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Photography: Georgia on their minds

04/10/2012 12:23 By CARL HOFFMAN

In the late 1960s, the Caucasus country’s Jews numbered upwards of 100,000.

Photo by: Eli Atias

At what date in history did Jews begin to settle in Georgia? The answer to this question is either simple or complicated, depending upon which Georgia we are talking about. The first Jews to arrive in what is now the US state of Georgia were a group of 42 men and women who came across the Atlantic from England on the schooner William and Sarah and landed in Savannah on July 11, 1733. That is the simple answer. Those Jews, incidentally, were warmly welcomed by the Christian colonists already there, who were perhaps pleased to discover that the new arrivals included both a doctor and a wine maker.

No one, however, can say with any certainty exactly when Jews first appeared in the other Georgia, in the Caucasus region of Western Asia. The Jewish community’s traditional history states that the first arrivals made their way to Georgia during the Babylonian captivity, after the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the first Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. Non-Jewish Georgian sources place the arrival of Jews at various later dates, ranging anywhere from the first to the sixth century CE. One thing that can be stated with reasonable conviction is that the Jewish community of Georgia is ancient, one of the oldest in the world.

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Photography: Georgia on their minds

In the late 1960s, the Caucasus country’s Jews numbered upwards of 100,000.

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