Azerbaijani Jews

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Azerbaijani Jews are Jews (Judæo-Tat: çuhuro / жугьуро / ז'אוּהאוּרו; Yiddish: אידם; Azeri: cuhudlar, yəhudilər; Russian: евреи) who live in Azerbaijan.

Contents 1 Distribution 2 History 3 Mountain Jews 4 Ashkenazi Jews 5 Other Jewish subgroups 6 Gers and Subbotniks 7 Life of the community 8 Antisemitism in Azerbaijan 9 Famous Azerbaijani Jews 10 External links 11 References

[edit] Distribution

Historically Jews in Azerbaijan have been represented by various subgroups, mainly Mountain Jews, Ashkenazi Jews and Georgian Jews. Azerbaijan at one point was or still is home to smaller communities of Krymchaks, Kurdish Jews and Bukharian Jews, as well non-Jewish Judaistic groups like Subbotniks and Gers. The total number of Jewish residents in Azerbaijan as of 2002 was 8,900 people with about 5,500 of them being Mountain Jews.^[1] A few more thousand descend from mixed families.^[2] Jews mainly reside in the cities of Baku, Sumqayit, Quba, Oguz and the town of Krasnaya Sloboda, the only town in the world where Mountain Jews constitute majority. Historically Jews were present in and around the city of Shamakhi (mainly in the village of Muji) but the community has been non-existent since the early 1920s.^[2]

[edit] History

Azerbaijani Jewry traces its roots back to the existence of Caucasian Albania, an ancient and early medieval kingdom situated in what is now Azerbaijan, and populated with predecessors of modern Lezgins, Tsakhurs, Azeris, Udis, etc. Archaeological excavations carried out in 1990 resulted in the discovery of the remains of the 7th century Jewish settlement near Baku and of a synagogue 25 kilometres to the southeast of Guba.^[2]

The first religious meeting-house in Baku was built in 1832 and was reorganized into a synagogue in 1896; more synagogues were built in Baku and its suburbs in the late 19th century. The first choir synagogue in Baku opened in 1910.^[3]

From the late 19th century Baku became one of the centres of the Zionist movement in the Russian Empire.^[3] The first Hovevei Zion was established here in 1891, followed by the first Zionist organization in 1899. The movement remained strong in the short-lived Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (1918–1920) marked with the establishment of the Jewish Popular University in 1919, periodicals printed in Yiddish, Hebrew, Judæo-Tat and Russian, and a number of schools, social clubs, benevolent societies and cultural organizations.^[2]

After Sovietization all Zionism-related activities including those of cultural nature that were carried out in Hebrew were banned. In the early 1920s a few hundred Mountain Jewish families from Azerbaijan and Dagestan left for Palestine and settled in Tel-Aviv. The next aliyah did not take place until the 1970s, after the ban on Jewish immigration to Israel was lifted (see: Refusenik (Soviet Union)). Between 1972 and 1978 around 3,000 people left Azerbaijan for Israel. 1970 was the demographic peak for Azerbaijani Jews; according to the census, 41,288 Jews resided in Azerbaijan that year.^[2]

Many Jewish émigrés from Azerbaijan settled in Tel-Aviv and Haifa. There are relatively large communities of Mountain Jewish expatriates from Azerbaijan in New York and Toronto.

[edit] Mountain Jews

Main article: Mountain Jews

Different theories have been brought forward regarding the origin of Mountain Jews and the exact date of their settlement in the Caucasus. The commonly accepted theory views Mountain Jews as early medieval immigrants from Persia and possibly the Byzantine Empire forced out by Islamic conquests. They settled in Caucasian Albania, on the left bank of the Kura River and interacted with the Kypchak Kaganate of Khazaria, which lied to the north. It was through these early Jewish communities that the Khazars converted to Judaism making it their state religion.^[2]

In the following centuries, Mountain Jews are believed to have moved further north making way to mass migration of Oguz Turks into the region. Their increase in number was supported by a constant flow of Jews from Iran. In the late Middle Ages Jews from Gilan founded a settlement in Oguz. Throughout the medieval epoch Mountain Jews were establishing cultural and economic ties with other Jewish communities of the Mediterranean. Agriculture and fabric trade was their main occupation until Sovietization. Some families practiced polygamy.^[2] In 1730, Huseyn Ali, the ruler of the Quba Khanate (then newly-separated from the Safavid Empire), issued a decree according to which Jews could own property in the khanate.^[4]

According to the 1926 Soviet census, there were 7,500 Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan (roughly 25% of the country's entire Jewish population).^[5] The exact numbers of the late Soviet period are unknown, since many were counted^[6] or preferred to be counted^[2] as Tats mostly due to the anti-Semitic attitude of the Soviet government. The theory of common origins of Tats and Mountain Jews (previously referred to as Judæo-Tats) has been vehemently dismissed by a number of researchers.^[7][8]

Mountain Jews currently dominate the entire Jewish Diaspora of Azerbaijan. They speak a distinct dialect of the Tat language called Juhuri or Judæo-Tat. The majority speaks more than one language, the second and/or third one most often being Azeri or Russian.

[edit] Ashkenazi Jews

Main article: Ashkenazi Jews

1811 is the year when the first Ashkenazi Jews settled in Baku, but their mass immigration to what is now Azerbaijan did not start until the 1870s. Their immigration was relatively steady leading them to outnumber the local Mountain Jewish community by 1910. They settled mostly in the booming oil-rich city of Baku. The Caspian-Black Sea Company, one of the leading oil companies in the Russian Empire, was established in Baku by the wealthy Rothschild family of German Jewish origin. Ashkenazi Jews continued immigrating to Azerbaijan until the late 1940s, with a number of them being World War II evacuees from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who chose to stay in their country of refuge.^[2]

Ashkenazi Jews were particularly active in Azerbaijani politics. Dr.Yevsei Gindes, a Kiev native, served as Minister of Health of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (1918–1920). Along with that, 6 of the 26 Baku Commissars were Ashkenazi Jewish. As of 1912, around ⅓ of Baku's registered lawyers and physicians were Ashkenazi Jewish as well.^[2]

The post-1972 aliyah largely affected this subgroup of Azerbaijani Jews, as among all they were more exposed to emigration. This resulted in the decline of their number, making Mountain Jews the largest Jewish group of Azerbaijan by the mid-1990s.

Similar to many immigrant communities of the Czarist and Soviet eras in Azerbaijan, Ashkenazi Jews appear to be linguistically Russified. The majority of Ashkenazi Jews speak Russian as their first language with Azeri sometimes being spoken as the second. The number of Yiddish-speakers is unknown.

[edit] Other Jewish subgroups

It is not clear whether local Jewish communities had established ties with Georgian Jews before the Czarist epoch, however by the 1910s the Georgian Jewish diaspora in Baku already accounted for its own educational club. Today there are a few hundreds of Georgian Jews living in Azerbaijan.^[2]

In 1827 first groups of Judæo-Aramaic-speaking Kurdish Jews started settling in Azerbaijan. In 1919–1939 a synagogue for Kurdish Jews functioned in Baku. After Sovietization the attitude of the Stalinist Soviet government towards them was somewhat unfavourable, and in 1951 all Kurdish Jews were deported from the Caucasus.^[2]

Krymchaks, who nowadays number only 2,500 people worldwide, consequently remained in quite low numbers in Azerbaijan throughout the 20th century. There were only 41 of them in the country, as of 1989. Bukharian Jews numbered 88 persons.^[9]

[edit] Gers and Subbotniks

Gers and Subbotniks were ethnic Russians from various parts of Russia who converted to Judaism primarily in the 1820s. In 1839–1841 the Czarist government expelled these communities to the newly-conquered South Caucasus, mainly to what is now Azerbaijan. Upon arriving here, they founded several settlements around Jalilabad (then called Astrakhan-Bazar), of which the largest one was Privolnoe. It later became the largest Judaistic Russian settlement in Russia. By the late Soviet epoch the overall number of Gers and Subbotniks in Azerbaijan was 5,000. There were only around 200 of them left in 1997 (when the region was visited by a research group from Saint Petersburg) with many planning to move to Russia and leaving virtually no chance for further preservation of this unique community.^[10]

[edit] Life of the community

Beginning in the 1960s, Azerbaijan's Jewish community has experienced cultural revival. Jewish samizdat publications started being printed. Many cultural and Zionist organizations were reestablished in Baku and Sumqayit since 1987, and the first legal Hebrew courses in the Soviet Union were opened in Baku.^[2]

Education in Jewish languages was discontinued by the Kremlin in the 1930s and the 1940s, and teaching in Yiddish and Juhuri was replaced by that in Russian. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a yeshiva opened in Baku in 1994 and an Ohr Avner Chabad Day School was established in 1999. As of 1994, Hebrew was studied at one state university and offered as a course choice in two secondary schools.^[2] On May 31, 2007, a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the Ohr Avner Chabad Centre for Jewish Studies took place in Baku. The centre is intended to include a day school, a kindergarten, residence halls, a scientific centre, a library, etc.^[11] There are currently three periodicals in Azerbaijan issued by registered Jewish organizations^{[citation needed]}.

As of 2007, there are three synagogues in Baku (one for each community, the Ashkenazi, Mountain and Georgian; the second one being the largest in the Caucasus), three in Krasnaya Sloboda, one in Guba and one in Oguz^{[citation needed]}. The Ger synagogue in Privolnoe is probably no longer functioning due to active emigration within the Ger community in the 1990s.

In 2005, Yevda Abramov, himself a Jew, was elected to the National Assembly of Azerbaijan as an MP representing the Rural Guba riding.

[edit] Antisemitism in Azerbaijan

According to the Report on Global Anti-Semitism released by the USA Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor on January 5, 2005, "Cases of prejudice and discrimination against Jews in the country were very limited, and in the few instances of anti-Semitic activity the Government has been quick to respond. The Government does not condone or tolerate persecution of Jews by any party". ^[12]

Despite antisemitism has not historically been a problem in Azerbaijan, in the 1990s there was rise of anti-Armenian and anti-Russian nationalism (in Azerbaijan Jews are also seen as ethnically Russian)^[13]. Jewish emigration from Azerbaijan increased during the Nagorno-Karabakh War: Jews feared both becoming casualties of war and becoming the targets of hostility that had previously been directed at Armenians.^[14] The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Canadian Documentation Centre note that Jews, as well as Armenians, were targets of violence and verbal abuse during the Sumgait and Baku pogroms in 1988 and 1990.^[15]

During the last decades different attacks against individual Jews or Jewish communal took place. Refugees reported that emigrating Jews often are the target of militia groups.^[16]

The former Interior Minister of Azerbaijan (1992−93) and later a political prisoner Isgandar Hamidov, now chairman of the unregistered National Democratic Party (Boz Gurd), made antisemitic and anti-Israel statements. According to The Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University report, Hamidov accused the Jews "of owning all the land in northern Azerbaijan, of trying to get hold of other assets and of acting as if they owned the world".^[17]

The Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, whose official status as a party was revoked in 1995, routinely disseminates antisemitic messages through their newspapers and radio channels, with statements such as "Throw the Jews out!" and "Jews should go where they belong or be destroyed."^[18]

In February 1995, in Baku, a gang of young Azeris attacked a 30-year old Jewish man Alexander Taranov. A man stopped Taranov in the subway, harassed him there, and then grabbed him at the subway exit and loudly announced that Taranov had a Talmud and a bomb in his briefcase. People surrounded Taranov and began to beat him shouting "Zionist-terrorist!" They brought him to the police branch where he was interrogated and ridiculed for 3 hours.^[19]

The Israeli Government "Report of Anti-Semitic Incidents" notes that in October, 1998, the Ashkenazi synagogue in Baku was desecrated: "garbage was spilled near the synagogue and faeces was smeared on the front door"^[20].

A month later, a synagogue of the Mountain Jews in Baku was also smeared with feces. The attack happened on a Friday night so people who came to the synagogue for Saturday morning prayer found a depressing picture. According to the UCSJ Special Report, this desecration is likely "a consequence of the fact that on November 16, 1998, during a meeting with President Heidar Aliev, the chairman of the synagogue of the Mountain Jews reported that during anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku, the Jewish community hid Armenians"^[21].

According to the Radio Liberty report, in October, 2001 fifty gravestones in a Jewish cemetery were desecrated in Baku. The leader of the Religious Community of Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan, Semyon Ikhilov, was quoted by Radio Liberty as saying that this is not the first time such an attack has taken place. The government of Azerbaijan has recently warned of the threat of rising Islamic extremism to Jewish and minority Christian groups and has closed some mosques connected with radical Islamism.^[22][23]

[edit] Famous Azerbaijani Jews

Many world-renowned Jewish intellectuals, artists, sports personalities and others came from Azerbaijan, some of which included: Nobel Prize winning physicist Lev Landau, pianist Bella Davidovich, singer Sarit Hadad , writer Lev Nussimbaum, chess players Garry Kasparov (world champion, a half-Jewish, half-Armenian), Emil Sutovsky, Tatiana Zatulovskaya, and a National Hero of Azerbaijan Albert Agarunov.

[edit] External links

• Free Political Journal
• Official Web-Site of Azerbaijani Jews
• Humanitarian Association of Jewish Women of Azerbaijan
• Chabad centres in Azerbaijan
• Jewish Azerbaijan
• Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. FSUMonitor:Azerbaijan

[edit] References

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