Abstract
With[SM1] the rise of European Jewry within the cultural world of 20th century it is undeniable that most of the current Jewish literature concerns itself with issues of Ashkenazim and, to a lesser extent, Sephardic Jews. Yet, at the time when Ashkenazi people were beginning to be heavily intertwined into the politics of Europe and the West (1917-1980)—and therefore following a general trend of acculturation[SM2] —a much smaller group of Jews spread across Caucasus in the south of Soviet Russia remained strict in its orthodox Jewish traditions and managed, by and large, to be the only Jewish peoples of Soviet Union to avoid Nazi confrontational policy. For years despite this, Eurasians and Ashkenazim, perceived Mountain Jews in belittling terms, at times mixing them with local uneducated populations and thereby bringing confusion to the broader terms of group identification[SM3] . With the help of Soviet Union regime—as the term for a local Caucasus population, Tat, became officially used for all who speak tatski language—some groups brought into question the relation of Mountain Jews to the Jewish people. However, this misconception could not be further from the truth. While the Mountain Jews do speak a dialect stemming from tatian language, in their own eyes and in the eyes of nearby peoples, Mountain Jews are certainly a separate ethnic group. As such, by bringing greater context to Caucasus region I hope to underline not only the historic origin of the terms and groups, but also emphasize[SM4] the distinct (for the region) life style of Mountain Jews and its close resemblance to that of Jews elsewhere.
Caucasus
Preface
Throughout[SM5] earlier years before Stalin’s abolition acts against Jews, there were tens of thousands of students studying at Moscow State University – many of them Jews. And always there were graduate students who as part-time teachers represented a solid community with its own administrative functions and with its own police department, which, among other things, involved a passport bureau. The first passport in USSR was generally received at age 16, after which it was to be renewed every five years.
So once upon a time a student came by the police office to renew his passport for he just turned 21. Police officer goes over the data in the previously issued passport by officials in Dagestan, and suddenly stops and asks:
“Under the nationality in your passport there is something incomprehensible: ‘TAT’. What does this mean?”
“That is what they call ‘Gorskih Evreeyev’” (Mountain Jews) – explained the student.
“So why be so wise about it”—grimly smiling pronounced the officer, and wrote down: “Gorkiy Evrey.” [1]
And thus the student lived for five years with a passport in which not just something quite new was stated under nationality, but in terms of Russian language simply illiterate: “Mountain Jew.” And the police officer most likely could not have imagined that in the Caucasus, apart from well-known Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, still lived also not only Tats, but Avar, Aguly, Rutuls, Abaza, Dargintsy, Laktsy, Tabasarany, Talyshes, Udis, Tsakhurs and others - altogether 32 nationalities with own language, culture, history and religion.
Introduction
Initially[SM6] Mountain Jews formed a unique sub-ethnic group in the Eastern Caucasus on the territories of Dagestan and Azerbaijan. They used the so-called Jewish-Tat, or simply Juhuri, 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. Ethno-culturally, 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.
Although[SM7] there are numerous exotic hypothesis on how Jews ended up within the Caucasus region, it is most commonly acknowledged that the earlier Jews (that now comprise what we know as “Gorskie Evreyi”) first appeared in the 6th century when the Sassanid ruler Khosrow II Anushirvan moved the Mazdakite Jews from Babylonia to the Eastern Caucasus. Later the group increased as other migrants from Iran (mainly from Gilyan) as well as from Georgia and Eastern Europe joined them. Under[SM8] the rule of Nicholas I (reigned 1825-1855) Jews, of course, were not permitted to migrate to Caucasus (and neither were “native” Jews technically allowed to reside there until 1837). Yet, with the abolishing of this decree in 1860 the “influx of non-native Jews was such that, by the 1897 census, most of the Jews in the Caucasus were Ashkenazim. Of the 56,773 Jews then in the Caucasus, 7,038 (12.4%) were Mountain Jews, 6,034 (10.6%) were Georgian Jews, and almost all the rest (43,390, or 76.4%) were Ashkenazim, listing Yiddish as their native language.”[2]
Interestingly enough, the introduction of Mountain Jews to Russia, in part, preceded that of Jews from elsewhere. [SM9] 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. By the early 1990s the majority of Mountain Jews was living in Northern Caucasus, although by that time a considerable number of Mountain Jews had already settled in Moscow and Leningrad. Toward the end of perestroika (1991) 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, Russian Mountain Jews are mainly concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the so-called Caucasian Mineral Waters zone (Piatigorsk, Essentuki, Mineralnye Vody, etc.). There are still two thousand Mountain Jews living in Dagestan. While some claim that Mountain Jews number somewhere between 100 and 150 thousands, by some other accounts only between 60 and 70 thousand exist.1
It[SM10] was, in fact, the Russian military administration that coined the term “Mountain Jews” in the 19th century to distinguish between the East Caucasian and European Jews, while the Russian administrators applied the term “mountaineer” to all Caucasian peoples without discrimination and irrespective of the zones of their traditional settlement. At that time the expression “Mountain Jews” began to be used in the ethnographic literature and has been an official name of this people for a long time under the Soviet power.
Traditional Ethnos
Ethnonym "tat" today appears in the Caucasus, Crimea, Central Asia, Siberia, Hungary and Iran. Currently, except for the northern Caucasus, it is used for naming of the Persian-speaking population of southern Iranian Azerbaijan. The[SM11] Mountain Jews, or Judeo-Tats, can be regarded as a homogeneous sub-ethnic group with a common: 1) ethnic name—Juhur, 2) a common language—Juhuri (Judæo-Tat), 3) and a common religion—Judaism. These identification criteria helped the Jews scattered across the Caucasus to recognize their kinship in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet, due to certain cultural distinctions, marriages with members of other Jewish sub-ethnic groups (Ashkenazim, Georgian, and Central Asian Jews) were rare—despite the close physical proximity between them. Until the last decades of the 20th century marriages with people of other religions were equally rare. Out of those that there were, the greater part of mixed marriages was with Ashkenazim.
Similarly[SM12] to European Jewry, Mountain Jews have displayed dual self-awareness: on the one hand, they looked at themselves as creators of a specific national culture of the country they lived in. On the other, they did not completely belong to it, alluding to the Jewish roots going deep into the historical and cultural traditions and belonging to a religion that differed from the local ones. Mountain Jews, while relating themselves to the world of Caucasian culture, were still aware of being different from the Caucasian peoples. At the same time, notwithstanding all differences in the mentality of the Mountain Jews and their Caucasian neighbors, they had and still have many things in common. This united them in the face of other non-Caucasian cultures. For example, when comparing the Caucasian and Russian cultural traditions the Mountain Jews invariably prefer the former; the same applies to other comparisons of this sort. The fact that Mountain Jews have been actively drawn into Russian culture since the turn of the 20th century, while receiving higher education in cities with predominant Russian population, did not affect their perception of the Russian ethno-cultural complex. As Goluboff points out, Mountain Jews lived "kak pervobytnie evrei" (like primordial Jews) "closely, compactly... [preserving] [their] traditions without change.”
Relationships with Ashkenazi
[SM13] Mountain Jews position themselves in the Caucasian world, and the Caucasian peoples among whom they live do the same. The Caucasian peoples place them apart from the Ashkenazim and in all cases prefer Mountain Jews whose mentality is closer to their own and who respect their traditions. They share many customs and, though the Mountain Jews belong to a different confession, the local peoples look at them as one of the Caucasian peoples. In the Caucasus the local people speak about the Ashkenazim as Russian Jews and about the Mountain Jews as “ours” thus emphasizing that they belong to the Caucasus.
Prior[SM14] to the attainment of Caucasus by Russia, Mountain Jews’ main contacts were with other Jewish communities of Middle East. The source of influence and authority served the communities and rabbis of Iran, Iraq and Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). Even at the beginning of the 19th century, Derbent rabbis went to study in Baghdad.
In[SM15] the 1870s there was a great number of Ashkenazim living in Daghestan: in Temir-Khan-Shura (now Buinaksk), Derbent, and later in Petrovsk (Makhachkala), as well as in Vladikavkaz, Grozny, Nalchik, Baku and other cities. In Baku, Derbent, Temir-Khan-Shura, Vladikavkaz and other cities, the Ashkenazi deemed it necessary to build their own synagogues, though there were synagogues used by the Mountain Jews. This cannot be explained by purely religious differences. Some believe that the mutual desire to live separately was prompted by the difference in their mentalities and their ideas of what it meant to be a Jew.
After[SM16] Caucasus’ accession, Russia began to see the reinforcement of Ashekenazi influence on the Mountain Jews. Yet, the interrelationships between Russians and Mountain Jews were far from close – in big part stemming from: disturbing language barrier, differences in the prayer practice, different lifestyles, etc. Local Jews were not always able to distinguish Ashkenazi Jews from the Russians, while for the Ashkenazi local Jews blended in the crowd of "ignorant Asians." Of course, Mountain Jews were not immune from returning a gesture: perceiving foreign Jews as free-thinkers, they would refrain from supporting the activities of the The Society for the spread of enlightenment among Jews in Russia (OPE).
A[SM17] more detailed picture of inter-communal conflict can be grasped from the article written in late 19th century by Ilya Anisimov—the first Mountain Jew to receive secular university education in Russia. Despite being a strong proponent and fan of European education, Anisimov writes:
[much] that European Jews have is lacking in religion of Mountain Jews, while I had noticed that many religious rites of Mountain Jews are unknown to Europeans. Most Russian and European Jews, whom Gorskie called "eshgenezi", being more educated and developed than their Caucasian “brothers” do not exactly follow Talmud, thus causing an outrage in these "savages" from the mountains. "Eshgenezi", in their view, are the same as "epikurusy" (apostate).
Anisimov[SM18] also brings up another reason, pointing out that by gaining the Caucasus, many soldiers of Russian Jewish origin, who later returned from Caucasus and settled in urban areas, for some reason gave their coreligionists, Mountain Jews, a nickname "bull" – “perhaps wanting to indicate to their rudeness.”
Yet[SM19] , despite all the conflicts, through contacts with Russian Jews the life of Caucasus Jews has ceased to take place in complete isolation from the rest of the modern world (even if within the context of orthodox Judaism). Young people were sent to study in Eastern Europe, mostly in Lithuanian Yeshiva. For instance, in the famous Volozhinskoy Yeshiva studied one of the first Mountain Jewish writers, rabbi Sherbet Nisim-oglu, the father of previously mentioned historian, Ilya Anisimov. Increased also the inflow of religious literature published in Vilnius, Warsaw, and other major “Jewish capitals” of Europe.
The[SM20] convergence of the two communities was also greatly affected after the revolution due to an increasing secularization and the collapse of a closed life in the communities (much to a different degree). But particularly strongly both communities felt belonging to one people during WWII, when tens of thousands of Ashkenazi refugees arrived in Caucasus and were very hospitably accepted by Mountain Jews.
Participation in the World War II
Along[SM21] with people of Soviet Union on the fronts of Great Patriotic War (1941-1945, as WWII is commonly referenced in Russia) also fought Caucasian highlanders, among them, and Mountain Jews. They included such Gorskiye Jews as: playwright Yuno Semenov, writers Michael Bahshiev and Hizgil Avshalumov, poets, Boris Gavrilov, Manuvah Dadashev, Daniel Atnilov and many others. Michael Bahshiev, a military correspondent in the North-West, Second Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Zabaykalskom fronts, he took part in vanquishing of Japanese militarists. He was awarded Patriotic War second degree honors, Red Star, two combat awards and other commemorative medals. Events of the war years formed the basis of his works such as a novel “by the walls of Naryn-Qala”, the story “Frontovye vstrechi” (meetings on the front), the play “pobeda geroev” (“triumpth of heroes”), and a large cycle of poems.
Many[SM22] women “goryanok” also bore arms to defend their homeland. One of the first Dagestan females to become a paratrooper, Vera Hanukaeva, voluntarily entered into the army in 1936. Having immediately started working as telegrapher in the city of Stalingrad, she thus happened to participate in the defense of the city from the earliest days. Later Hanukaeva participated in the liberation of Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania and Hungary. During the battle, she was awarded the Merit Order of the Patriotic War, and many combat medals. Most notable, however, is that Hanukaeva later married a regular officer of the Soviet Army—Russian by nationality—Alexander Romanov in the city of Budapest.
History[SM23] of the Soviet World War II is also full of examples of involvement in the fighting with fascists of Soviet teenagers, as in the composition of the guerrilla detachments, or underground, and in the ranks of Soviet troops, where the kids were called “synovya polkda” (sons of the regiment). One of those fighters was a Gorskiy Jew, Boris Rahamimov. Having escaped from the boarding school for homeless kids, he became the son of the fourth Regiment Battalion. At age 14 he already participated in the battles for the liberation of Rostov, and then in less then a year marched all the way to Berlin, where on the May 10th he turned 15.
Altogether[SM24] hundreds were awarded the highest government awards, including the two highest rankings “Hero of the Soviet Union” for Shatiel Abramov and Isa Ilazarova. But with the whole community numbering thousands, it is hard to depict exactly the significance of this participation—however large an internal proportion was—in the war that by most accounts took the lives of somewhere between twenty and thirty million Soviets. The much bigger significance is, in fact, exemplified in the Nazi occupation of the North Caucasus during the late 1942, when they found themselves in control of several thousand Mountain Jews.
By[SM25] the time of Nazi retreat in 1943, Germans managed to kill hundreds of Mountain Jews, yet much of ambivalence remains about the actual nature of this Nazi-Jewish contact. In his work, Feferman argues that whatever murders occurred were by and large the result of failure by the first Nazi regiments to check up with Berlin about this community’s “Jewishness”. He presents evidence showing SS research into the whole ethnic makeup of Caucuses, and points out questions Nazis raised to ensure of correctly identifying Mountain Jews. This, Feferman argues, was done not as much for any “racial design” reasons, as much as to avoid political turbulence in the by far the most ethnically mixed region of Soviet Union.
Indeed, the end outcome of Nazi occupation confirmed their perception of the complexity within the region. While Nazis were successful in exterminating nearly all Mountain Jews in the Northern Caucasus (the villages of Bogdanovka and Menzhinsk) and in the Crimea (the Shaumian), Mountain Jews in Nalchik were spared after been uniformly presented by local people as Tats. This, Mikhail Chlenov believes, in fact, later lead to a successful process of “Tatization” of the Mountain Jews. In the face of a common danger with locals, Gorskiye Evreyi attempted to dissociate from the Ashkenazim and Jews in general—as was all the more typical across Soviet Union. This can however be argued, for massive “Tatization” was not launched immediately after the war but in the late 1960s and reached its peak only in the late 1970s.
Problem with Mixing Identifications: “Tats” and “Gorskie Evreeyi”
Starting[SM26] with the 1930s Soviet propaganda was imposing the “Tat” ethnonym on the Mountain Jews of Dagestan and the Northern Caucasus. The pressure soon increased in the 1970s after the first wave yielded. In the late 1970s and early 1980s many of them described themselves as Tats, not as Mountain Jews (or Jews in general). As a result the new term was taken for the Mountain Jews’ self-identification name and their identification by other peoples was distorted.
The[SM27] word “Tat” was a Turkic term applied to subjugated settled peoples, mainly Iranians, and carried not so much an ethnic as a social meaning. In fact, that is its precise meaning in Central Asia, the Crimea, northwestern Iran and the Eastern Caucasus. Turks (more specifically Azeris from Azerbaijan) applied the term to the Iranians of the Eastern Caucasus whose ancestors had been moved away from Iran during and after the 6th century. They used to live in compact groups between Apsheron in the south and Derbent in the north. Early in the 20th century there were several hundred thousands of them. Their self-identification was closely linked to their religious beliefs in either Islam or Christianity. Neither did they ever call themselves Tats nor did they use a language other than parsi (as opposed to tati), for the Turkic term sounded derogative to them.
In[SM28] the 1920s, B. Miller formulated an idea of a single Tat ethnos divided by three religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. This, of course, was very much inline with Bolsheviks’s policy – including those few more secular ones among Mountain Jews. On their initiative a congress of Mountain Jews held in Moscow in 1927 adopted a declaration that registered the term “Tat” as one of their self-names. Yet, the fact that neither the majority of Jewish Tats, nor the Muslim Tats, nor the Christian Tats ever called themselves Tats was ignored by the scholars of the epoch. The “physical-anthropological features of which B. Miller was aware contradicted his idea about the ethnic kinship” of the Mountain Jews and the Tats of the Caucasus. Yet, today it is still widespread and is known as the “Tat myth.”
Until[SM29] the 1950s there were few college graduates among the Mountain Jews but it was precisely they who enthusiastically accepted the myth and proliferated it among their people. It was this layer that produced “Tat” writers, poets, etc. who were consistently imposing the myth on their less educated compatriots. Until the early 1970s the majority of the Mountain Jews treated the myth as an invention of the “highbrows” and a certain misunderstanding not to be discussed in informal situations. Therefore the Mountain Jews and their neighbors continued calling the Jewish Tat language (Juhuri) “Jewish” in Russian while the self-name of the Mountain Jews (Juhur) was translated as “Jew” into Russian. In this way, before the 1970s when the Jews of the Soviet Union were allowed to emigrate to Israel (though not without problems) the Tat myth had been treated as a “sort of a toy” of the “Tat” writers and communist functionaries. In that period the level of education among the Mountain Jews was rapidly rising. Together with it the number of those who supported the notorious myth was also increasing. This process coincided with the beginning of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and with an active anti-Israeli campaign in the Soviet press (1967). It was at that time that the Tat nationality was actively imposed on the Mountain Jews of Dagestan and other North Caucasian republics. Everywhere people were explained that they were Tats, not Jews. This implied that they should not emigrate to Israel.
The[SM30] propaganda campaign instigated by the authorities was carried out by Mountain Jews themselves—the “Tat” writers, poets and communist party (C.P.S.U.) members. Nearly all newspaper articles on the subject appeared in the 1970s. It was a period of numerous meetings of the “Tat” public at which people were forced to speak against the “Israeli aggressors.” The media and meetings had to discuss the Tat ethnonym in a very clumsy and importune way. From that time on the problem has acquired special importance for the Mountain Jews. This all happened mainly in Dagestan; in Azerbaijan from where the Mountain Jews were not allowed to emigrate to Israel there was practically no talk about the term. In addition, it was not wise to raise the issue in a union republic where there were several hundreds of thousands of “Turkisized” Caucasian Tats.
In Dagestan the Mountain Jews formed two camps: that of the “Tats” and that of “Jews” commonly known as the Zionists. The latter was made up mainly of less educated people and only a small number of college graduates. They regarded the efforts to impose the Tat ethnonym on them as official anti-Semitism. The Tat group included nearly all Mountain Jew writers, poets, C.P.S.U. functionaries, directors of industrial enterprises, teachers, etc. The majority treated the dispute with indifference, yet later over a half of the local Mountain Jews accepted the new name. This happened after the articles by M. Matatov and writer K. Avshalumov had appeared in Dagestanskaia pravda. The authors openly divided the people into ours (“Tats” and hence “Soviet citizens”) and not ours. These articles appeared during a campaign of changing Soviet passports that started in 1977 and created the best possible conditions to turn all Mountain Jews into Tats: by the beginning of perestroika the majority of them had been registered as Tats.
In this way four factors coincided in time: a possibility (mainly theoretical) of emigration; Israel’s victories in the wars of 1967 and 1973 and the anti-Israeli campaign in the Soviet press that went together with them; stepped up campaign to impose the Tat ethnonym on the Mountain Jews; changing Soviet passports in the late 1970s. This coincidence negatively influenced the identity of the Mountain Jews.”
The fact that a Jewish state existed and scored military victories over its neighbors greatly affected the Mountain Jews’ identity, though they became divided into those who were against the “Zionist aggressors” and those who supported Israel. The latter were in the majority because even the “Tats” spoke with pride about the military successes of their historical homeland.
Anisimov followed this line of reasoning in his writings.19 He was the first to formulate the Tat hypothesis. When comparing the Ashkenazim and the Mountain Jews, he regarded the features of the former’s ethnocultural type as a standard and pointed out that the Mountain Jews obviously did not fit it: Ashkenazim were mainly well educated, they were familiar with the rabbinic (Talmudic) tradition while the share of those who could read and write among the Mountain Jews was low; their rabbis, according to Anisimov, knew next to nothing about the Talmud while the Mountain Jews became introduced to the Talmud thanks to Ashkenazim.20
This shows that the process of Tat-ization was rooted in the abandonment of religion that corroded the Mountain Jews’ traditional identity, and psychological discomfort caused by their association with Ashkenazim. Because of this many fairly educated Mountain Jews who more than the others imbibed certain specific features of the culture and rules of conduct of Ashkenazim preferred to dissociate themselves from those who represented this culture to the extent that they did not want the same ethnic name. Since in the Russian language the term “Jew” is mainly associated with the Ashkenazim, parts of the Mountain Jews tried to drop their ethnic name even though it was somewhat diluted with the term “mountaineer.” It should be added here that not all members of the intellectual elite of the Mountain Jews felt like that but only those who participated in the process of Tatization. On the whole, a large number of the Mountain Jews treats the Ashkenazim with sympathy and looks at them as part of a single Jewish people.
The campaign was mainly aimed at preventing massive emigration from the country. The authorities failed but the myth not only distorted the Mountain Jews’ ethnic self-awareness but also taught them hypocrisy.
It was also gradually undermining the Mountain Jews’ traditional ethnic self-awareness: at first the formulas “ĵuhur-a Jew” and “ĵuhur-a Tat” were seen as identical. By the late 20th century the new generation was prepared to drop the first of the two formulas. They started thinking differently: “We call ourselves Tats, other peoples also call us Tats, therefore we are obviously not Jews but Tats.” Other peoples stopped calling the Mountain Jews by their old name on the ground that “if they call themselves Tats and if the local press uses the same name, therefore they are probably Tats.” This created chaos in the minds of Mountain Jews themselves and their neighbors. .
Although it is possible to attribute the uniqueness of this Nazi encounter to a variety of causes, what is clear is that the history of interrelationships between Mountain Jews and other locals prior to WWII is like Jewish history in general: complicated and unique.