Avraham Jacob Brawer, at age 81This is an article by Dr. Avraham Jacob Brawer, published in the newspaper Haaretz on 30 November 1945. Avraham was an Israeli rabbi, geographer and historian, born in Galicia in 1884, who studied the geography and history of the Land of Israel and the countries of the Middle East. He wrote regularly for Haaretz and other newspapers, especially HaTzofe. The article sheds light on what was taking place in this region of Persian Azerbaijan and on the Jewish communities there. An entry about Avraham can be read on Wikipedia here.
Avraham was an Israeli rabbi, geographer and historian, born in Galicia in 1884, who studied the geography and history of the Land of Israel and the countries of the Middle East. He wrote regularly for Haaretz and other newspapers, especially HaTzofe. The article sheds light on what was taking place in this region of Persian Azerbaijan and on the Jewish communities there. An entry about Avraham can be read on Wikipedia here.
Geographical Situation
There are countries whose names are known only to a few. When explaining their location to someone who is not familiar with maps and geography books, it is often easier to name their capital or another famous city within them. This is not necessarily logical, but it is a short and practical method. How many of our readers would know where Illinois is? But if we say that it is the state in which Chicago is located, everyone will know. The same is true of that country called Azerbaijan, a name difficult to remember and pronounce; it is easier to say that it is the land where Baku, the great oil city, is situated.
Since 1818, when Tsar Nicholas I wrested the northern part of the country from Persia, it has been divided by the Aras River (the ancient Araxes) into two parts. The south remained in Persian hands and was cut off from the Caspian Sea, because the Tsar took the Talysh region from it.
Azerbaijan is the northernmost and westernmost country of the Iranian kingdom, and it is the closest to the Black Sea, which provides the nearest outlet to the Mediterranean countries and to Europe as a whole. It is now connected by rail to Batum, and during this war a railway to the capital, Tehran, was completed, thereby also creating a connection with the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea in the north. Turkey still has no direct railway connection with Persia, but only an indirect one through the Soviet Union; nevertheless, the whole of eastern Asian Turkey borders Azerbaijan, and whoever controls it controls the roads between Turkey and Persia and can cut them off.
Political Status
Russian Azerbaijan was, in the days of the Tsars, part of the Caucasian governor-generalship. At the beginning of 1913 a constituent assembly declared the country a free republic. The British then sent troops by sea from Persia to Baku to protect the oil fields from falling into Turkish and German hands. In 1919 they were forced to leave the country under communist pressure. In 1920 a communist republic was proclaimed, joined Moscow and received, in theory, equal membership rights in the Soviet Union. Later the three republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia were joined into a Transcaucasian federation. Each, in practice, had only second-rank rights.
Within the Azerbaijani republic were two third-rank republics or autonomous territories: Nakhchivan on the Aras River, almost midway between the two great lakes, Lake Gokcha in Soviet territory and Lake Rizaieh or Urmia in Persian territory, about one hundred kilometers from each and about two hundred kilometers east of Lake Van in Turkish territory. The second territory was Nagorno-Karabakh, in the heart of the Azerbaijani republic.
Persian Azerbaijan is one of those countries to which the “King of Kings” in Tehran sends governors who rule as they please. Under the previous dynasty, that is, under the Qajar dynasty, the Shah used to send the crown prince to govern this country, which was considered the richest and finest of all the lands of his kingdom. The crown prince’s rule was a kind of autonomy, since the king’s son could act according to his own judgment and local needs without having to depend on the ministers in the distant capital. Under Reza Khan Pahlavi, founder of the new Persia, government became centralized and national.
Upon this country, which was Persian only in part, the Iranian language was imposed, together with everything connected with the desire to assimilate foreign peoples. An indicative answer was given to me by the Persian director of education in a Kurdish district. I asked him about the dialects spoken in the district, and he replied: everyone must speak Iranian (Persian). Such an aspiration may arouse dissatisfaction among the population, who know that beyond the Aras River their spoken language governs education and government offices.
The Land and Its Nature
The Italian Encyclopaedia, the latest of the great encyclopaedias, estimates the area of Persian Azerbaijan at 105,000 square kilometers. According to measurements in the German Stieler Atlas, it is no more than 75,000. I have no official Persian source before me and do not know whether Persia possesses a more reliable estimate than those based on foreign maps.
The country is therefore three to four times larger than the Land of Israel within the boundaries of the National Home. Hugo Grothe, the German scholar, estimated its population in 1911 at two million, and this was also the estimate in the aforementioned encyclopaedia about a quarter of a century later. There is no official census. Persia as a whole is now estimated at 15 million inhabitants; Azerbaijan’s population is certainly no less than one-seventh of the kingdom, while its area is one twenty-second. Persian Azerbaijan lies between two different geographical regions: Armenia to the west and the Iranian plateaus to the southeast. Armenia is a land of dense mountain folds dotted with extinct volcanoes along cracks in the earth’s crust; Iran is a land of plateaus and broad plains.
In Azerbaijan, characteristic features of both neighboring regions occur together: folds, volcanoes and plateaus. This “mixture” is partly the result of our limited knowledge, since there are no large-scale maps and no complete geological and geographical description. The average elevation is estimated at 1,500 meters above sea level. The highest points are the volcanic mountains of Savalan and Sahand. The first is almost as high as Mont Blanc, the highest point of the Alps, at 4,820 meters. It lies midway between Tabriz and the Caspian Sea. The second is south of Tabriz and rises to 3,556 meters. Pronounced mountain folds are the Kara-Dagh, the Black Mountain or Mountains of Darkness, which accompany the Aras River in the south. At the foot of these mountains Grothe’s map marks veins of copper and iron and coal seams. Only here, and nowhere else in the country, geologists may have found prospects for oil, as there are in Russian Azerbaijan. The great plains between the mountains are associated with the names of large cities, for these plains are garden oases, receiving abundant irrigation water from the mountains.
The largest plains are found around Lake Rizaieh or Urmia, whose surface is about 1,250 meters above the Mediterranean. At low water the lake covers about 4,500 square kilometers, and at high water about 6,000, that is, six times the area of our Dead Sea. The lake can spread across the plain, unlike our Dead Sea, whose expansion is limited because it is enclosed by mountains to the east and west, and the ground also rises steeply to the north and south. Lake Rizaieh is closed, so its waters are salty and bitter, though not to the same degree as those of our Dead Sea. As the water rose, settlements moved away from the lake. Naturally there is no agriculture in the flooded area, because the salty water saturates the soil with salt, so that nothing can be sown or grown. But the plains rise beyond the flood zone. There are the fields and gardens praised by travelers. One traveler in the second half of the nineteenth century says that around Lake Urmia there are a thousand villages and that this is the lower paradise of Persia.
Urmia, now called Rizaieh, lies west of the lake; east of it, in the valley of the Aji Chai River, lies Tabriz, the capital. The Aji Chai is fed by bitter springs (aji means bitter) and serves for irrigation only during floods. But Mount Sahand makes up the difference through melting snow, which continues into late summer, and through springs that do not dry up. Tabriz is a city of a quarter of a million people—some exaggerate to 300,000, while others reduce the figure to 200,000—and it is entirely immersed in greenery, trees and gardens, with only its central market having a truly urban character.
On the plain southeast of the lake are the cities of Maragheh, formerly the capital of mighty kings, and Miandoab. On a great plain farther east, at the foot of Mount Savalan, which we have already mentioned, lies Ardebil, which was the capital of the country in ancient times and a center of Torah and scholarship. The great library found there was transferred to St. Petersburg by the Russian conqueror General Paskevich, who advanced in 1828 as far as Van and Tabriz. On the plain of Ashes-i-Rud, the Eight Rivers, lies Mianeh, midway between Qazvin and Tabriz. In the heart of a fertile plain north of Lake Urmia lies Khoy, close to the Soviet border in the north and to Turkey in the west.
The climate of Persian Azerbaijan has extreme temperature variations: in winter temperatures fall to twenty degrees Celsius below zero, while in summer they reach 40 degrees. The people are therefore subjected to changes between Siberia and Sudan. It is a harsh but healthy climate because it is dry. Average rainfall is only about 240 millimeters in the plains and valleys, and considerably more in the mountains. Summers are dry, but winter does not last as long as it does here, and most of the rain falls not in the middle of the rainy season, as it does here, but in autumn and spring, which is more convenient for cultivated vegetation and mountain pasture. The country grows grains, vegetables and the fruit trees found here, except for citrus and olives, which cannot withstand freezing temperatures.
The History of the Country
Until the days of Cyrus, the Medes ruled here. There is an opinion that the ancient Persian religion arose in Azerbaijan and that Urmia was the birthplace of Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), the legislator of the Zoroastrian religion. From Cyrus to Alexander the Great, Azerbaijan was one of the Persian satrapies. When Persia fell before invaders from Europe, a national priestly dynasty remained here, refusing to submit to foreigners and preserving the Zoroastrian tradition. The eternal fire did not go out in the temples of Hormuz the Good.
*Greek writers called the country Atropatene, a name derived from the Persian Azarbadgan or Adorbadgan. The name is interpreted as “guardian of the fire.” From this came the modern Persian and Arabic forms Azerbaijan or Adarbaijan. The alternating consonant, which does not exist in our language, is sometimes transcribed with zayin and sometimes with dalet, like Hebrew zahav and Aramaic and Arabic dahava, a sound between zayin and dalet. It should not be pronounced “Bai” but “Baai,” as the military attaché at the British Legation in Tehran pointed out to me, and as I found in the books.
From Azarbadgan the teaching of Zoroaster later spread again, and during the renewed Persian empire, for the 420 years preceding the Muslim conquest, this religion was the foundation of the Sasanian dynasty. It was an ardent faith that sometimes persecuted those who rejected it, including the Jews. Azerbaijan long resisted the Muslims. During the Mongol conquest of Persia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Azerbaijan became the center of their vast kingdom. Hulagu, the great khan, resided there, and to this day magnificent buildings remain in Maragheh, including an astronomical observatory.
The Mongols destroyed hundreds of cities and towns with remarkable thoroughness. Their practice was to return several days after they had left, in order to destroy those who had emerged from hiding in search of food. Yet while they lived in the country they became interested in art and science (Hitler and Göring, too, were lovers of art). The first khans were pagans; their sons later converted to Islam. Christians and Jews attained high positions at their courts. Sa’d al-Dawla, whose name means “Happiness of the State,” was appointed vizier in 1283 and served for about 29 years, eventually being executed because of his enemies’ hostility. Alongside him at the court of the khan served Najib al-Dawla, “Nobleman of the State,” a famous eye physician who anticipated the danger and converted to Islam, apparently only outwardly.
The French archaeologist Morgan found tombstones with raised inscriptions in the Jewish cemetery at Maragheh, but he was not familiar with Hebrew and neither read nor copied the inscriptions. During and after the Mongol period, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Turkic tribes entered Azerbaijan and gradually became the majority of its population. Just as Atropatene had been a center of zeal for the Zoroastrian religion in antiquity, in the Middle Ages it became a center of Shiite Islam. From there emerged, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Safavid dynasty, which united all of Persia on the basis of militant Shiism. The dynasty later chose Isfahan as its capital and gave Persia several great shahs, especially Abbas the Great in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Most of the magnificent buildings preserved today in Isfahan date from this dynasty. In 1828 Paskevich, a Russian commander, entered Azerbaijan with his army and captured Tabriz as well. Under the Treaty of Turkmenchay that same year, the land south of the upper and middle Aras was returned to Persia; only in the plain south of the river, in its lower section, did the Russians retain territory, the Talysh mentioned above. Yet they kept their eyes on it for a future opportunity. They therefore built a railway as far as Julfa, the Armenian town on the border of Persian Azerbaijan, and later built a road through Persian territory to Tabriz. They imposed it upon the Persians.
No sooner had construction been completed than Persia entered a period of revolution in 1906. The revolutionaries imposed a parliamentary constitution on the Shah. After the revolution, the Shah and his relatives tried to abolish the constitution. Azerbaijan took a leading part in these movements, and the Russians and other Europeans in Tabriz were in danger, providing the Tsar with a pretext for sending troops to protect them. In 1909 General Snarsky captured Tabriz, the “Dome of Islam,” a city sacred for its hundreds of mosques. Two years later, when unrest increased in the country, General Voropanov arrived at the head of a full brigade. The Russians did not leave the country until 1918.
The Russians continued the railway from Julfa to Tabriz, and traffic began in 1916. When they left, the Russians declared that, in opposition to Tsarist imperialism, they were renouncing their conquests. They gave the roads they had built as a gift to the Persian people. In place of the Russians came the rule of a democratic party headed by Ismail Naubari. This government lasted only from midwinter to midsummer, because the Turks appeared and installed a governor according to their wishes.
Until the summer of 1919 Persian Azerbaijan governed itself, and only then did a governor appointed by Tehran take control. In this war the Russians appeared for the third time, this time with the consent of the British rather than, as in the previous two instances, against their will. They continued construction of the railway from Tabriz to Tehran. It is worth knowing that the threat of Russian invasion always hung over the country. The same geographer Blanchard, who completed his work in 1929, when Russia was still retreating from its conquests and renouncing imperialism, predicted that it would return.
Economy, Peoples and Classes
Everything we have mentioned above shows that Azerbaijan is an agricultural country, where irrigation supplements rainfall. It provides itself with grain and all kinds of fruit and even has a surplus for export, especially dried fruit, raisins and tobacco. Cattle and sheep are raised in the mountains. Among the industries, carpet weaving is highly developed. Tabriz is one of the world’s great carpet centers, because the wool is excellent and the craftsmen have good taste in choosing designs and colors. There are also hand-spinning and hand-weaving industries. Leather tanning is also developed, because hides and processing materials such as oak bark and galls are plentiful.
The inhabitants are mostly Turks—not Ottoman Turks such as those of Turkey, but a mixture of other Turko-Tatar tribes. Nevertheless, I was able to converse with them in the Istanbul Turkish I speak. The Soviet Azerbaijanis have presumably developed a literary language of their own during the last quarter-century, written neither in Arabic script nor in the script and orthography customary in Ankara, but in the system devised for them by the Bolshevik scholars, who are not interested in the Pan-Turanian movement, which the Germans supported and whose aim was the unification of all the Turkic tribes from Chinese Turkestan to Constantinople. The Turks of Azerbaijan are mostly Shiites, whereas the form of Islam in Turkey is Sunni.
Besides the majority, there are another six or seven peoples: Persians, the ruling people of the kingdom, who were formerly the majority here; Armenians; Chaldeans and Assyrians. The latter two speak Aramaic and differ only in the form of their Christian religion: one recognizes the Pope in Rome, while the other has its own patriarch, whose title in every generation is Mar Shimun, now a refugee in England. In the mountains live the Kurds, who are pastoral people and change their dwelling places according to the seasons, in summer in the valleys, that is, below one thousand meters, and in summer in the high mountains, in the villages of huts that exist there year-round.
A large part of the agricultural workers, perhaps the great majority, are tenants of landowners. One traveler says that they are forced to thresh their grain in the courtyard of the aga, the landowner, formerly called effendi in Turkish territory, so that they will not steal from his share. As far as I can judge from the literature, the conditions of tenancy and lease are not favorable to the peasant. The reforming Shah, who renewed the structure of village society, merely removed the great feudal magnates who had formerly wielded authority and did not touch the great landowners who were not rulers. It may therefore be assumed that the so-called democratic movement is not merely a Russian invention; it has a social and economic background.
Irrigated land and garden farms cannot easily be incorporated into collective farms. Perhaps even Stalin does not dream of it. But it may be just and proper to give land to those who work it and organize agricultural cooperatives, somewhat like the workers’ settlements in our country. Britain did not use its power and influence in the Near and Middle East for agrarian reforms. Apart from Cromer’s Five Laws in Egypt, it left rural society as it had been in the days of the Pharaohs, with great landowners ruling over the people. It may pay dearly for its short-sightedness if communist propaganda succeeds.
The suppression of the democratic movement in Azerbaijan also affects agreements between Russia and the Anglo-Saxon powers, but continuing the old system of tenancy and sharecropping is likewise impossible. A Persian army may wreak havoc among the rebels.
The Jews of Azerbaijan
I must say our disgrace openly: we do not know these brethren of ours who have lived for generations under the burden of a harsh exile. I must also express my own sorrow publicly: I came close to this country but did not enter it. I traveled during the great summer heat at the end of the summer, and the leave granted to me by those who provided my livelihood was merely a waiver of a few working days between the Jewish festivals of Tishrei. My means were insufficient to hire special cars at my disposal for thousands of kilometers, and thus I was forced to leave Persia without seeing the remote Jewish communities in the plains of Azerbaijan.
Three types of Jews, distinguished by their languages, are found in this country: speakers of Aramaic, like the Chaldean Christians and the “Kurds” of the Land of Israel; speakers of Turkish; and speakers of Persian. Six years ago Zalman Rubashov met a Jew from Urmia and, from his account, published interesting information about this community and its neighbors (Davar, 3 Elul 5700). It emerges from his article that these Jews are careful about contact with ritual impurity from creeping creatures and about menstrual impurity, following Karaite custom rather than our own. Moreover, a fairly large group rejects the words of the Sages altogether, and when a chapter of the Mishnah, such as Bameh Madlikin, is read in the synagogue, they leave the building derisively.
This division is not new. I found support for Mr. Rubashov’s account in a letter from 1851 written by the Karaites of Constantinople to the Jewish community of Sauj Bulak, south of Lake Urmia. The contents of the letter, published by A. Danon in the Jewish Quarterly Review, volume XVII, p. 258, are as follows: the Karaites of Constantinople had heard from two Jews from Sauj Bulak and Salmas in the Urmia district that the communities there followed Karaite customs. Since Karaite Jews in Persia had not previously been known, they asked for confirmation of the testimony they had received.
At present one should not go to Azerbaijan, but the disorder will pass, and we must prepare emissaries for the remote communities—not only instructors of the kind who have worked in some places in recent years, but also researchers and scholars who can rescue historical and folkloric material that is disappearing before our eyes. The small communities will be abandoned because Jews are flowing to the cities, and in the cities they will be affected by modernization. I suspect that not only in Maragheh but elsewhere there is epigraphic material that should be found and preserved, and the first responsibility rests with those who make such great claims for Hebrew culture.