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The Holocaust of the Mountain Jews

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The Mountain Jews lived in the Eastern and Southern Caucasus (mainly in Krasnaia Sloboda in Azerbaijan), as well as in various autonomous republics of the modern-day Russian Federation: Chechnya, Dagestan (the town of Derbent), Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria (the town of Nalchik), and North Ossetia (Mozdok). The Jewish communities in the Eastern Caucasus apparently emerged in the early medieval period, as a result of the settling of Persian Jews along trade routes. From the beginning of the 19th century, all the Mountain Jewish communities lay within the Russian Empire, and later in the Soviet Union1. Mountain Jews speak several dialects of the Tat language (a Western Iranian language spoken by the Tats, an indigenous Iranian people of the Caucasus), which is also referred to as Dzhuguri by the Mountain Jews themselves. In recent centuries, the Mountain Jews adopted the Sephardic rite of Rabbinic Judaism. On the eve of World War II, there were 35,000 Mountain Jews living in the USSR2. As part of the Soviet policy of collectivization of the early 1930s, hundreds of Mountain Jews found themselves in the kolkhozes (collective farms) of the North Caucasus, including Menzhinskoe and Bogdanovka in the Kursk Raion, Ordzhonikidze (present-day Stavropol) Krai. More than 100 of them were moved to the Shaumian kolkhoz in the Yevpatoria Raion of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea.

1. On the history of the Mountain Jews, see Mordechai Altshuler, Yehudei Mizrah Kavkaz: Toledot Hayehudim Haharariyim Mereshit Hame'ah Hatesha-esreh (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute; the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1990) (Hebrew); Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 196–211; Valerii Dymshits, ed., Gorskie evrei: Istoriia, etnografiia, kul’tura (Jerusalem–Moscow: Znanie, 1999), p. 462 (Russian); Judaic-Slavic Journal, 2(4) (2020) (Istoriia i kul'tura gorskikh evreev).
2. Altshuler, Yehudei Mizrah Kavkaz, p. 151.

The first massacre of Mountain Jews3 by the Nazis took place in this Shaumian kolkhoz4. In March 1942, a local citizen reported to the German authorities that there were some Jews still left there (after the killing of the local Ashkenazi Jews, which had taken place at the kolkhoz previously). Immediately thereupon, the German Military Police (Feldkommandatur 810) and Einsatzgruppe D, with the help of local collaborators, executed all 114 Mountain Jews who lived at the kolkhoz5.

The conquest of the North Caucasus, with its vast oil fields, was one of the two main goals of the 1942 summer offensive of the Wehrmacht. In the second half of 1942, German troops occupied a segment of the North Caucasus where there were some Mountain Jewish settlements6.
The first communities of Mountain Jews in the Caucasus to be captured by the Germans in late August 1942 were two kolkhozes in Menzhinskoe and Bogdanovka. There, the Mountain Jews made up a significant percentage of the entire Jewish population, and they lived alongside Ashkenazi Jews. After being subjected to abuse and looting of their property, scores of Mountain Jewish families who had remained in these villages were murdered with machine guns on August 19 and September 20, 19427. These two massacres claimed a total of about 850 victims8.

The Germans occupied only two major urban centers that were home to several thousand Mountain Jews: Mozdok (occupied for 4.5 months) and Nal’chik (occupied for only two months).

In the town of Mozdok, several hundred Mountain Jews were abused and occasionally murdered, but not subjected to wholesale extermination. They were employed in leather production, which apparently secured their survival.

In the town of Nalchik, the Germans plundered the property of the local Mountain Jews and sent them to perform humiliating forced labor in the area, without supplying them with food. All the Mountain Jews were detained and placed in a camp in a certain neighborhood of Nal’chik, with no provisions9. Some of the men were beaten10 and murdered11.

Initially, the Mountain Jews were probably murdered along with their Ashkenazi counterparts, as part of the general genocidal Judenpolitik of the Nazis. By mid-October 1942, the Mountain Jews, with the help of the local population, were able to convey to the Germans that they were a separate ethnic group unrelated to the "real" Jews. The Germans then decided to halt further killings of Mountain Jews, pending investigation.

The researchers in Germany did not formulate their opinion on the extent of the "Jewishness" of the Mountain Jews. Nor did the decision-makers in Berlin render their verdict. As part of this research "project," SS officers questioned witnesses from among this group and interviewed members of other local ethnicities on the subject of the Mountain Jews; they visited the residences of Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus and attended their ceremonies, such as weddings12. For their part, according to a Mountain Jew’s testimony, the elders of the community showed the Germans cradles that looked like those of the Kabardians, “in order to prove that they were not European Jews13.” Of crucial importance was the Mountain Jews’ attempt to influence the investigation indirectly by garnering the support of their Muslim neighbors, primarily the Kabardians. The Germans made two important preliminary conclusions: 1) The Mountain Jews did not look Jewish, and 2) they practiced polygamy14. The latter fact was attributed to the influence of Islam on them15. By late December 1942, Einsatzgruppe D had ruled that the Mountain Jews were unrelated to the Jews, and that they had to be referred to as a Tat people16.

To summarize, in the early stages of the occupation, the Germans did not regard the Mountain Jews as a distinct group – but, rather, as part of the broader Jewish population, which was targeted for complete eradication. As a result, except for the case of Mozdok (which seems to have been a local initiative), the Germans exterminated Mountain Jews wherever they found them. However, once the Mountain Jews had managed to convey to the Germans that they were a separate ethnic group unrelated to the Jews, an investigation was launched. Were it not for this initiative, it appears that the group’s fate would have been sealed. The preliminary findings of this investigation worked in favor of the Mountain Jews, sparing them from total destruction.

After the war, Mountain Jews continued to pursue a path of secularization, acculturation, and urbanization, which gained momentum, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Substantial numbers of Mountain Jews relocated to Moscow and Pyatigorsk, as well as to the United States and Israel, further amplifying the latter trend.

3. Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), pp. 292–308; Kiril Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews: Was There a Policy?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21:1 (2007), pp. 96–114. Mordechai Altshuler, “Yahas hanatzim leyahadutam shel ‘haharariyim’ veshel edot mizrahivot aherot,” Peamim, 27 (1986), pp. 5–17 (Hebrew).
4. Feldkommandatur (V) 810. Activity report for the period March 1-15, 1942. March 16, 1942, Yad Vashem Archives (henceforth: YVA), M.29.FR/40, p. 20.
5. Statement of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission of the Yevpatoria Raion. June 26, 1944, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF, State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 7021, op. 9, d. 79, l. 10.
6. Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, pp. 292–308. Altshuler, “Yahas hanatzim leyahadutam shel ‘haharariyim’ veshel edot mizrahiyot aherot,” pp. 5–17.
7. Statement of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission of the Village of Menzhinskoe, June 27, 1943, GARF, f. 7021, op.17, d. 10, pp. 155–56; statement of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission of the Village of Bogdanovka, June 29, 1943, GARF, f. 7021, op. 17, d. 10, p. 158.
8. Minutes of the plenary meeting of the Ordzhonikidze District Committee of VKP(b) on the terror of the occupiers in the occupied territory and their plans to use the lands of kolkhozes and sovkhozes, March 9, 1943, published in V. Vodolazhskaia, M. Krivneva, and N. Mel’nik, eds., Stavropol’e v period nemetsko-fashistskoi okkupatsii (avgust 1942–ianvar’ 1943): Dokumenty i materialy Komiteta po delam arkhivov Stavropol’skogo kraia, Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Stavropol’skogo kraia, Tsentra dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Stavropol’skogo kraia (Stavropol: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2000), p. 81.
9. Testimony of Dina Pinkhasova, Archive of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 4 (106), pp. 15-16.
10. Act of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, 1943, GARF, f. 7021, op. 7, d. 109, p. 200.
11. Testimony of Nushum Shamilov, November 11, 1988, YVA, 0.3/5157, pp. 19–20.
12. Testimony of Avgosh Shamilova, in Iskhod gorskih evreev: razrushenie garmonii mirov, in Svetlana Danilova, ed., Nal’chik (Poligrafservis IT, 2000), p. 30 (Russian); testimony of Zhenya Biazrova, ibid., p. 48.
13. Testimony of Shamilova, ibid, p. 30.
14. Strafsache gegen Bierkamp. Bayer. Landeskriminalamt. Z. Zt. March 26, 1962. Vernehmungsniederschrift. H. Friedrich, YVA, TR.10/1147, p. 495. On the subject of polygamy among Mountain Jews, see Ekaterina Norkina, "Mnogozhenstvo u gorskikh evreev v XIX-nachale XX vv.," in Judaic-Slavic Journal, 2(4) (2020) (Istoriia i kul'tura gorskikh evreev), pp. 102–110.
15. Bev. D. RmfdbOg beim Ob. Kdo. Der Heeresgruppe A Min.Dirig. Dr. Bräutigam an RmfdbOg. “Bergjuden,” December 26, 1942, YVA, JM/5640.
16. Otto Bräutigam, So hat es sich zugetragen, Ein Leben als Soldat und Diplomat (Würzburg: Holzner Verlag, 1968), p. 535f.