Gorsky-Kavkazi

“You know you’re Gorsky when….” This lighthearted entry on a Gorsky-Kavkazi Facebook page provides humorous insights about this community of 15,000 living in North America, most of whom reside in the Kensington, Brooklyn area of New York City. Answers include such tidbits as, “You have thirty cousins,” and, “Your parents drink six cups of tea a day.” For those who have never heard of the Gorsky-Kavkazi, just figuring out what to call them is an achievement! In North America they are typically known as “Mountain Jews,” a loose translation of the Russian name “Gorsky-Kavkazi.” As the Facebook page shows, they often simply go by “Gorsky” or “Kavkazi,” the word for their ancestral homeland in the Caucasus Mountains, predominantly in modern day Azerbaijan. To add to the confusion, they call themselves “Juhuro” in their native language, Judeo-Tat, which is a version of ancient Persian with Hebrew mixed in. Many Gorsky-Kavkazi also peak Russian and English.

The Gorsky-Kavkazi claim to be descendants of the Jewish community taken captive by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BC. The Babylonians were later conquered by the Medo-Persians. In the 6th century AD, a Persian king sent many Jewish people to reinforce his northern border in the rugged Caucasus where they settled among the native Aryan and Muslim tribes. In 1869, the Gorsky-Kavkazi helped the Russians defeat Islamic armies who wanted an independent Shari’a state in the Caucasus. In return, they were spared the anti-Semitic persecution experienced by Russian Jewry. When the Soviets took over the Caucasus region in 1926, the Gorsky-Kavkazi were incorporated into the Soviet republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Azerbaijan. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, most of the Gorsky-Kavkazi population has left the Caucasus for Moscow, Israel, or the United States.

While they could have chosen to live in Israel, the group of Gorsky-Kavkazi who came to Metro New York in the mid-1990s were seeking a safe place for their children to grow up. The break-up of the Soviet Union brought conflict to the Caucasus. By the early 1990s, Azerbaijan was at war with Armenia, Chechnya was fighting for independence, and Dagestan was a hotbed of crime and kidnapping. Deciding to come to Metro New York instead of Israel was a choice for peace. As one man said, “Why leave one war zone for another?”