This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies, questions, theories and analytical methods of human geography, economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the immediate built environment, the book explores how both physical and human space influenced responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.