Tbilisi טְבִּילִיסִי

Georgian Jews call themselves Ebraeli; the language is Qivruli, Judaeo-Georgian: a Kartvelian language with a Hebrew-Aramaic lexical layer, not a separate language family.

What the evidence says. The hard floor is Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Iberia: Aramaic epigraphy in Hebrew characters of the fourth and fifth centuries. The description is precise and worth quoting: the inscriptions "were created by the Jewish community of Mtskheta, and are written in Hebrew characters, while their language is Middle Aramaic (Jewish-Palestinian dialect)." A self-identifying Jewish community at Mtskheta by the fourth or fifth century is established. Second-century gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions from the same site are repeated everywhere, but I could not locate the excavation publication: treat the second century as probable and the fourth–fifth as certain.

Two substitutions current in Jewish-heritage guides must be removed here. The Urbnisi inscriptions in the Georgian corpus are Armazian Aramaic of the second and third centuries, of the same type as the Armazi bilingual: royal and administrative Iberian Aramaic, not Jewish. Urbnisi is associated with an early Jewish settlement in the Georgian chronicle tradition, but the epigraphic Jewish material is at Mtskheta. And the Armazi bilingual (Greek-Aramaic, second century, the epitaph of Serapitis) and the Armazi monolingual (first century, the viceroy Sharagas under Mithridates II) will not serve as "evidence of Jews": they are Iberian court Aramaic.

The honest formulation: Jews are securely attested in Georgia by the fourth or fifth century, probably by the second. Continuity from 586 BCE is tradition, not evidence. What is genuinely remarkable, and provable, is something else: the near-total absence of expulsions, and a presence unbroken for at least sixteen hundred years.

Ebraeli and Ashkenazim are two distinct communities. The Ebraeli spoke Judaeo-Georgian, were agriculturally rooted, and from the late fourteenth century for some five centuries were serfs, emancipated in 1864–71, after which urbanisation followed. The Ashkenazim came with the Russian Empire, after the annexation of eastern Georgia in 1801: soldiers, exiles, traders, later Cantonists. Separate synagogues, separate rites, separate cemeteries and separate burial societies held into the Soviet period; Tbilisi has both the Great (Georgian) Synagogue and a distinct Ashkenazi one. The Georgian Jews also distinguished themselves from the Mountain Jews of the eastern Caucasus.

There were six blood libels against the Jews of Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century: in 1852, 1878, 1881, 1882, 1883 and 1884. The loudest was the Sachkhere case of 1878: nine Jews were accused of killing a Christian child before Passover, and the case was heard at Kutaisi. The court acquitted them all, and local conviction was not shaken by it. The libels recurred later as well—in 1921, 1923 and 1926.

Numbers: the census of 1897 gives 6,407 Georgian-speaking Jews, but that counts language, not ethnicity. The peak is 1970, at 55,382. In 1989, about 24,800. Today between 1,500 and 8,700 in Georgia: the spread reflects different definitions—the core community, and all those eligible to emigrate. In Israel, about 120,000 of Georgian origin.