The second homeland. Georgian Jews throughout the centuries

The synagogue in Tbilisi. Photo: Adam Reichardt

This was no surprise given the historical context of the events and politics of Israel at the time, which encouraged the return of Jews to the historical homeland and continued the long history of the Zionist movement in Georgia. On the other hand, the recognition of 26 centuries of Georgian-Jewish friendship as part of Georgia’s cultural heritage, and the narrative about the long history of comfortable living for Georgian Jews, makes it difficult to believe that Georgia was a place they truly wanted to leave.

Ketevan Kakitelashvili, a Georgian historian, believes that the narrative about 26 centuries of friendship between Georgians and Jews appeared as a “double idealisation of the past” as the result of “nostalgia of the loss”, since after most Georgian Jews moved to Israel they lost their second homeland – Georgia – while Georgians lost their Jewish community.

Strong bond

In the spring of 2018, the Georgian government officially recognised the “26 centuries of Georgian-Jewish friendship” as an intangible cultural heritage of the country. The concept of 26 centuries suggests that Georgian Jews settled in Georgia after the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem, and since then unique friendly relations have bonded them with Georgians. The narrative implies that if this harmony was ever broken, it would be caused by external forces such as the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. Based on the 11th century chronicle of Leonti Mroveli, Georgian historical tradition attributes the settlement of Jews to the period of Babylonian captivity in the fifth century BC. The oldest material evidence of Jewish life in Georgia are the gravestones dating to the 2nd century, found in the town of Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Georgia, just a few kilometres west from Tbilisi.

According to the same historical tradition based on the medieval chronicle Kartlis Tskhovreba [The life of Kartli], Jews were involved in the dissemination of Christianity to Georgia and brought the first Christian relics which are buried under the first Christian cathedral built in Georgia. This is widely used as an explanation of the allegedly low level of antisemitism in Georgia, a traditionally Christian country, where religion often serves as one of the main reference points for Georgian national identity.

Georgian Jews are a separate Jewish ethnic group. They often are mistakenly believed to be Mountain (Caucasian) Jews or Sephardic Jews. In reality, Georgian Jews are different from both of those groups as well as from Ashkenazi Jews. Some researchers believe that Georgian Jews can be regarded as one of the groups of the Mizrahi Jews – the diaspora dating back to biblical times. In terms of religious rite, Georgian Jews are indeed close to Sephardics. Historically the Jews lived both in the largest cities of Georgia, such as Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Batumi and Gori, and in several settlements in the west of the country, including Kulashi, Lailashi and Oni. A large community also used to live in Akhaltsikhe, in southern Georgia, the area which, in the mid-16th century, was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. This gave birth to speculations that the Akhaltsikhe Jews are descendants of Sephardic Jews who came to those lands from the Ottoman Empire. The recent research around Akhaltsikhe and in neighbouring areas of Turkey has not found any material evidence of this. Nevertheless, the synagogues of Georgian Jews that are still preserved are of the Sephardic type, which proves the existence of Sephardic influence in Georgia.

Acculturation and language

Georgian Jews did not develop any separate language like Yiddish or Ladino. They speak Georgian and are fairly well acculturated into Georgian society. The use of language is an especially significant marker of the specificity of Georgian Jews and of their acculturation into Georgian society. Georgian is an even more important reference point for Georgian national identity than the Christian orthodox religion and its alphabet is recognised as a cultural heritage of Georgia. By accepting Georgian as their mother tongue, Georgian Jews became the most integrated minority in the country. Apart from language, they have adopted to Georgian folk culture, including music and dances. Some researchers assume that a Georgian-Jewish ethnolect used to exist, but this theory still lacks proper evidence. The evident traces of Hebrew influences on Georgian vocabulary are yet another illustration of the long-lasting and close Georgian-Jewish contacts. For instance, Georgian names for the days of the week suggest that the count starts from shabati – Saturday.

The history of Georgian Jews still leaves many questions and needs further research. It is clear, however, that by the beginning of the 19th century when Georgia was eventually incorporated into the Russian Empire, Georgian Jewry was an integral part of Georgian society with its own economic role – mostly in trade. Involvement in trade and usury gave birth to negative stereotypes about Jews related to income and greed. Despite records showing the occurrence of several blood libels and – as Ketevan Kakitelashvili observes – depictions of Jewish stereotypes in the Georgian press during the 19th century, these events are absent from today’s cultural memory on Georgian-Jewish relations. Kakitelashvili sees the narrative of the 26 centuries as a tool for the mediation of cultural memory and the building of a framework which influences the choice of facts for narrating the history of Georgian Jews. Such a framework represses the memory of past antisemitic incidents.

It should be also noted that up until the 19th century Georgian Jews had very limited contact with other Jewish diasporas. Thus, the historical closeness of the community, together with its successful strategy of survival as a minority group in Georgia for centuries, and for being an integral part of society and simultaneously preserving its own identity, illustrates the uniqueness of Georgian Jewry. Ashkenazi Jews and Persian Jews started to settle in Tbilisi in the 19th century, but smaller Jewish settlements in less ethnically diverse regions of Georgia remained relatively closed to newcomers until the mid-20th century.

Failed Sovietisation

The 20th century – in particular the Soviet period since 1921, when Georgia became a Soviet republic, until independence in 1991 – brought new challenges and opportunities for Georgian Jewry. This was the time when the community’s closeness with the rest of society was ultimately broken. However, the century also resulted in an almost complete abandonment of a majority of the small historically Jewish settlements by Jews. The last three decades of the 20th century were marked by the exodus of almost the entire Jewish population from the country. Different estimates exist with regards to the size of the Jewish population in 20th century Georgia, from 30,000 to 100,000. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the community left Georgia between the 1970s and 1990s, and fewer than 10,000 remain in the country today.

After Georgia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, Soviet-wide policies were applied. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the wake of Soviet korenisation – a policy meant to demonstrate the authorities’ loyalty to all ethnic groups of the USSR – Jewish cultural institutions were established in Georgia, including the museum of Georgian Jews which opened in 1933 in the building of a former synagogue in Tbilisi. Another synagogue building in Tbilisi was used as the House of Culture of the working Jews of Georgia, named after Lavrentiy Beria. With the closing of the synagogues in Soviet anti-religious campaigns, and transformation of the buildings into cultural institutions, Georgian Jewry did not avoid repressions (especially towards its religious leaders).

Collectivisation – the process of unifying the peasants into collective farms called kolkhozes – also affected Georgian Jews. A number of Jewish collective farms were established in Georgia and local Jews were recruited to join them. Special organisations were established to help “settling the Jews on the land”. The korenization policy did not succeed and was soon abandoned, with Jewish cultural institutions being gradually dismantled by the end of the 1930s. Nevertheless, the Georgian Jewish museum was only closed down in the 1950s and some Georgian Jewish kolkhozes continued to exist up until the 1980s.

During the Second World War, Soviet Georgia was an important transport hub in the evacuation of enterprises and civilian populations from the areas of the USSR located near the front lines. More than 50,000 evacuees, many of whom were Jewish, stayed in Georgia during that period, often sharing flats with the locals. The evacuees usually found employment in their new location and they widely communicated with the local population.

Ashkenazi Jews who evacuated to Soviet Georgia attended the synagogues and communicated with the local Jewry. Thus, during the Second World War Georgian Jews were able to encounter Jewry from other parts of the USSR, mostly from western Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Poland. After the war, most of the evacuees returned to their pre-war homes. We do not know if some families maintained contact in subsequent years, or whether this could have influenced decisions to leave in later decades.

Protests and migration

The Georgia of the 1940s and 1950s was often described by visitors and those who stayed as evacuees as the land of synagogues. Despite Soviet anti-religious policies, Georgia, to some extent, was an exception in this regard. That did not mean one could freely practice one’s religion in the republic, but the policies of the local authorities were, in some cases, less harsh than in other regions of the USSR. Mordechai Altshuler mentions that 29 per cent of the synagogues that stayed open in the Soviet Union in the 1950s were located in Georgia – while only 2.3 per cent of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population lived there. Nevertheless, the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s show that not everything was so harmonious for Jews in Soviet Georgia. A letter sent by 18 Georgian Jewish families to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in 1969, demanding permission to make aliyah (i.e. to go to Israel), was the first open appeal of Soviet Jewry for emigration.

The protests continued for several years afterwards. In 1971 a group of Georgian Jews undertook a hunger strike at the main post office in Moscow and 300 people made a demonstration in front of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Tbilisi. These protests initiated a wave of migration of Georgian Jews outside the Soviet Union, mainly to Israel. Archival documents show the vast majority of Georgian Jews in the beginning of the 1970s obtained visas allowing them to travel to Israel. Coupled with another migration wave in the 1990s, this gradually led to the emigration of almost the entire community. Today, most Georgian Jews that remain in Georgia live in the two largest cities, Tbilisi and Kutaisi.

It is still difficult to analyse the reasons for the great exodus of Jews in the last decades of the 20th century, mostly because the story of this event has yet to be researched and reconstructed. It is clear, however, that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jews in Georgia often had contact with foreigners, or at least this is what denunciations sent by the communist authorities’ informers claim. It is also clear that despite many synagogues remaining open in Soviet Georgia local Jews were far from content with the turning of other synagogues into houses of culture, workers clubs, cinemas or museums. A number of letters from Jewish activists across the republic to the communist authorities with regards to the closing down of synagogues are preserved in the Georgian archives.

A study conducted in Israel by Yochanan Altman and Gerald Mars in the 1980s among recent Georgian Jewish newcomers suggests that prior to coming to Israel, most Georgian Jews were actively involved in Georgia’s grey economy. A number of criminal cases instituted against Jewish spekulants, which are kept in the national security archives of Georgia, seem to support this theory. Involvement in the informal economy was illegal in the Soviet Union and could lead to serious consequences.

Limitations and exodus

Undoubtedly, the Soviet Union was not the most comfortable place to live – and not only for Georgian Jews – but could this be the only reason for their exodus? Kakitelashvili believes that within the framework of Soviet policy, the Georgian Jewish community was incompatible with the new reality and “had to become a museum exhibition of its history and style”.

“Despite the fact that many Georgian Jews adapted to the Soviet context and formed the Soviet Georgian intelligentsia and proletariat, most of them continued illegal Jewish life – and this was both the religious life and the economic activities… Jews engaged in illegal activities often became victims of detention and resettlement and were constantly in danger. This was one of the most important factors in the beginning of the Great Aliyah in the 1970s,” she adds.

Professor Lela Tsitsuashvili, a Georgian Jewish art historian and researcher of Jewish culture, evaluates the Soviet period as a time when Georgian Jews broke with their historical closeness and were able to form larger circles of an intellectual elite than within previous periods. She believes the main limitation of the Soviet Union, with which Georgian Jews could not cope, was the ban on the open demonstration of any religion.

“Even though there were families who were unhappy with the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime, most of them were motivated by… [religious] freedom and by the idea that after so many centuries the state of Israel appeared,” concludes Tsitsuashvili.

Yulia Oreshina is a lecturer of cultural memory studies at the Georgian American University in Tbilisi and an editor with Open Caucasus Media.

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