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 on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-glimpse-into-azerbaijans-hidden-all-jewish-town/