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THE MOUNTAIN JEWS IN THE CAUCASUS: CERTAIN ASPECTS OF ETHNIC IDENTIFICATION
Igor SEMENOV
Igor Semenov, Ph.D. (Hist.), researcher, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Daghestanian Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences (Makhachkala, Russia)
The Mountain Jews formed an individual sub-ethnic group in the Eastern Caucasus (on the territories of Daghestan and Azerbaijan). They use the so-called Jewish-Tat language, based on a Middle Persian dialect, that includes a vast body of lexical borrowings from the Aramaic and Hebrew together with elements of the contemporary Azerbaijanian, Kumyk, and other languages.
Ethnoculturally, the Mountain Jews belong to the Iranian Jewry with which they had been maintaining close ties even before the Eastern Caucasus became part of Russia in the early 19th century. These ties are linguistically confirmed by their knowledge of the Zeboni imrani, the language common to all Iranian Jews who spoke different dialects within their ethnic groups. In the 18th-19th centuries a great number of Iranian Jews, mainly from Gilyan, moved to the Eastern Caucasus where they were integrated into different ethnic groups of Mountain Jews.
There is a host of ideas about these ethnic groups’ origins—some of them very exotic. Without going into details I would like to present here my own hypothesis: the Jewish substratum that served the core of the Mountain Jew sub-ethnic group appeared in the 6th century when the Sassanid ruler Chosroes (Khosrow) I Anushirvan (531-579) moved the Mazdakite Jews from Babylonia to the Eastern Caucasus. Later the group was increasing as migrants from Iran, mainly from Gilyan, from Georgia and Eastern Europe joined them.
The first compact settlements of Mountain Jews appeared in Russian fortresses being built everywhere in the Northern Caucasus during the Caucasian War of the mid-19th century. Gradually their number in the Northern Caucasus increased to reach, by the 1980s, the numbers comparable with the Jewish population of Daghestan and Azerbaijan. By the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union (1985-1991) the absolute majority of Mountain Jews was living in these three zones, although by that time a considerable number of Mountain Jews had already settled in Moscow and Leningrad. Toward the end of perestroika and immediately after it more than half of Mountain Jews left for Israel, the United States, Canada, and Germany. They were driven away mainly by a criminal wave in the Caucasian republics of the Russian Federation. Today, Mountain Jews are mainly concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the……………………..
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