The Mountain Jews of the Caucasus יהודי ההרים
The communities of Dagestan and Azerbaijan, who spoke Juhuri—a Jewish language of Iranian stock. Their capitals were Derbent and Krasnaya Sloboda by Quba; in the twentieth century most left for Israel and America.
They call themselves Juhuro, and their language Juhuri: south-western Iranian in structure, with Hebrew and Aramaic inside it—in prayer, in counting, in the words for holy things. Such a language is not learned in a generation: it speaks of a long life beside the Persian world.
Their coming is disputed. The community's tradition counts from the exiles of antiquity who went north through Persia; scholars speak of Persian-speaking Jews who settled the Caucasus in Sasanian centuries—and we name both readings, choosing for neither.
They lived in mountain villages and towns: Derbent the oldest knot, and Krasnaya Sloboda by Quba in Azerbaijan—a rare case of a whole Jewish town, alive to this day. The census of 1897 counted about thirty-one thousand.
The twentieth century went over them twice: Soviet rule closed the schools and synagogues, and the war reached the Caucasus and wiped out the communities of Crimea and Nalchik. After the fall of the Union nearly all left—for Israel, Moscow, New York. Some three thousand remain in Krasnaya Sloboda, and it is the liveliest point left on their old map.
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Records of the Juhuri language and the Russian imperial censuses — the structure of the language; some 31,000 in the 1897 census
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Derbent and Krasnaya Sloboda; the exodus of the late twentieth century
Basis: documents and evidence.