No 5 (2024)

The article analyzes the Soviet government policy toward the resettlement of, and land management among, several groups of Mountain Jews at the Mozdok and Stepnovsky districts of the Terek region of the North Caucasus area. The goals and objectives (economic and political) are identified, as well as the stages of these resettlement activities in the 1920s – early 1930s. The origin and quantitative composition of a number of groups of Mountain Jews actively involved in resettlement by various government and other structures throughout the territory of the Terek District are revealed. The study made it possible to establish the significant role of the regional branches of the Society for Land Settlement of Jewish Workers and the Committee for Land Settlement of Jewish Workers in the processes of development by Mountain Jews of the plots of land allocated to them in the Terek region. Based on the results of the study, the group composition (origin, etc.) of Mountain Jews who participated in the creation of (mono)Jewish settlements in the North Caucasus area has been significantly clarified.

The article is devoted to the forms of Mountain Jewish identity. It is based on the materials of the Derbent community of Mountain Jews. The Derbent community is one of the largest Mountain Jewish communities. Mountain Jews have retained the idea of internal division into ethnoterritorial and dialect groups. There are many stereotypes and autostereotypes that remain important in various areas of the life of this ethnic group. The article examines the following aspects: what groups and subgroups do Mountain Jews distinguish within their community, what stereotypes and autostereotypes exist in relation to these groups, and the ways in which they are formed. The Derbent group turns out to be central in geographical terms and, in this regard, is perceived by many Mountain Jews as a “model” of tradition and language.

Almost thirty years ago, a joint Russian-Israeli expedition took place, working in the places where Mountain Jews lived in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. The ethnographic materials collected during this event remained unclaimed for a long time. The article fills this gap. In contrast to the existing descriptions (Judas Chernyi, Mikhail Bezhanov, Ilya Anisimov, Mikhail Ikhilov, etc.), data from about a dozen interviews with informants conducted by the team members allow us to take a fresh look at ethnography of Mountain Jews. Previously, researchers sought to solve for themselves the question of the origin of this group and, willy-nilly, paid primary attention to the preservation of the “common Jewish” component in its culture. The 1994 material shows many micro-traditions among various local communities of Mountain Jews, which helps to clarify how they coexisted with adherents of other religions for centuries.

The article studies daily online and offline practices by trans-local (Russian) and transnational (Chinese) student migrants in Irkutsk. Drawing on the concept proposed by J. Law, distinguishing between “Euclidean space” and “Network space”, we aimed to explain how migrant students’ participation in various digital chats and groups shapes and stabilizes different networks, determining their everyday practices. We demonstrate that for Chinese students, participation in social media groups becomes the foundation for forming their “Network space”, playing a primary role in its assembly. For Russians, however, social media mainly supplement offline practices, supporting building the “Network space”. Thus, while physically present in the same locations (“Euclidean space”) daily, trans-local (Russian) and transnational (Chinese) students perceive them differently as they simultaneously exist in various “Network spaces”, including those influenced by digital resources.

The article focuses on the influence that the orientalist stance of the early nineteenth-century explorers exerted on the way they selected ethnographic material for their descriptions of the peoples that inhabited the North-West Caucasus. Taking the cases of V.B. Bronevsky, a historian of the Don Cossacks who visited the Caucasus during one of his travels, and F.F. Tornau, a Caucasian Corps officer dispatched on an intelligence mission to the Black Sea littoral, I trace the development of two distinct branches of orientalism: “aesthetic” and “official”. These can demonstrate the shift from the romanticized artistic clichés about the Caucasus highlanders to the production of real ethnographic knowledge about the Circassians, Abazins, and Abkhazians. I argue that despite the persistence of clichés and images of pan-European Orientalism, the empirical collection of ethnographic material set the foundation for future scholarly concepts in the description of peoples, as well as their classification based on the ethnolinguistic criteria. The research draws both on published memoirs and on official reports kept in the Russian Military Historical Archive and the State Historical Museum.