The Iliyev Family

The origin of the Jews of the Mountains is lost in an ancient memory that the archive documents only imperfectly. The Tats Jews, or Jews of the Mountains, assert that they were originally Jews of the ten tribes of the North settled in the Assyrian Empire, and that they gradually adopted the language of the region where they lived. The Tat people of the Caucasus possibly holds the most complex ethnic history of the region. This legendary genealogy — that of the lost tribes deported after the fall of the kingdom of Samaria in 722 before the common era — belongs to collective Memory more than to established fact; but it speaks a profound truth about the self-awareness of these communities, who have always thought of themselves as a fragment of Israel exiled to the far reaches of the Orient.

What linguistics confirms is the antiquity of Iranian settlement. Judeo-Tat is an Iranian language derived from a spoken form of Neo-Persian and strongly influenced by Azerbaijani Turkish, traditionally spoken in the Jewish communities of the east and north of the Caucasus, known as the Jews of the Mountains. In this speech, Hebrew words surfaced like sacred islands in the midst of a Persian ocean: the terms of prayer, of the calendar, of the Law. It was in this language that the stories of Elijah the prophet were transmitted from generation to generation, whose name would one day become that of the family.

The very name of Iliyev thus testifies to a double loyalty: loyalty to the biblical Memory of Israel, and loyalty to the land of welcome whose language had adopted its inflections. In preserving, across centuries and successive languages — Persian, Tat, Russian — the attachment to the name of the prophet, the lineage participated unknowingly in that cardinal virtue of Judaism that is transmission: the massoret, the unbroken chain by which a people remembers itself.

The documented cradle of the Iliyev family is a unique place in the world: Krasnaïa Sloboda, in the Quba region, in northeastern Azerbaijan. Its history is that of a refuge granted by a Muslim prince to persecuted Jews. This Jewish settlement in Quba has been inhabited by Jews since the thirteenth century. In 1742, the khan of Quba gave the Jews, persecuted by Islamic fundamentalists, permission to settle across from his city. Thus was born, on the other side of the Qudiyalçay river, a Jewish agglomeration destined to become the world's largest concentration of Mountain Jews.

The chronicle of this founding deserves to be retained in its detail, for it illuminates an essential value: hospitality offered to the persecuted stranger. At the time, there were many persecutions against the "Mountain Jews" and a Jewish city was burned; Fatah Ali Khan invited the Jews who had lived there to settle on the other side of the river, across from Quba, and assured them of his protection. This welcome, Jewish tradition names hakhnasat orḥim — the duty of hospitality. Here, it was the Jews who were its beneficiaries; but the memory of this refuge would nourish, in their descendants, an acute sense of the protection owed to the weak. Shortly after the beginning of settlement, an official status was proposed under the name of Yevreiskaïa Sloboda — the Jewish City — and the khan of Quba granted the city a protected status, permitting the settlement of Jewish citizens in large numbers without fear of discrimination or reprisals.

It is from this city that the most celebrated Iliyev of the present time are descended. The Museum of the Mountain Jews of Krasnaïa Sloboda was financed by Russian real estate billionaire God Semenovitch Nisanov, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, alongside two other Jewish oligarchs from Moscow also born in Krasnaïa Sloboda: businessman Zarakh Iliev and German Zakharyaev. The city remains a living place of Judaism: today, seven synagogues have been preserved there.

The twentieth century imposed on the Iliyev, as on the entire community, the ordeal of Soviet power, hostile to religion. The history of Krasnaïa Sloboda bears the scars of this ideological persecution. The city experienced numerous trials during the Soviet era: the communists closed eleven synagogues and exiled the rabbis to Siberia. One can measure, by this figure of eleven synagogues, the religious density of a community that, before Bolshevik power, made study and prayer the beating heart of its collective life. The exile of the rabbis to Siberia was a quiet martyrdom, that of guardians of the Law punished for their faithfulness — painful expression of the virtue of messirout nefesh, the surrender of self for the sanctification of the Name.

And yet, within this very adversity, a protective paradox emerged. The Jews were here sheltered from the horrors of Europe occupied by the Nazis at the beginning of the Second World War. While the Shoah engulfed European Judaism, and the Jews of the mountains of the western Caucasus endured the full force of Nazi massacres, Krasnaïa Sloboda, spared from occupation, was able to maintain the continuity of its presence. The Caucasian tragedy was no less elsewhere: the Jews of the mountains speak several dialects of the tat language, which they themselves call dzhuguri; they lived in the eastern and southern Caucasus, principally in Krasnaïa Sloboda in Azerbaijan, as well as in various autonomous republics of present-day Russia — Chechnya, Dagestan with the city of Derbent, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria.

From this long crossing of the Soviet century, the Iliyev lineage emerged stripped of its institutions but not of its faith. The clandestine transmission of Judaism, under constraint, embodies one of the most austere forms of piety: that which, deprived of temple and master, preserves in the secrecy of hearths the spark of the prophet Elijah whose name the family bears.

No figure better exemplifies the contribution of this lineage to scientific knowledge than the surgeon Gavriil Abramovitch Ilizarov, whose name, a variant of Iliyev, also derives from the prophet Elijah. His family origin unambiguously connects him to the Caucasian stock: his father, Abram Ilizarov, was a Mountain Jew from Qusar, while his mother, Golda Ilizarova, was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent; shortly after Gavriil's birth, the family returned to Qusar, where he grew up. Born in 1921, trained at the Crimea Medical Institute, Ilizarov would revolutionize orthopedic surgery worldwide.

His career, born in the destitution of western Siberia, embodies the Jewish virtues of care and knowledge placed in service of healing others. In 1955, he became head of the surgery department of a hospital and surgeon of the medical aviation service; he completed his specialization in orthopedic surgery, during which he developed a system of external fixation. In 1961, he created the Center for Reparative Surgery and Orthopedics in Kurgan. The invention that bears his name — the Ilizarov apparatus, designed for the lengthening and reconstruction of limb bones — remains one of the great conquests of twentieth-century medicine. Gavriil Abramovitch Ilizarov, known for the Ilizarov apparatus used for limb bone lengthening, received the Lenin Prize in 1979 and died in Kurgan in 1992.

Ilizarov's renown crossed the Iron Curtain: in 1980, in the midst of the Cold War, the Italian alpinist and photojournalist Carlo Mauri, at the urging of his Russian colleague Iouri Senkevitch, traveled to Kurgan to be treated there. This physician from a family of Mountain Jews, who restored the ability to walk to thousands of the crippled worldwide, magnificently embodies refou'a — the vocation of healing — which Jewish tradition regards as an extension of divine work. In repairing broken bodies without distinction of origin, Ilizarov raised to the highest the virtue of universal care brought to others, that very virtue which Judaism places at the foundation of human dignity.

At the other end of the spectrum of talents, the lineage gave at the turn of the 21st century one of the great fortunes of post-Soviet Russia in the person of Zarakh Iliev, native of Krasnaïa Sloboda. A real estate businessman, he belongs to that circle of three personalities from the same small Jewish town of the Caucasus who rose to the heights of economic success — with God Nisanov and German Zakharyaev.

What distinguishes Zarakh Iliev, in the light of this Great Book, is not prosperity alone, but the use he made of it in service to the Memory of his people. His contribution to the Museum of Mountain Jews of Krasnaïa Sloboda inscribes his action in the long Jewish tradition of tsedaka — justice made charity — and of care for collective heritage. This museum is not an ornament: it carries an intention of safeguarding. An exhibit at the Museum of Mountain Jews evokes the movement of the first aliyah and the Israeli singer of folk music Yaffa Yarkoni, whose family was of Azerbaijani origin.

Attached to his native city, Zarakh Iliev himself described its singularity. The city of Krasnaïa Sloboda is located in the mountainous region of northeastern Azerbaijan; it is home to the largest group of Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan. One perceives there the concern to fix a Memory threatened by emigration: many members of this community left in search of better economic prospects. In financing the preservation of this place, the Iliyev lineage illustrates a deeply Jewish conviction: that wealth has meaning only when returned to the community, and that remembering is a sacred duty. Economic action becomes here service to the Memory of Israel — a discreet but capital virtue, where fortune becomes guardian of zakhor, the injunction to remember.

The recent history of the Iliyev lineage is one of a new dispersion, superimposed on earlier exiles. The fall of the Soviet Union, the opening of borders, and regional uncertainties provoked a vast migratory movement of Mountain Jews toward Israel, Moscow, and North America. Krasnaïa Sloboda, once full, gradually emptied of its permanent inhabitants, many returning only in summer. This phenomenon is confirmed by both tradition and archive in concert: the inner narrative of a community aware of its fragility joins the observable data of depopulation.

The presence of the Iliyev in Moscow, where Zarakh Iliev and his peers flourished, as well as their new roots in Israel or in Kavkazi communities of America, extends the old diasporic genius of Israel: the art of replanting oneself without renouncing one's identity. The Mountain Jews maintained, in these new worlds, the memory of their Judeo-Tat language and their customs, transmitting to their children born in Tel-Aviv, New York, or Moscow the remembrance of the synagogues of Quba. In this, they embody the virtue of communal loyalty — the am Israël, that sense of belonging to a people that transcends borders.

One must here keep the measure of the historian. If the great figures — Ilizarov the scholar, Iliev the builder — are well documented, the mass of anonymous Iliyev families largely escapes written archive. Their history, made of modest trades, marriages, celebrations and mournings, is transmitted by oral memory more than by registers. This is why this chapter belongs to the intersection: where family tradition and the rare documentary traces answer one another, sometimes confirming, often nuancing each other. Honesty requires that we acknowledge these silences as much as celebrate the glories.

From ancient Persia to the skyscrapers of Moscow, from the "Jerusalem of the Caucasus" to the operating rooms of Kurgan, the Iliyev lineage unfolds a trajectory that condenses the very history of the Jews of the mountains: an ancient people, taking refuge under the protection of a Muslim khan, tested by Soviet power, finally scattered to the four corners of the world, yet always recognizable by the prophetic name it bears. Placed under the sign of Elijah, this family embodied several of the great virtues that Israel has carried through the centuries: the faithful transmission of an identity across successive languages, piety maintained in adversity, beneficence placed at the service of collective memory.

But if one must name, above all else, what the Iliyev lineage will have best expressed, it is the restorative care brought to the other — that virtue of refou'a and reconstruction, which runs from the welcome of the persecuted in Krasnaïa Sloboda to the genius of Gavriil Ilizarov restoring the ability to walk to the maimed of the entire world, and to Zarakh Iliev repairing the threatened memory of his community. Healing bodies, preserving places, mending the torn fabric of a people: such was to be, above all else, the vocation of this family. In this, it made its own the Jewish ideal of tikkoun — the repair of the world — showing how a singular lineage, born at the Persian confines of the diaspora, fully participates in the virtue that the memory of Israel has carried from one continent to the other.