The Jewish people used to live across the islamic world. They lived in Turkey, North Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Persia, the Arab states of the Middle East and even as far afield as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although Islam traditionally grants Jews freedom of religion as “people of the book”, over the centuries, many rulers of the Islamic world have sought to persecute them. The Jews were in many places subjected to pogroms and forced conversions. For example, the Jews of Yemen, having refused the king’s decree to convert to Islam, were banished en masse to a remote region of barren and inhospitable desert.
This downward pressure on the Jewish population of the Islamic world intensified in the 20th century as the notion of a Jewish state took hold. Nearly a million Jews left, fled or were expelled from countries across the Islamic world. Today, just a handful of isolated pockets remain. A few thousand Jews can be found in Turkey and Iran, and a few thousand more in a small town on a cold grey river in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains in northern Azerbaijan. The Mountain Jews (as they are known) of the Red Village (Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Azeri) have proudly maintained their culture and traditions since ancient times. They are a truly unique group of people, inhabiting the world’s last remaining totally Jewish settlement (a shtetl) outside of Israel and the United States. Let us brave the cold and the rain and venture out on a quest to meet them.
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