Azerbaijan’s All-Jewish City

In northern Azerbaijan, not far from the Russian border, lies the town of Krasnaya Sloboda, whose residents are almost exclusively “Mountain Jews”—indigenous Caucasian Jews who speak their own language, related to Persian. Thanks to the presence of a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary from Israel, the community has experienced a religious revival, but its numbers are dwindling as younger people move to Russia in search of economic opportunity. Lee Gancman writes:

The town itself was founded as a haven for Jews in 1742 by Fatelli Khan, the Muslim emir of the [adjacent] town of Quba, located in a relatively flat area just south of the modern-day border with the Russian province of Dagestan. While the rugged and remote area to the north had served as a haven for Jews for centuries, a period of unrest beginning in the 18th century saw local Sunnis turn on their Jewish counterparts and send them fleeing.

“At the time there was much persecution of Mountain Jews, and one Jewish town was burned down,” explains Alexander Murinson, a faculty member at Bahçeşehir International University and expert on Caucasian Jewish communities. . . .

While for a time in the mid-20th century the town was considered by some to be the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the land of Israel, numbers have since dwindled from an estimated peak of 18,000 to . . . around 1,000 permanent residents.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Azerbaijan, Chabad, Jewish World, Mountain Jews, Soviet Jewry

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF