History of the Jews in Azerbaijan

Mountain Jews formed the principal Jewish population of the territory when it passed into Russian imperial rule in the nineteenth century; their established centers included Quba, historically rendered Kuba, its surrounding district, Miudji, Miudji-Aftaran, and Vartashen.[1] Ashkenazi immigration subsequently expanded the Jewish population, particularly in Baku, where the oil industry attracted entrepreneurs, skilled workers, and professionals.[4] Georgian Jews also established a distinct community, with their own religious institutions, language, and traditions.[2]

Qırmızı Qəsəbə, also called Krasnaya Sloboda or Red Village, occupies a special place in Mountain Jewish religious and communal life.[2] Its establishment as a recognized Jewish settlement in 1742 belongs to a different historical period from the older Jewish presence in the surrounding region.[5] Baku and Red Village became major centers of Mountain Jewish life, although Baku also sustained separate Ashkenazi and Georgian congregations.[3][4]

The geographic scope requires a distinction between the modern republic and Persian Azerbaijan, now in northwestern Iran.[1] Both regions appear in historical accounts under the name Azerbaijan, but their Jewish communities followed different political and institutional histories.[1] Connections with Iranian Jewry nevertheless remained important to Mountain Jewish language, migration, and cultural development in the eastern Caucasus.[3]

Mountain Jews belong to the Jewish communities of the eastern Caucasus and have longstanding cultural and linguistic connections with Iranian Jewry.[3] Their settlement history includes migration from Persia into the Caucasus, followed by further arrivals that joined existing communities.[3] A significant movement of Iranian Jews, many from Gilan, occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and close connections with Iranian Jewish communities predated Russian imperial annexation.[3]

Mountain Jewish culture and language began to crystallize in the early fifteenth century, while the community remained physically isolated from European Jewish centers until the end of the nineteenth century.[3] Its regional distribution extended beyond Azerbaijan into the eastern and southern Caucasus, including Derbent, Nalchik, and Mozdok in territory now within the Russian Federation.[6] These connections place Azerbaijani Mountain Jewish history within a wider Caucasian Jewish setting rather than a community confined to modern national borders.[6]

Persian Azerbaijan had its own substantial Jewish history.[1] Documentary evidence for Jewish settlement there is attested from the twelfth century, and Benjamin of Tudela, writing around 1165, described more than a hundred congregations in the Haftan mountains extending toward the frontiers of Media, including Persian Azerbaijan.[1] The messianic leader David Alroy found adherents in Khoi, Salmas, Tabriz, Maragha, and Urmia.[1]

After Hūlāgū Khān established his residence in Tabriz in 1258, the city attracted Jewish settlers; the courtier Saʿad al-Dawla, who died in 1291, made his career there.[1] Tabriz, Sulṭāniyya, and other places in the region continued to appear in Jewish history during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Persian Azerbaijan was also a Karaite center.[1] Later accounts record Jewish communities under the Safavids, persecution during the seventeenth century, and suffering under the Qajar dynasty from 1794 in Maragha, Urmia, Salmas, and Tabriz.[1]

Mountain Jews, also known as Juhuro or Juvoro, speak Judeo-Tat, called Juhuri or Dzhuguri within the community.[6] The language belongs to the Iranian linguistic family and contains Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, together with influences from Azerbaijani and Russian.[3] Mountain Jews adopted the Sephardic rite of Rabbinic Judaism in recent centuries, and their religious traditions include Kabbalistic practices.[6][2]

Language transmission continued within families under Soviet rule.[7] Mansharov recalled that her parents and grandparents spoke Juhuri at home, while her parents also learned Azerbaijani and Russian as they grew up.[7] Her family history connects domestic language use with the wider multilingual environment of Azerbaijani Jewish life.[7]

After Azerbaijan declared independence in August 1991 and the Soviet Union collapsed, Jewish communities could again operate yeshivas and teach religious classes.[8] Jewish organizations and charitable associations expanded, including the Humanitarian Association of Jewish Women, established in 1992, and Hava, established in 1996.[2] The newspaper Aziz, meaning “Azerbaijan-Israel,” began publication in 1992, and the Jewish Agency was allowed to operate openly in Baku.[1]

Baku's European Jewish community opened a major new synagogue in March 2003, described at the time as the largest in the Caucasus.[9] Government representatives, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, and diplomats attended the opening.[9] A Jewish community center followed in 2004 with high-level government participation.[10] In 2007, Baku had Mountain Jewish, Ashkenazi, and Georgian synagogues, while synagogues also operated in Red Village and Oghuz.[2]

Jewish education developed through several institutions.[10] Construction of a new educational complex began in May 2007, and authorities reserved a wing of a Baku school for secular and religious classes serving 200 Jewish students.[10] On October 5, 2010, President Ilham Aliyev inaugurated the Chabad Ohr Avner education center in Baku's Khatai District.[11] A government-built synagogue for Mountain Jews opened in 2011.[8]

Baku's Jewish school, established in 1994, had 250 pupils from kindergarten through eleventh grade in 2022.[12] Languages spoken at the school included Hebrew, English, French, Russian, and Azerbaijani, while its Jewish studies were supervised by Israel's Ministry of Education program Heftzibah.[12] A contemporary estimate placed Baku's community at approximately 70 percent Mountain Jewish, 20 percent Ashkenazi, and 10 percent Georgian Jewish.[12]

Red Village retained synagogues, an old cemetery, and a kosher events hall.[13] A 2018 account described two active synagogues, while Mansharov's later oral-history account mentioned at least three synagogues, a beit midrash, and a Jewish museum.[13][7] These institutions continued the town's role as a center of Mountain Jewish religious learning and memory.[2]

Qırmızı Qəsəbə was established in 1742 across the Gudyalchay River from Quba as a recognized Jewish settlement.[5] Permission from the Quba Khanate enabled Jews to establish their own community, originally known as Jewish Village.[5] Its Russian name, Yevreskaya Sloboda, likewise meant Jewish Village; during the Soviet period it became Krasnaya Sloboda, or Red Village.[2]

Successive groups arriving from nearby highland and valley villages formed separate neighborhoods, or mahallas, while immigrants from Gilan established additional quarters in the 1780s.[14] These neighborhoods maintained synagogues named after their places of origin.[14] By the late nineteenth century, the settlement had 972 Mountain Jewish families, eleven synagogues, and twenty Jewish schools.[14] Trade, crafts, and Jewish education helped make it an important center of Caucasian Jewish life.[15]

The surrounding Quba district contained one of the region's largest Jewish concentrations.[1] In 1835, Quba and its district had 5,492 Jewish residents, including 2,718 in the city.[1] A Jewish traveler in 1866 counted 952 Jewish households in Quba, 145 in Miudji, and 190 in Vartashen, while a Russian traveler recorded populations of 6,282, 957, and 1,396 respectively.[1] Local Jews generally worked in agriculture, petty trade, and manual labor, and their economic circumstances were often poor.[1]

Red Village remained a center of religious attachment as well as settlement.[2] Community leader Milikh Yevdayev recalled walking home from synagogue before Shabbat while children hurried to prepare for the meal and neighbors exchanged greetings of “shalom.”[5] He expressed the settlement's personal significance in the words, “For a Jew in Azerbaijan, spending Shabbat in the Red Village is like returning to your most essential home.”[5]

The territory of the present republic was ceded to Russia in 1813 and incorporated into it in 1828.[1] Mountain Jews accepted Russian sovereignty, and their legal and social position changed from dependence on local rulers toward rights and obligations resembling those of neighboring populations, including land ownership and taxation.[3] In Baku, a blood libel in 1814 was followed by threats against Jews; some fled to Quba after Russian authorities offered protection, and some later returned.[4]

A Persian Jewish community existed in Baku in the eighteenth century, and references to Jews in the area extend to the thirteenth century.[4] The city's later transformation into an oil-producing and commercial center drew Jews from European Russia as well as Mountain Jews from surrounding settlements.[4] Ashkenazi settlement expanded during the nineteenth century, and by 1910 Ashkenazi Jews outnumbered the local Mountain Jewish community in Baku.[2]

A new phase began in the 1870s as Jewish concessionaires, skilled workers, engineers, and professionals participated in developing the oil industry.[4] Their activities included financing and exploiting oil wells, establishing enterprises, building transport infrastructure, and marketing petroleum.[4] Participants included the Rothschilds, Dembo and Kagan, Polak and Sons, and engineer Arkadi Beilin.[4] Jewish companies accounted for 44 percent of Baku's kerosene production in 1913–1914.[4]

The 1897 census recorded 12,761 Jewish residents in Baku government and 2,031 in Yelizavetpol government.[1] Quba had 6,662 Jewish residents and Baku 2,341, making Quba the larger Jewish urban community at that date.[1] Educational change accompanied these developments: a secular Jewish-Russian school opened in Quba in 1908.[1] Mountain Jewish urbanization began before the 1917 Revolution and accelerated during Soviet industrialization in the late 1920s.[3]

Jewish connections with Zionism also developed before Soviet rule.[3] Mountain Jewish representatives participated in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, and Mountain Jews were among early aliyah immigrants and founders of the pre-state Hashomer organization.[3]

The revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil-war years reshaped Jewish settlement: many Jews left villages for Baku, which also attracted arrivals from European Russia.[1] Miudji was deserted, approximately 3,500 Jews left Quba, and Baku emerged as Azerbaijan's leading Jewish center.[1]

Jews participated in public life in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, established in 1918.[16] Jevsei Gindes served as minister of healthcare and social security in 1918–1919 and was a founder of modern pediatric medicine in Azerbaijan.[2] Jewish representatives served in parliament, and Jewish publications included a Caucasian Jewish bulletin, Palestine, and the biweekly Youth of Zion.[16]

Jewish print culture also included the Yiddish newspaper Ḳaṿḳazer ṿokhenblaṭ, whose surviving archive runs from December 9, 1917, to April 6, 1919.[17] Its existence documents a Yiddish-language publishing presence during the revolutionary period, alongside the region's other Jewish linguistic traditions.[17]

Under Soviet rule, traditional Jewish schools were closed and government schools opened for Jewish pupils.[1] By the late 1920s, institutions included a Turkish-Jewish school in Vartashen, a Mountain Jewish school in Baku, and a Jewish club in Quba, while Tat-speaking writers worked in Quba and Baku.[1] Soviet authorities also attempted to settle Jews on the land; by the end of 1927, 250 Jewish families were engaged in agriculture.[1]

Soviet policy promoted secular integration while restricting religious expression and limiting opportunities for Jewish cultural life.[3] Jewish nationality continued to appear in official documents even as religious practice was discouraged.[3] In Red Village, cultural institutions were closed, most synagogues were converted into storehouses or workshops, and Hebrew was banned in 1937.[14] Families nevertheless continued observance at home, including Sabbath practices, Passover seders, and Yom Kippur fasting.[13]

The written form of Judeo-Tat changed substantially.[18] Before 1917, only two books in the language had appeared, both translations from Hebrew printed in Vilna; a newspaper, Hed Harim, appeared during World War I.[18] Soviet language policy replaced Hebrew script with Latin in the late 1920s and then with Cyrillic in the late 1930s.[18] Judeo-Tat schools, newspapers, and other publications operated during the Soviet period, especially between the 1920s and 1960s.[18]

The 1926 census counted 19,000 European Jews and 7,500 Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan.[1] Baku's Jewish population that year was 21,995, including 19,583 of European origin, 1,985 Caucasian Jews recorded as Tats, and 427 Georgian Jews.[4] The city's Jewish population reached 31,050 in 1939, approximately four percent of its total population.[4]

Azerbaijan itself was not occupied by German forces during World War II.[19] Mountain Jewish communities elsewhere in the Northern Caucasus came under German occupation and were targeted for extermination.[19] By mid-October 1942, with help from local Kabardians, Mountain Jews had persuaded the Germans to treat them as an ethnic group distinct from Ashkenazi Jews.[19] The Mountain Jewish population throughout the USSR on the eve of the war was approximately 35,000.[6]

Collectivization had also dispersed Mountain Jews beyond Azerbaijan.[6] In the early 1930s, hundreds were placed in North Caucasian collective farms, including Menzhinskoe and Bogdanovka, and more than one hundred were moved to the Shaumian collective farm in Crimea.[6] These communities formed part of the wider Mountain Jewish history affected by Soviet policies and the war.[6]

The 1959 census recorded 40,204 Jews in Azerbaijan, or 1.1 percent of the population, with the great majority living in urban communities.[1] It recorded 8,357 people declaring Tat and 6,255 declaring Yiddish as their mother tongue.[1] Azerbaijan's Jewish population reached 41,288 in 1970; Baku's Jewish population that year was 29,716, or 2.2 percent of the city's population.[1][4]

By 1970, Baku's European, Tati, and Georgian Jewish communities each maintained a synagogue, with the Tati congregation the oldest and largest.[4] Matzah was available for Passover, although ritually slaughtered meat was not.[4] A cultural revival began in the 1960s with Jewish samizdat publications, followed in 1987 by the reestablishment of cultural and Zionist organizations in Baku and Sumqayit.[2] Baku also hosted the first legal Hebrew courses in the Soviet Union.[2]

Emigration increased during the late Soviet period as exit restrictions eased, and Israel became the principal destination for many Azerbaijani Jews.[19][20] More than 8,000 left for Israel or other countries between 1979 and 1989.[20] Ashkenazi departures after 1972 contributed to Mountain Jews becoming Azerbaijan's largest Jewish group by the mid-1990s.[2]

Mountain Jewish immigration to Israel had already grown in the 1970s.[19] Across the Caucasus as a whole, approximately 12,000 Jews arrived in Israel during the 1970s and early 1980s, followed by approximately 60,000 during the 1990s; these regional totals are broader than Azerbaijan alone.[19] Azerbaijan recorded 1,981 Jewish emigrants in 1989, while 7,673 emigrated to Israel in 1990 and 5,968 in 1991, including 5,513 from Baku.[1]

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs characterized the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as an additional incentive for emigration, arguing that some Jews sought to avoid the fighting and conscription of draft-age men.[21] Its early post-Soviet account portrayed Azerbaijani Jews as supporting Azerbaijan without political involvement in the dispute.[21] Economic decline and scarce employment after independence also encouraged departures from Red Village to Israel, the United States, Europe, and other destinations.[14]

Census analysis gives a measure of the demographic contraction while accounting for people recorded under different ethnic labels.[22] An analysis including urban residents recorded as Tats calculated 39,900 Jews in Azerbaijan in 1989, compared with 8,900 in 1999 and 9,100 in 2009.[22] Approximately 3,600 additional people recorded as Tats in 1999 may also have been Jewish.[22] Baku's Jewish population declined from 32,100 in 1989 to 6,100 in 2009, while its share of the country's Jewish population fell from 80 to 67 percent.[22]

The same analysis identified Mountain Jews as the great majority of the remaining population after comparatively greater Ashkenazi emigration.[22] In 2009, 93.5 percent of Jews considered their ethnic group's language their native language, while 19.3 percent spoke Russian fluently.[22] Median age increased from 33.2 in 1989 to 35.7 in 2009, and children under fifteen represented approximately 19 percent of the community in 2009.[22] Earlier, in 1989, intermarriage figures were 48 percent among Ashkenazi Jews and 18 percent among Mountain Jews.[2]

Family testimony illustrates the personal dimensions of aliyah.[7] Ilana Mansharov recalled that her parents and grandparents left Quba for Israel in the early 1970s, while her husband's family departed Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.[7] Her husband remembered a secret journey lasting weeks by train through European cities to Vienna, followed by a Jewish Agency flight to Tel Aviv.[7] Mansharov described leaving homes, land, and livelihoods as difficult, while connecting her family's departure with a longstanding Zionist aspiration.[7]

Red Village also experienced substantial population loss.[23] In a 2013 account, a community member recalled 8,500 Jewish residents roughly two decades earlier and estimated that 75 percent had left for Israel, Moscow, and Baku.[23] Younger residents often departed for employment and professional opportunities, while those remaining received support from relatives abroad and Jewish welfare organizations.[23][14]

Eight Jewish communities and seven synagogues were registered in Azerbaijan at the end of both 2022 and 2023.[24][25] In each reporting year, the government allocated 350,000 manat to the Mountain Jewish religious community and another 350,000 manat to the European Jewish, or Ashkenazi, community.[24][25] Earlier reporting in 2007 had recorded approximately five to six rabbis and six synagogues nationally, with most Jews living in Baku.[10]

On May 23, 2022, the United States and Israeli ambassadors visited Red Village and launched a heritage project with the Mountain Jews Heritage Union and the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.[24] The project supported the historic center of the Mountain Jewish community and sought to strengthen local cultural traditions and awareness of its history.[24]

In 2023, President Aliyev congratulated the Jewish community on Rosh Hashanah and described it as “an integral part of our society and an equal member.”[25] During a May meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, he also emphasized the Jewish community's contribution to Azerbaijan's modern development.[25]

Jewish participation in national life has also received commemorative recognition.[26] Mosaic reported that a monument to Jewish Azerbaijani soldier Albert Agarunov was erected in Baku in September 2019 and characterized his courage during the 1988–1994 Nagorno-Karabakh war as having made him a national hero in Azerbaijan.[26]

Mountain Jewish origins remain a field of differing historical interpretations and inherited traditions.[3] Accounts connect the community to ancient Israelite exiles, early medieval Persian settlement, or later migration from Iran; the Judeo-Tat linguistic account emphasizes post-Mongol and Safavid-era migration and finds no linguistic evidence for descent from Sassanid military colonies.[3][18] These narratives should not be compressed into one established arrival date, nor should ancient-origin traditions be treated as the foundation date of Red Village.[3][5]

The designation “Tat” also carries a history of disagreement.[3] Soviet officials promoted a single Tat ethnic category divided by religion; a 1927 Mountain Jewish congress adopted Tat as one self-name, but participants at a 2001 symposium rejected its application to their people.[3] Classification affects demographic comparison: published 1989 totals range from approximately 30,800 to 39,900 depending partly on whether people recorded as Tats are included.[1][22]

Recent population estimates likewise vary: a 2020 study placed the total between 7,200 and 20,000, while community leaders estimated 15,000–20,000 in 2022 and 15,000 to more than 25,000 in 2024.[24][27] A 2026 report also relayed a community-attributed estimate of 55,000 Jewish wartime refugees, but provided no supporting methodology.[28]

The 1918 Quba killings require particular care: Jewish leaders requested a memorial in 2007 while citing an estimate of approximately 3,000 Mountain Jewish victims, but the report explicitly noted continuing historical investigation.[29] A later museum-guide account assigning responsibility to Armenians does not independently establish either the attribution or total.[30] Assessments of antisemitism also differ by period: early post-Soviet reporting includes both accounts of little hostility and allegations of attacks in Sumgait in 1988 and Baku in 1990, whereas the 2024 human-rights report recorded no antisemitic incidents during its reporting period.[20][27]