Europe's last shtetl

October 25, 2022 6:34 AM

How the Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan Endure By a river in the hills near the Russian border, a 300-year-old community of multilingual Jews keeps 'Europe's last shtetl' alive

(New Lines Magazine is a great read in general. You would do go by bookmarking the site and visiting often for many great articles.)

posted by NoMich (14 comments total)

This is really fascinating- and especially that they’ve managed to survive as a community when so many others in the greater region were wiped out. Thanks for posting!
posted by Mchelly at 9:22 AM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is so cool: you have my thanks as well -- for both the article and New Lines Magazine.
posted by y2karl at 10:12 AM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting culturally. Thanks! I was slightly puzzled by the economics of it, though. The article seems to be talking around something; it makes it sound like a town whose income comes primarily from being a place where gangsters summer and/or retire and/or stash their families?

(Kind of weirdly cheerful about the "we don't allow our women to work outside the home" bit, too.)
posted by praemunire at 11:30 AM on October 25, 2022

I never knew there was a Farsi equivalent (Juhuri) of Yiddish and Ladino. I guess of course there word be.
posted by atomicstone at 12:17 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Kind of weirdly cheerful about the "we don't allow our women to work outside the home" bit, too.)
And when it was a "shtetl" it was mostly the women working...
posted by atomicstone at 12:20 PM on October 25, 2022

I never knew there was a Farsi equivalent (Juhuri) of Yiddish and Ladino.

I wanted to hear more about this! Curious to hear what the effect of being forced into transliteration into a less suitable script has been, linguistically.
posted by praemunire at 12:58 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh hey, I want to say there's also a Greek equivalent of Yiddish and Ladino. It's called Yevanic, and it was spoken where my ancestors lived -- Ioannina, Greece -- among Romaniote Jews, who can be generalized as "the Jews who were in Greece before the Sephardim arrived" aka the oldest Jewish community in Europe.

My ancestors and others of their ilk had a hard time assimilating after emigrating to New York in the early 1900s because of that language barrier, so they built their own synagogue, Kehila Kedosha Janina, which still stands.
posted by BlahLaLa at 1:38 PM on October 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've been by there a number of times. Very pretty on the outside!
posted by praemunire at 3:13 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Re: I wanted to hear more about this!
Not much more, bc I assume you can Google, but: here's the Wikipedia for the language/dialect.
posted by atomicstone at 3:51 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks, BlahLaLa, like I needed a new research hole to fall down!? I am in!
posted by atomicstone at 3:52 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not "who knew?", but why did no one tell us? (Or, I guess, why (ok, we know) we're these lost before an old millennial could learn about them). All of these local/Jewish dialects make perfect sense. And I have a pretty deep Jewish education both formal and not. And I have never heard of any of them beyond Yiddish and Ladino. Wow
posted by atomicstone at 3:56 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

And when it was a "shtetl" it was mostly the women working...

That's not actually true. The whole 'grown men in yeshiva learning all day, women earning the family living' thing is a really modern invention. Tevye was a dairyman. Heck, Rashi was a winemaker (way pre-shtetl, but you don't get more Torah-scholar-y than Rashi and he still had to work for a living). Before the Holocaust, when the European Jewish communities were arguably at their height, there weren't all that many yeshivas, only in the larger towns, and only the very strongest students were able to travel to attend them. While at least one kollel (yeshiva meant for men who did nothing but learn) did exist, you were only allowed to stay there for 10 years. Most grown men had jobs and learned in their spare time while their wives took care of the family and worked in the home. It's an ironic consequence of the wreck of European Jewry that we now have the entrenched Orthodox kollel system (and corresponding female support system) there is today - it was created as a response to make up for what was lost.
posted by Mchelly at 4:30 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

Fair.
posted by atomicstone at 4:35 PM on October 25, 2022

I never knew there was a Farsi equivalent (Juhuri) of Yiddish and Ladino.

Not one, but many! Judeo-Persian is pretty much an agglomeration of related dialects, but there's a long tradition of writing Persian languages in Hebrew script. If you're interested, there are some digitized materials available through the British Library, the Scribes of the Cairo Geniza project, and elsewhere!

Note that not all Jewish languages spoken in Iran are Judeo-Persian: various Neo-Aramaic dialects, for example, are Iranian geographically but not linguistically. (But they're not Farsi, so less relevant to the discussion at hand!)
posted by the tartare yolk at 4:50 PM on October 25, 2022 [5 favorites]