Azerbaijan’s Jews hid away during the Soviet era - now they say they are safe and free

V In the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, the Red Village is one of the few places in the world where a Jewish community has lived continuously for more than 2,000 years, now in a Muslim majority country.

It’s believed to be the last surviving shtetl, and the only town in the world outside Israel and the US where Jewish residents, numbering around 3,000, make up the majority.

Jewish history in Azerbaijan stretches back over two millennia, with communities first arriving and settling in the region in the 5th century BCE when much of the Caucasus was controlled by the Persian Empire. Various Jewish groups have lived in the mountain range in the centuries since.

Today there are seven synagogues in Azerbaijan, and the country’s some 25,000 Jews (0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of the country’s population) is comprised of communities of varying sizes – the Mountain Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews and Georgian Jews, who migrated from the neighbouring Caucasus country, are the country’s largest Jewish subgroups. The 5,000 Mountain Jews (also called Juhuri Jews), who follow Sephardic traditions, is the largest. Their main settlement, the Red Village, is an hour-and-a-half drive north of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital city, through the flat, sparse landscape bordering the Caspian Sea and then inland for another 45 minutes.

Their houses are made of stone and wood with Persian, Jewish and local Caucasian architectural influence, some gated and brand new, many dilapidated and abandoned. Around each of the village’s three synagogues, huddled amid high walls of baked brick, are grave-looking armed men in full tactical military equipment on guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since October 7.

Pisakh Isakov of the Mountain Jewish community showed me the village’s oldest synagogue, the Six Dome Synagogue, built in 1888. Isakov, 70, said Jews have lived peacefully alongside Muslim and Christian communities here for centuries. “There’s no antisemitism here,” he insists. “The rabbis say blessings for the passing of imams, and imams attend Jewish funerals. We share in one another’s holidays; our children play together.”

Threats to the Jewish community’s way of life never arrive, he claims, from the mosques in nearby towns, as he suggests might be the case in “other countries”.

But state-sanctioned assault against religious ways of life in the Soviet Union began in the 1930s and continued until Azerbaijan declared independence in 1991.

The Six Dome Synagogue, the centre of religious life for Mountain Jews, was itself closed and forbidden from use until it was reopened for religious purposes in 2001.

Thousands of Jewish residents “prayed in secret” during Soviet times, he recollected, and punishments were severe; rabbis were arrested, synagogues in the country were shut down, but still Jewish life persisted for decades in these low-lying mountains.

It was “difficult, there was tension, informants, things were very, very different. The only thing that stayed the same was our Jewish traditions,” he said.

In 2011, the Mountain Jews’ synagogue was opened in Baku by order of President Ilham Aliyev, who has been in power since 2003 after taking over from his father, as part of his government’s stated aim of continuing the legacy of religious tolerance in the country. The stately building, constructed in less than six months at the expense of the state, is complete with a large prayer hall, Torah ark and Bimah.

Now in modern Azerbaijan, Isakov says, they “don’t have to hide, we are free”.

His reflections were echoed by Sevinc, a 33-year-old Azeri Jewish man wearing a kippah and tzitzit I meet in a trendy café within a slick pedestrian shopping district in downtown Baku. “It’s kind of a joke here. Every young Jewish person has a story about what their parents or grandparents did under Soviet rule to hide. My grandfather used to go to underground Torah lessons in the basements of his friends, and my mother used to hide her share of challah beneath her loom,” he said.

He said the country had “come a long way” since Soviet subjugation, with “never, ever” any examples of antisemitism. “If there was any antisemitism, any at all, the government would come down very hard and quickly.”

An “adamant patriot”, Sevinc said his friends watch their phones “with horror” and disbelief at videos that have surfaced online in the last year of Jewish people being targeted and harassed on the streets of European cities. “Azerbaijan is not perfect, we know this,” he said, “but when we hear stories about what life was like for Jewish people under Soviet rule, and we see in places like Amsterdam Jews being targeted, we know we have it very good now, we cannot complain. That stuff is unthinkable in our country today.”

Azerbaijan has been accused of engaging in a long-term charm offensive, through hosting lavish international events and summits – Eurovision, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the World Chess Championship, and recently COP29 – to deflect criticism from the country’s poor human rights record and suppression of opposition parties and a free press.

But, democracy, posited Davud, a 31-year-old Azeri Jewish business owner born and raised in Baku, is not essential for the safety and flourishing of the Jewish people. Besides, he insisted, if Azerbaijan were to democratise, it would put a “target” on its back, making an invasion or attacks from neighbouring Iran or Russia more likely. It’s the authoritarian system that “keeps everything in place”.

Azerbaijan, long concerned with the activities of Tehran, particularly in context of its influence in the South Caucasus, has in recent years found itself in strategic alignment with Israel, one of the world’s most advanced producers of military technology, intelligence and cybersecurity – and which, too, seeks to contain Iran’s ambition.

The chief rabbi of the Azerbaijan Ashkenazi Jewish community, Rabbi Shneor Segal, said that after October 7, “Jewish safety became an exception around the world.

“But I thank God that we Azeri Jews can count ourselves among the lucky few,” he said.

“Not persecuted, happy, safe. We feel very secure here.

“A rarity in the history of our people. Long may it continue.”