Photograph: Jews at Khochmas railway station. Vladikavkaz.

Mountain Jews

Baku province, Khochmas (Khachmaz) Village

1870-1880s

Albumen print

19 x 24,4

РЭМ 8855-17

Along the bottom edge of the photograph is a dark stripe with author’s numbering and text in pre-Revolutionary spelling: “14046. Vladikavkaz. Jews at Khochmas railway station. 1206.” Khochmas (Khachmaz) station was on the route from Baku to the port of Petrovsky; the railway was constructed in the 1890s. According to the first Mountain Jewish ethnographer Ilya Sherebetovich Anisimov (Eliyahu ben Sherbet Nissim oglu, 1862-1928), in the 1880s the Mountain Jews lived “in 36 auls and towns of Dagestan, Terek, and Kuba regions and Baku and Yelisavetpol Provinces; their total number was 21,000 (10,892 men and 10,237 women), in 4,090 families (of these, 1,503 families lived in towns, and 2,587 families in towns.” As to the occupations of the Mountain Jews, the researcher noted that only about 14 percent of the total number of families were in commerce (mostly, they ran drapery and grocery shops). “The family life of the Mountain Jews is based on the adats (customs) inherited from their ancestors, and on some customs that the Jews acquired from other peoples of the Caucasus. Helping your neighbor in need, if not with money, then with work done with your own hands, is believed a sacred duty among the Mountain Jews… Especially worth noting are various societies, which make it their mission to help the poor and those unable to work hard enough, to aid orphans with money, and to look after the sick.”