Video: How To Make Azerbaijani ‘Eggplant Caviar’
Azerbaijan is home to one of the oldest and most enigmatic Jewish communities in the world. Some say Jews arrived as early as the eighth century BCE from Persia; others say they came later, seeking a safe place to hide from the persecution of warring tribes. Speaking a language known as Judeo-Tat, they built homes on the sides of Azerbaijan’s beautiful mountains.
By the time of the 1926 census, about 59,000 Jews lived there. With the opening up of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, Jews started emigrating; only about 5,000 remain today, many of them living in red-roofed houses in the Red Village of Quba, about two hours from Baku on the Caspian Sea. Those who left went to Israel, and later Toronto and New York, where I first came across Azerbaijani restaurants in Brooklyn.
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