KUBA

KUBA, city in N.E. Azerbaijan. From the 17th century, there was an important community of mountain jews in Kuba. In 1734, during the military expedition of nadir shah from Persia, many communities in the vicinity of Kuba were destroyed and many Jews were compelled to adopt Islam. The rest settled in Kuba where they were under the protection of Gussein, the ruler of the town. Large numbers of Jews fled to Kuba from baku when a blood libel was raised there in 1814. For many years the Jews in Kuba maintained separate communities, constituted according to their towns of origin. Many of the Jews were engaged in agriculture. There were 5,492 Jews in the town in 1837, 6,662 (43.5% of the total population) in 1897, and 5,200 in 1926. During the Civil War (1918–20) in the north Caucasus the Jewish community suffered greatly. It is probable that the greater majority of the 8,357 Jewish inhabitants of Azerbaijan who declared Tat as their mother tongue in the 1959 census were living in Kuba. In 1970 it was estimated that about 10,000 Tat Jews lived in the town. Most left in the 1990s. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.J. Chorny, Sefer ha-Massa'ot (1884); G. Levi, in: Voskhod Weekly, 21:46 (1901), 21–22. (Yehuda Slutsky)