ABSTRACT
The small country of Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains is home to one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, dating back to at least the 2nd century BCE. Striking features of Georgian include its large inventory of consonants and its tendency to have long strings of consonants. The last official remnant of Soviet Jewish cultural life in Georgia was the Georgian Jewish Museum in Tbilisi, which was established in the early 1930s and remained open until 1951. In this period, Georgian Jewish cultural and religious life in general was subjected to severe attacks by the Stalinist regime; many synagogues were closed, rabbis and writers were arrested and executed, and sacred books were destroyed. Beginning in the 1970s, and increasing with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many Georgian Jews immigrated to Israel. Israel is where the bulk of the Georgian Jewish community lives, with only a few thousand remaining in Georgia.
