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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Rauf GUSEYNOV
D.Sc. (Hist.), professor, leading fellow at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan).
JUDAISM IN THE CAUCASUS
Abstract
The author looks at the past and present of Judaism, one of the monotheist religions in the Caucasus dating back to the 5th century. Today over 200 thousand Jews live in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Daghestan, and some of the North Caucasian repub-
lics. This means that the author has to cover a wide range of questions from the origins and settlement of the Jews in the Caucasus to the specific features of their material and spiritual culture and their ramified contacts with the rest of the world.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The vast body of academic and popular writing1 and regular scientific forums2 are a sure sign that Judaism in the Caucasus and the two main Jewish groups (the mountain and the Georgian Jews) have always attracted and continue to attract a lot of attention. The mountain Jews call themselves Juur; they speak the Juuri tongue and have preserved their traditional material and spiritual culture, Judaism as their religion, and their way of life. Their language is built on the vocabulary of mainly Iranian extraction, however religious terms are traditional,3 as well as first names and last names.4 The Georgian Jews have partly preserved their traditional material and spiritual culture, however they use Georgian and Russian and call
1 Here is a list of the major works: I.Sh. Anisimov, Kavkazskie evrei-gortsy, Moscow, 1888; second edition, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 2002; M. Altshuler, Jews of the Eastern Caucasus, Jerusalem, 1990 (in Hebrew); Gorskie evrei.Istoria. Etnografía. Kultura, DAAT/Znanie Publishers, Jerusalem-Moscow, 1999; Iu.N. Murzakhanov, Gorskie evrei. Annotirovanny bibliograficheskiy ukazatel, Part I. XVIII-nachalo XX vekov, CHORO Publishers, Moscow, 1994; M.Ia. Agarunov, R.A. Guseynov, E.A. Kerimov, Gorskie evrei Azerbaidzhana. Bibliograficheskiy ukazatel, Abilov, Zein-alov i synovia Publishing House, Baku, 2000; I.Ia. Cherny, “Gorskie evrei,” in: Sbornik svedeniy o kavkazskikh gortsakh, Issue III, Section II, 1870; V.P. Shapiro, “Gorskie evrei,” in: Sbornik statei i materialov, Jewish University Press, Jerusalem, 1983; I. David, Istoria evreev na Kavkaze, Vols. I-II, Kavkasioni Publishers, Tel Aviv, 1990; Mountain Jews. Custom and Daily Life in the Caucasus, ed. by Liya Mikdash-Shamailov, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2002.
2 See: Istoria i etnografia gorskikh evreev Kavkaza. Materialy seminara, 15-17 sentiabria 1997 goda, EL-FA Publishing Center, Nalchik, 1998; Materialy Mezhdunarodnogo kollokviuma “Gorskie evrei: istoria i sovremennost,” Baku, 12-13 fevralia 1992 goda, published by the International Organization of Judaics and Jewish Culture, Moscow, 1992; Mezhdunarodnaia nauchnaia konferentsia “Arkheologia i etnografia Kavkaza”. Kratkoe soderzhanie dokladov, ELM Publishers, Baku, 2000; Materialy Mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo symposiuma “Gorskie evrei Kavkaza.” 24-26 aprelia 2001 goda , ELM Publishers, Baku, 2002.
3 See: V.F. Miller, Materialy dlia izuchenia evreysko-tatskogo iazyka. Vvedenie. Teksty. Slovar, St. Petersburg, 1892; idem, Ocherk fonetiki evreysko-tatskogo narechia, Moscow, 1900; idem, Ocherk morfologii evreysko-tatskogo narechia, Moscow, 1901; Ia.M. Agarunov, Tatsko (evreysko)-russkiy slovar, published by the Jewish University in Moscow, Moscow, 1997.
4 See: Ia.Kh. Abramov, Pomni imia svoe, published in cooperation with the Jewish Agency Sokhnut and Joint, Baku, 1999.
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themselves in Georgia ebraeli, israeli and kartuli ebraeli? They have not only accepted the Georgian language but also Georgian dances, music, and last names. The European Jews call themselves Ashkenazim and Yiddish. They follow the main prescriptions of Judaism and speak Yiddish, a language based on German, and have preserved their traditional and spiritual culture, first names and last names.
The Jews in the Caucasus and the Judaism they brought into the region attracted the attention of historians, ethnographers, culturologists, linguists, and philologists some 130 years ago. Since the 19th century, when this part of the Jewry and its religion became an object of more or less systematic studies, there has been no shortage of hypotheses about the history, causes, stages, and roads of Jewish migration from the Promised Land to the Caucasus and the time when the ancestors of the mountain and Georgian Jews reached it. Nearly all the authors relied on either oral or the canonical tradition recorded in the Bible. There is an obvious shortage of information based on reliable historical sources: only bits and pieces have been discovered so far. This explains why at the very end of the 19th century I.Sh. Anisimov, the first scholar from among the mountain Jews, wrote that his people knew nothing of their true history and that they had no reliable information about their own past.6 The same can be said about the early history of the Georgian Jews. Today there is no agreement about it, which allowed W.J. Fishel to say that the history of how the Jews reached the territories to the east of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Caucasus, still remains vague.7 Historically, the Jewish communities identify themselves in the following way:
■ Ashkenazim—today known as European Jews—are descendants of the Jews who came to live in Germany and had their own name, Ashkenaz, for the land along the Rein and later for the whole of Germany;
■ Sephardim—today known as Eastern Jews, including the mountain and Georgian Jews— have Jews who lived in Spain, which they called Spharad, as their ancestors.
They use different languages and live in different places, their traditional material and spiritual culture has many different traits, however they are kept together by Judaism, the cornerstone of the traditional Jewish identity. This means that the blanket term Sephardim of the Caucasus can be applied to the mountain and Georgian Jews.
The Jewish (now Krasnaia) Sloboda (quarter) in the Azeri city of Quba has been and remains the largest Jewish community in the Caucasus; it is also known as Caucasian Jerusalem,8 the magnet that pulled Sephardim from all over the Caucasus. It should be said that the Caucasus knew neither antiSemitism nor Jewish pogroms.
The Origins of the Caucasian Jews
There is no reliable information about the distant past of the Georgian Jews: “Legends date the arrival of the Jews to Kartli and Iberia, two of the most ancient Caucasian states, to the late 7th century B.C. when the First Temple was ruined and numerous prisoners were carried off from Israel and Judea into Babylonian Captivity.”9 The tradition associates this significant event in the history of the Jews and Judaism with Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.). The second Jewish wave traditionally goes back to the date the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the 1st century A.D.: “New exiles reached Mtskhet in the 1st century A.D. and joined those Jews who had already
5 See: M. Karelashvili, “Gruzinskie evrei Azerbaidzhana,” Azerbaidzhan i azerbaidzhantsy v mire, No. 1, June, 2GG7, p. 4G.
6 See: I.Sh. Anisimov, op. cit, pp. 11-12.
7 See: W.J. Fishel, “Azerbaijan in Jewish History,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 1953, Vol. XXII, p. 1.
8 See: Gorskie evrei. Istoria. Etnografia. Kultura, p. 211.
9 M. Karelashvili, op. cit., p. 4G.
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settled there.”10 Some of those who later started the Jewish population of Georgia came from Byzantium, the Sassanian Empire, Caucasian Albania, and the Khazar Kaganate. According to some of the legends, the ancestors of the Juurs were taken prisoner in the 6th century B.C. by Cyrus II Achaemenid (559-530 B.C.) who conquered Babylon and Judea. The legend is usually supported by the Bible (The Book of Esther 2:5-6), which tells the story of a Benjamite “who had been taken into exile from Jerusalem” by “Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylonia.” The captives first settled in Mesopotamia and Media, from where they later reached the Caucasus. It is generally believed, therefore, that the mountain Jews descended from the tribes of Benjamin and Judah. In other words, they are the descendants of those who lived in Judea, a kingdom in southern Palestine (928-587 B.C.) destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II who ruined the First Temple. Indirect information suggested that the forced demographic changes in the fate of the Jews were brought about by the Assyrian and Babylonian kings. The Bible tells the story: “In the ninth year of Hoshea,11 the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried Israel away into exile to Assyria, and settled them in Halah and Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” (2 Kings, 17:6; 18:11). Among other things, the Jews abandoned their homeland when the First and the Second Temples, the centers of their national, cultic, and spiritual life, were destroyed. Deprived of these landmarks and a state of their own, which meant that they had no political life, the followers of Judaism formed a widespread diaspora outside their historical homeland.
During the Achaemenid Kingdom Cyrus II allowed the Jews of Benjamin’s and Judah’s tribes to return to Palestine, which he had captured by that time, and to help build the Second Temple. This is mentioned in the Book of Ezra (1:1-4; 8:15-17). They never accepted this invitation; this is indirectly confirmed by the Mishnah12 that mentioned Nahum ha-Modia (Media), a Jewish scholar of the 1st century. The Talmud,13 in turn, speaks of Rabbi Gamaliel (1st century) who ordered his scribe to send a letter to “our brother in Media,” a shepherd of the Jews who lived in South Azerbaijan. This means that the Jews of the Achaemenid Empire missed the chance to go back to Palestine. In any case, not all of them returned to the Promised Land; a fairly large number preferred to remain in Media (South Azerbaijan)—this is indirectly confirmed by the fact that in the 1st century they formed a community with its own head.
In the mid-20th century Russian academic Iu. Solodukho offered a fairly well-justified opinion that the ancestors of the mountain Jews had been deported to the Caucasus by the rulers of the Sassanian Empire (224-651), who indeed had the larger part of the region under their power.14 This means that deportation took place in the 5th century (the Early Middle Ages) rather than in Antiquity as it was believed before.
In search of an acceptable solution one can side with those who speak about the several waves of Jewish eastward migration that reached the Caucasus. There is no disagreement, however, over the direction of Jewish migration; it went on for a long time and covered wide territories. Here I shall concentrate on one of the historical-chronological and spacial contexts: the Caucasian vector.
From the history of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires, all of them tagged “Great” in antiquity, we know that in the ethnopolitical sphere they preferred to mix and disunite tribes and deport them in pursuit of their own local or geopolitical aims that demanded ethnic and demographic changes.
■ First, all parts of the vast imperial domains should have been more or less uniform when it came to trade and the economy.
■ Second, the need for a developed local market that would add stability to the state was obvious.
10 M. Karelashvili, op. cit., p. 40.
11 Hoshea—King of Israel in 785-742 B.C.
12 The Mishnah—the earliest part of the Talmud.
13 The Talmud—a collection of Judaic dogmas, religious, ethical, and legal propositions in the form they took shape by the 4th century B.C.-5th century A.D.
14 See: Iu.A. Solodukho, “Dvizhenie Mazdaka i vosstanie evreyskogo naselenia Iraka,” Vestnik drevney istorii, No. 3-4, 1940, pp. 131-145.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
■ Third, the empires sought a dignified place in the system of international relations and international trade.
■ Fourth, the conquered but not subjugated people had to be mutually neutralized.
■ Fifth, being strong enough, the “great powers” of antiquity followed the “divide and rule” principle which is as old as class society itself and which was very much in demand at all times in all polyethnic states: it fitted perfectly the aims and tasks of the ruling ethnic group.
■ Sixth, artificial separation of an ethnic group destroyed its “critical mass,” which presented a danger to foreign oppressors who not infrequently had their own gods and spoke a different language.
The above fully applied to the Sassanian Empire which in the 5th-6th centuries supported Zoroastrianism as its official religion and imposed it on its subjects who belonged to different religions. Those who refused were cruelly punished and deported without distinction. Ancestors of the mountain Jews, among others, fell victim to this treatment. The Sassanian epoch (the Early Middle Ages) marked the beginning of Sephardim’s migration; this was when the Jews now known as Juurs first reached the Caucasus.
It was under Shahenshah Yesdigerd II (439-487) that Jews were either deported from the Sassa-nian Empire or left by their own free will for the Caucasus because they could no longer observe the Sabbath and were persecuted in many other ways. Under Kavadh I (488-531) and especially Chosroes I Anushirva (531-579), who came after Yesdigerd II, the pressure became unbearable. This is one of the possible answers to the question about the origins of the mountain Jews. We know for sure that it was their ancestors who brought Judaism to the Caucasus and that this happened in the 6th century.
Distribution of the Jews in the Caucasus
According to the 2007 figures, there are about 16 million Jews in the world; about 6 million of them live in the United States, 5 million in Israel, and 1 million in Russia. Large Jewish communities of over 100 thousand are found in France, Ukraine, Canada, Great Britain, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, and Hungary. Organized Judaic communities function in about 80 countries.
According to the First General Population Census of the Russian Empire of 1897, there were 152 thousand mountain and Georgian Jews, or 1.3 percent of the local population.15 There were Jews in Azerbaijan, Daghestan, Georgia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Checheno-Ingushetia and in the cities of Baku, Tbilisi, Quba, Makhachkala, Derbent, Nalchik, Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, Essentuki, Zheleznovodsk, and Mineralnye Vody. According to the All-Union Population Census of1989 there were over 200 thousand Jews in the Caucasus (1.6 percent of the local population).16 Post-Soviet information cannot be called complete: it is limited to two figures: 18,795 Jews in the Northern Caucasus in 2002 and 38,170 Jews in the Republic of Azerbaijan.17
There were several synagogues in the Jewish Sloboda of Quba, the home town of the largest compact Juur community. In the latter half of the 18th century, rulers of the Quba Khanate Guseynali-Khan (1722-1758) and Fatali-Khan (1758-1789) invited Juurs to move into their capital, the city of Quba. They first settled in a small quarter that later spread to become the Jewish Sloboda. According to information of the early 19th century, there were about 1,000 houses inhabited by about 5,000.18 The sloboda was divided into 9 quarters with a synagogue in each of them. Today, there are three syn-
15 See: G.F. Chursin, “Kavkaz,” in: Novy entsiklopedicheskiy slovar Brokgauza-Efrona, Vol. 20, St. Petersburg, 1913, col. 305-306, 308; M. Karelashvili, op. cit.
16 See: Soiuz newspaper, No. 32, 1990.
17 See: Vserossiiskaia perepis naselenia 2002 goda, Federalnaia sluzhba gosudarstvennoy statistiki, Moscow, 2002; Population Census of the Republic of Azerbaijan. 1999, Part IV, Sada Publishers, Baku, 2001 (in Azeri).
18 See: I.Ia. Cherny, op. cit., pp. 1, 14, 43.
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agogues. The opening ceremony of the largest of them restored in 2001 was attended by the city authorities, the Israeli ambassador, and numerous guests. Their religion and its rigorous demands concerning the lifestyle, diet, customs, and endogamy set the Juurs apart, hence the sloboda and other strictly separate settlements.
There were synagogues in Derbent, Baku, Tbilisi, and Piatigorsk. In 1910 the central choral synagogue was built in Baku, which remained open until the 1930s.19 There were also Yeshibahs who taught the usual subjects—the Torah,20 the Talmud, and the Mishnah.
At the turn of the 19th century some of the Georgian Jews moved to Azerbaijan where they acquired another synagogue in Baku. Today there is a new synagogue in Baku built in 2002-2003, the best throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia.21 It is used by European and Georgian Jews. The opening ceremony was attended by top officials of Azerbaijan and guests from Russia, America, Israel, Kazakhstan, and Georgia.
In connection with the Jewry it should be said: “According to the Halacha (sum total of the laws collected in the Torah, Talmud, and rabbinic writings that regulate all sides of everyday life.—R.G.), each person born of a Jewish mother or practicing Judaism according to the religious law is considered to be a Jew.”22 It should be said that practically all those who practice Judaism are ethnic Jews, first, because of their tribal origins; second, because Judaism has no use for proselytism and missionary activities; third, because it is not easy to join the Judaic community (Giyur) even though it is permitted. Proselytes (Geres) become Jews through a corresponding ritual; nobody has the right to remind them of their non-Jewish origins. There are several marginal groups—Karaites23 and Samaritans,24 the Judaizers of Ethiopia, Zambia, Liberia, Myanmar, India, Japan, the U.S. and Russia—who are aware that they differ from the Jews.
Traditionally, only those born of Jewish mothers should be accepted as Jews. The history of Judaism, the Jewish religion, in the Caucasus among other places, testifies to the fact that it was the religion of both ethnic Jews and people of other ethnic origins. Such were the Khazars, a Turkic people who followed Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and pagan cults.25 The Geres are another Judaist branch present in the Caucasus.
The memories about the Benjamin and Judah ancestry and deportation to Mesopotamia are alive in the legends of mountain Jews, yet oral tradition knows nothing about when and how their ancestors reached the Caucasus. Back in 1940 Russian Orientalist Iu. Solodukho offered his version of how the Jews from Mesopotamia moved eastward. It is still accepted as the most correct one because it rests on specific historical facts.26 He wrote that in the late 5th-first third of the 6th century the Sassanian Empire was rocked by a powerful mass movement of Mazdakis who moved against the Persian nobles, top landowners, and Zoroastrian priests. Mazdak gathered land tillers, artisans, cattle-breeders, urban poor, tradesmen, and common members of the official clergy under his banner.
The Jews of Mesopotamia (then part of the Sassanian Empire) joined the Mazdakis in great numbers. In this context it can be surmised that this was the region where a large part, if not all, of the Jewish
19 See: M. Bekker, “Evrei v Azerbaidzhane: istoria i perspektivy,” Azerbaidzhan i azerbaidzhantsy v mire, No. 1, July, 2007, p. 35.
20 The Torah—ancient Hebrew name for the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
21 See: M. Karelashvili, op. cit., p. 45.
22 M.A. Chlenov, “Judaism,” in: Narody i religii mira. Entsiklopedia, Bolshaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopedia Publishers, Moscow, 1998, p. 743.
23 Karaites—descendants of Turkic tribes that embraced Judaism in the Khazar Kaganate in the 7th century. They speak a Turkic language of the Kypchak group.
24 Samaritans—people living in the region of Samaria in Palestine and a religious community that detached itself in the 6th century B.C. from the Judaic community of Jerusalem.
25 See: P.K. Kokovtsov, Evreysko-khazarskaia perepiska v X veke, U.S.S.R. AS Publishing House, Leningrad, 1932, pp. 5-77, 92-94; M.I. Artamonov, Istoria khazar, U.S.S.R. AS Publishing House, Leningrad, 1962, pp. 262, 266286; M.B. Magomedov, Obrazovanie Khazarskogo kaganata, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1983, Ch. 4.
26 See: Iu.A. Solodukho, op. cit., pp. 131-145.
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population of the Sassanian Empire lived. This is confirmed by the Biblical texts quoted above: the top-onyms mentioned there point to Mesopotamia and Media, which meant South Azerbaijan).
Mazdak, who created a religious and ethical teaching of his own that inspired a large number of those living in the Sassanian Empire and neighboring countries, preached that all people are equal therefore the immense wealth of some and the sheer poverty of others, as well as vast landed possessions and material boon, ignited enmity among the people. To achieve harmony it was suggested to take land and other property from the rich and distribute them among the poor. The Mazdaki movement that spread across the Sassanian Empire found fertile soil among the Jews of Mesopotamia. The Jewish Chronicle of the 9th century tells a story of what took place in 508-526 in the local Jewish community when the Mazdaki movement was at its height: it recounts that events connected with Mar Zutra II “from the House of David, King of Israel”27 who for 20 years served the Exilarch (head) of the Jewish community of the Sassanian Empire and Mesopotamia as its part. He joined Mazdak with a detachment of 400. According to the chronicle: “Mar Zutra conquered the state and collected poll tax for seven years.” This means that the Jewish rebels set up an independent state with their Exilarch at the head and the capital in the city of Pumbatida. The state survived for seven years to be routed by King Chosroes I Anushirva Sasanid who ascended the throne in 531. Mar Zur was taken prisoner, carried off to the city of Mahoze close to Ctesiphon, the Sassanian capital, and executed there. Pumbatida, the center of the Jewish community of Mesopotamia and Mar Zutra’s capital, was destroyed.28
By way of punishment the Juuri ancestors were deported further east until they finally reached the Caucasus where they came face to face with an unknown ethnic, religious, social, economic, cultural, and geographic environment. The migrants, in turn, brought their skills and gradually learned a lot from the locals. On the whole the Juurs blended with the new environment while preserving, unlike the Georgian Jews, their ethnic, cultural, religious, and other specifics and bonds as well as their language. Today they stand apart from other ethnic groups and yet remain part and parcel of the Jews as descendants of the Jews of antiquity pushed to the Caucasus. This is confirmed by their unquestionably Judaic culture and everyday life and ethnic self-identification.
Material and Spiritual Culture. Public Life
V. Kozlov, a prominent Russian ethnologist of the 20th century, has written: “Each nation has its own specifics displayed in material and spiritual culture; sometimes some of the cultural elements become symbols of ethnic affiliation.”29 The following confirms that the Jews (including the Sephardim of the Caucasus) belong to the Jewry:
■ Ancestry that goes back to the tribes of Benjamin and Judah;
■ Legends and myths;
■ Judaism that they have been professing from the very beginning;
■ Specifically Jewish diet;
■ Traditional system of education of the recent past together with settlements, homes, and everyday lifestyle.
At the same time, in some respects the Caucasian Jewish community differs from Jewish communities in other regions. The Ashkenasim, who reached the Caucasus relatively recently, are all urban dwellers while the Juurs, ebraeli, and geres, who have been living in the Caucasus for many centuries, were initially village dwellers. Their settlements and houses comprised two groups: mountain and valley
27 Ibid., p. 133.
28 See: Ibid., p. 145.
V.I. Kozlov, Etnicheskaia demografia, Statistika Publishers, Moscow, 1997, p. 26.
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villages. In the villages with mixed populations Jews invariably lived in compact groups in separate quarters; the pattern was repeated in towns and cities. Their quarters and houses were generally of the local (Caucasian) type adjusted to the Jewish traditions and everyday life. Relatives lived together in houses that faced inward, toward the landed plot, and were separated from the street by high solid fences.30 According to I. Cherny, there was a fireplace in the living room and shelves with dishes; one of the walls had mirrors on it with silk or wool shawls and weapons between them; clothes were kept in chests; there were niches for household items and bedding; a special room was reserved for guests (kunaks).31
The Juurs and Ebraeli wore Caucasian clothes with certain specifics typical of Jewish dress. There were five types of traditional dishes: meat, starch, milk, vegetables, and fish; the Jews used strong seasoning together with onion, garlic, and herbs; they drank tea, ayran, wine, and vodka. In strict compliance with Judaic prescriptions they ate kosher meat and poultry slain by the shoiket. To this day they keep meat and milk dishes separate.
The local specifics left its deep imprint on the social life of the local Sephardim, however they have remained loyal to the Jewish traditions and holidays:
■ Passover (Pesah), the spring holiday that celebrated the Exodus from Egypt;
■ Purim, the holiday that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the Achaeme-nid Empire from the plot to annihilate them;
■ Simhat Torah, “rejoicing in the Torah”;
■ Sukkot, feast of the Booths or Feast of Tabernacles during which the Jews are instructed to use temporary structures;
■ Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year;
■ Shabuoth, “honey,” the feast during which sweets are eaten;
■ Tisha be-Av, the day of mourning during which dead relatives, parents in particular, are mourned;
■ Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and Repentance, of fasting and intensive prayer;
■ Hanukkah, the Day of the Maccabees, the Feast of Dedication.
At all times the synagogue remained the center of religious and social life. In the 19th century there were 43 synagogues and 48 rabbis; two of them were chief rabbis for supervising the Jewish communities of the Central Caucasus and the Northern Caucasus.32 The synagogues and utensils are of the Sephardic types. Irrespective of where they live the Jews follow the same rule of Shabbat: on Friday at sunset one of those who serves in the synagogue announces that Shabbat has come; a lamp is lighted to be left burning throughout Shabbat when no fire can be lighted; the food cooked in advance is eaten cold. In general, everything that can be described as “work” is banned. In the Caucasus all Jews go to synagogues; in the absence of two separate synagogues for the Sephardim and Ashkenasim they share one.
The Sephardic communities call their rabbis haham; he is also the khazzan (cantor), who reads prayers in a sing-song manner; the shoihet, who slays animals and poultry in the ritual way; melamed, the private teacher of the Jewish laws and director of the primary religious school for Jewish boys; he also acts as a mohel (circumciser), who performs circumcision (milah). Rabbis had an important role to play in marriage ceremonies and burial. They still enjoy the respect of the Jewish community as representatives of Judaism.
In the past so-called Omar's Laws played an important part in the Jews’ religious life. They regulated the lifestyle and conduct of the ahl al-zimma (non-Muslims of the Covenant), meaning the “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews) living under the patronage of zimma (the Muslim state). They were regarded as subjects duty-bound to observe special laws that regulated their life and activ-
30 See: V.P. Kobychev, “Krestianskoe zhilishche narodov Azerbaidzhana v XIX veke,” Kavkazskiy et-nograficheskiy sbornik, Issue III, 1962, p. 68.
31 See: I.Ia. Cherny, op. cit., pp. 1-4.
32 See: I.Sh. Anisimov, op. cit., pp. 229-230.
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ities. They had to live separately, in special parts of the cities, wear clothes that would set them apart from the Muslims, their churches and synagogues should not be higher than the mosques while their houses should be lower than the mosques and houses of the Muslims. They had to give way to Muslims and dismount at the sight of a Muslim. Omar’s Laws permitted forced conversion to Islam.
The life-cycle of the Sephardim of the Caucasus preserved its Judaic foundations, although it changed a lot in the Caucasian milieu. Until relatively recently social life was ruled by the adats— Caucasian customs; the local Sephardim are as hospitable as their Caucasian neighbors. Each house had a guest room in which not only Jews but also Christians and Muslims were equally welcome. The tradition of sworn brotherhood was a key one. In the 19th century, “each Muslim had his kunaks in Jewish villages and each Jew had kunaks in Muslim villages.” This went even further: “A Jew would defend even his personal enemy since he dealt with a non-Jew.”33
All members of the Jewish community could count on neighbors in case of trouble; mutual assistance was extended to those who built new houses, procured kosher meat and dairy products, and baked bread, as well as in the event of natural disasters and catastrophes; orphans and the poor could count on monetary assistance, ill people could expect care, etc.34
There were special Judaic burial rituals:35 during the first 10 days the relatives of the recently deceased visited the synagogue to read prayers for the dead; today, Hebrew is still used for epitaphs.
Marriage rites are also still connected with Judaism:36 “confessional endogamy,” religious marriage involving a rabbi, the marriage feast begins on the eve of the Saturday when the bride takes a ritual bath; the marriage takes place under a special canopy in the yard next to the synagogue. Circumcision was performed on the eighth day after a boy’s birth; names were selected from the Tanakh.37
Kehilla, the community, served as the cornerstone of social organization. In the Russian Empire it protected the Jews’ autonomy in religious and everyday life. In the Caucasus this was a closed structure of a certain non-official semi-administrative nature.38 The kehilla functioned under the chief gabbay; together with his deputies he was responsible for all aspects of communal life. It is generally believed that “the Jewish community of the Caucasus is one of the earliest communities of the Jewish diaspora.”39 Kehilla remained the backbone of the Jews’ social order until the early 20th century; the communal organization of life is still felt among the Jews: there are religions traditions, collective feelings, and care of neighbors.
The Caucasian Jews’ Relations with Israel and the Rest of the World
The contacts created by the territorial-geographic, social-economic, military-political, ethnic-confessional, and cultural circumstances are highly varied.
Alia, resettlement in the historical homeland, is an important link in this chain. By the end of the 20th century about 40 thousand Jews moved to Israel from the Caucasus.40 The process that began in
33 I.Ia. Cherny, op. cit., p. 6; M.G. Bezhanov, “Evrei v sele Vartashen (Elizavetpolskaia gubernia, Nukhinskiy uezd),” in: Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostey i piemen Kavkaza, Issue XVIII, otd. III, 1894, p. 112; Gorskie evrei, pp. 19G-191.
34 See: I.Sh. Anisimov, op. cit., pp. 26, 84-89; Narody Kavkaza, Vol. 1, U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Publishers, Moscow, 196G, p. 558.
35 See: I.Sh. Anisimov, op. cit., pp. 135-141; Narody Daghestana, U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Publishers, Moscow, 1955, p. 235.
36 See: I.Sh. Anisimov, op. cit., pp. 94-13G; Narody Daghestana, pp. 232-234; I.Ia. Cherny, op. cit., pp.26-39.
37 The Tanakh—dictionary of Biblical names.
38 See: M.G. Bezhanov, op. cit., pp. 112-113.
39 Gorskie evrei, p. 29; F.L. Shapiro, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
4G See: H. Bram, Absorption of the Caucasian Jews, Jerusalem, 1997, p. 8 (in Hebrew); Gorskie evrei, pp. 441-443; 446-452.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
the 19th century is still going on. The first alia went on throughout the 19th century. In 1901 the first Zionist congress of the Jews of the Caucasus, which was convened in Tiflis, kindled an interest in the Holy Land. The second alia took place in 1907-1914. In 1917 Baku hosted the second Zionist congress of the Jews of the Caucasus; in 1919 it was followed by another congress in Baku. They launched another alia. It happened in the 1920s during Soviet power. In the 1950s, when the State of Israel was two years old, the alia continued and reached its peak in the 1970s.
Back in 1922 the world-wide Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) was set up to organize Jewish migration to the historical homeland. When the State of Israel was established, Sokhnut became an official structure with offices in all countries with compact Jewish groups; it pays for resettlement and organized preliminary trips to Israel.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an independent non-governmental organization, is another important structure. Set up in America in 1914 it operates on voluntary donations from organizations and private persons with offices wherever there are Jews living in compact communities. All Jews can count on its material support while all Jewish communities, irrespective of their location, are patronized by the Joint Committee.
C o n c l u s i o n
Judaism in the Caucasus and its followers lived through several historical stages connected with territorial, political, statehood, and chronological factors. The above suggests that there is a fundamental difference between deportation of the Jews to the east during the Assyrian and Babylonian empires under Sargon II and Nebuchadnezzar II in the 8th-6th centuries B.C. and under the Sassanids in the 5th-6th centuries A.D. In the first case the “divide and rule” slogan was realized when Palestine was conquered and the Israeli and Judaic kingdoms were destroyed along with the First Temple. In the latter case the Jews rebelled against the state, the Sassanian Empire that deported them.
Judaism and its followers appeared in the Caucasus because of several important military-political, socioeconomic, demographic, ethnoconfessional, and cultural events in the life of the Jews. These events proved instrumental in the historical, ethnographic, cultural, sociological, and demographic processes that led the Jews, stage by stage, to the Caucasus. They left their imprint on the life and activities of this historical and cultural community in the Caucasus, which has been and remains an inalienable part of Jewry and Judaism. At the first stage, in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the ancestors of the Caucasian Jews moved en mass eastward from Palestine; at the second stage, up until and including the 17th century, they lived in alien (some of them Caucasian) states. At the third stage, in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, they were living in the Russian Empire; at the fourth stage (1918-1920), within the independent Caucasian republics. The fifth, Soviet period, stretched from 1921 to 1991. At the sixth stage, which began in 1991 and is still going on, they live in independent Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and the Russian Federation (in the Northern Caucasus, to be more exact).
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the settlement pattern of the Sephardim underwent changes: they started as village inhabitants, but gradually, under the pressure of the urbanization that unfolded since the latter half of the 19th century, they moved to the towns.
Today, the bulk of the Jews of the Caucasus are living in Azerbaijan, Daghestan, Georgia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and the Stavropol Territory. They first attracted the attention of the academic community in the 19th century, which has not yet abated. Today, as before, students of the Caucasian Jews are still interested in their material and spiritual culture, ethnic and confessional specifics, and longstanding contacts with the outside world and within their religion, Judaism.
