20th century. Since there were no regulations concerning the selection of surnames, it seems quite possible that many surnames were chosen by those who bore them.

At the beginning of the 20th century, large number of Russian Jews lived in the same area where their ancestors had lived when they assumed surnames a century earlier. Surnames derived from toponymies (place names) are common among Jews of various countries. In Russia, surnames based on place names had already become traditional by the beginning of the 19th century. The most common pattern was the addition of the suffix skij to the stem of a toponym, as in Movsha Yanovskij (that is, Movsha from Yanov).

Surnames based on place names are formed not from the name of the locality where the person lives, but from the name of the locality from which he came. There is no reason to call a man who lives in Slutsky by the name Slutskij ("of Slutsk" in Russian), since all people in this place are of Slutsk. A man who migrated from Slutsk to Minsk, however, might easily acquire the name Slutskij while in Minsk. As proof of this naming pattern, we find the surname Okrainets ("from Ukraine") in Byelorussia and the surname Litvak (meaning "Jew from Lithuania or Byelorussia") common in Ukraine.

For numerous reasons, many Russian Jews at the beginning of the 19th century did not live in their place of birth. At the end of the 18th century the Russian government allowed Jews to migrate to new territories, and many did so. At the same time, Russians expelled Jews from villages into district centers. Since these expulsions occurred at about the same time that surnames were adopted, when Jews acquired surnames many lived in new localities and assumed surnames indicating their places of origins. At the beginning of the 20th century, surnames derived from the names of villages or townlets were generally found in the center of the same district, while surnames derived from the names of district centers were usually found in the neighboring district. In the same way that when you are traveling abroad and someone asks "Where are you from?" your first response might be "America". More questioning might evoke "New York", "Queens County, just outside New York City", and finally "Forest Hill". So too, those who relocated were from "Russia", "Vitebsk"(the guberniya), "Lepel"(the district), "Ulla"(the town).

In general there were Five types of names (people had to pay for their choice of names; the poor had assigned names):

1. Names that were descriptive of the head of household: Examples: Hoch (tall), Klein (small), Cohen (priest), Burger (City dweller), Shein (good looking), Levi (temple singers), Gross (large), Schwartz (dark), Weiss (white), Kurtz (short)

2. Names describing occupations: Examples: Holtzkocker (wood chopper), Geltschmidt (goldsmith), Schneider (tailor), Kreigs-man (warrior), Isen (iron), Fischer (fish)

3. Names from the city of residence: Examples: Berlin, Frankfurter, Danziger, Oppenheimer, Deutsch (German) Pollack (Polish), Breslau, Mannheim, Cracow, Warshaw

4: Bought names: Examples: Gluck (luck), Rosen and Rosenblatt, Rosenberg (roses), Diamond, Koenig (king), Spielman (spiel is to play), Lieber (love), Berg (mountain), Wasserman (water dweller), Kershenblatt (churchpaper), Stein (glass)

5. Assigned names (usually undesirable): Examples: Plotz (to die), Klutz (clumsy), Billig (cheap)