The Kabbalah of Rothko

In the gap between transcendental and concrete experience, 48 years after the painter’s death By Jeremy Sigler

Tablet Fiction and Essays Me, U, Baku, Quba

How a tiny enclave of Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan produced some of the former Soviet world’s richest men By Joshua Cohen July 23, 2018 • 12:00 AM

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To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. —Theodor W. Adorno

In Houston, in a small middle-class neighborhood, on a quiet street lined with oak trees, sits the unassuming Rothko Chapel, surrounded by a big lawn, a wall of overgrown bamboo, and a reflecting pool that enshrines Barnett Newman’s imposing steel monument, Broken Obelisk. The combination of the chapel’s bland, windowless, tan-brick exterior with the somewhat heavy-handed Obelisk is an initial bummer. But the suite of Rothko paintings that line the room is nothing less than transformative, and once the initial emotional impact begins to wear off, one can reflect on the room’s architectural precision and painterly detail.

The 14 site-specific paintings in the Rothko Chapel read as a multipanel work of monomorphic chromatic art. Each panel is essentially tied to the next by a haze of filtered natural light. The artworks themselves are so integral to the space and to one another that, to an untrained eye, they could almost be mistaken for the chapel’s walls. After Rothko and Philip Johnson, the chapel’s original architect, had a disagreement and parted ways, two other architects from Johnson’s firm took over. The chapel’s design is so reductive, so stripped down to essentials, that one is not struck by the hand of any architect but rather given the opportunity to feel pure unadulterated Rothko.

The chapel’s near brutalism juxtaposes nicely with the paintings’ sensuous, vulnerable fields. It’s as if the room is a nocturne—a forest with moonlight filtering through its canopy. Even by day, the paintings provide the quiet solitude and mystery of night. The dark presence of the canvases seems to articulate light itself and allow one to commune with the chapel’s radiance. Dark as they may be, their geometric forms, alternating between translucence and opacity, create a milky luminescence and a compelling spectrum of tones and temperatures.

From its inception, the chapel offered a haven to Rothko himself, who was desperate for a context outside the toxic New York art world and for the nurturing he needed to venture onward in his work. Despite his enormous success by the mid-1960s, Rothko was finding it increasingly difficult to feel rewarded or challenged by exhibiting and selling knockout paintings. The chapel gave Rothko the opportunity to home in on, and realize, one of the last objectives of his late career, which was to create a kind of circuit of permanent, site-specific paintings that would have a greater visceral impact on viewers than any work he had previously done.

The octagonal chapel was designed with a Greek cross (+) in mind and was originally intended to be Roman Catholic, Rothko’s initial referent being the Byzantine Cathedral of St. Maria Assunta in Torcello, Venice. However, without a gold dome or mosaic of the Madonna and Child or bell tower, the chapel is hardly reminiscent of a northern Italian basilica. And yet, the chapel retains a definite Christian aura. Three of the paintings are triptychs, a form invented in the Middle Ages to provide pop-up altarpieces illustrating generic crucifixions. Perhaps the chapel’s most strikingly Christian gesture is found in two of its three triptychs, which are nearly identical. In both, Rothko—swayed by an offhand remark after the works were complete—chose to elevate the central panel about 6 inches, a gesture that, given the chapel’s overall starkness, stands out as a bold reference to the Christian cross.

What would have led Mark Rothko—a Jew, albeit a nonpracticing Jew—in such a Catholic direction—in Houston, of all places? The concept for the chapel was cooked up by the legendary Houston-based philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, who were motivated by their interest in the ecumenical movement in Christianity to establish a one-size-fits-all sacred chamber for prayer and meditation. As John de Menil wrote not long after the chapel opened: “Without staff, without organized programs, just by keeping its doors open eight hours a day, [the chapel] has become a place of election for peace, for quiet contemplation and prayer.” Today, the chairman of the chapel’s board of directors is Mark Rothko’s highly charismatic and brilliant son Christopher Rothko, and the chapel is in constant use, hosting weddings, memorials, baptisms, philosophical exchanges, colloquia, and a broad range of spiritual and musical performances.

To what extent Rothko believed in the chapel’s mission is another question; one can only imagine the skepticism of a judgmental, depressive Jewish artist getting involved in the creation of a Christian church with a high-profile architect known for his arrogance and sympathy for German Fascist dictators. Nevertheless, the de Menils believed that a room of Rothko’s would possess a universal spiritual force, and they fearlessly led their pet abstract expressionist from the secular into the spiritual. Today, while many gravitate to the chapel and revel in its sacred vibrations without a moment’s hesitation, others stand poised with iPhones, yoga mats, and credit cards, scratching their heads. It’s simply too good to be true.

Indeed, part of the answer to the mystery is money. Yes, money does talk. And money can also make God talk. It should thus come as no surprise that money was (and still is) flowing from the de Menils, who up until 1997, when Dominique died (John died in 1973), were among the wealthiest art patrons in the game. Dominique was heiress to the Schlumberger oil-industry fortune, and in 1932 after having married the banker John de Menil, the couple relocated to Houston from France. John quickly rose in the ranks of his wife’s family business to president of the Middle East, Far East, and Latin America divisions of Schlumberger. Even with Schlumberger’s supposedly high “Green” ratings, and the de Menil family’s altruism and extreme generosity, the words “Texas,” “oil,” and “Middle East” are likely to raise eyebrows, even at the peaceful little Rothko Chapel.

If Rothko is playing the part of the martyr here, then the de Menils are surely the saints. Their generosity is staggering, and there are far too many fascinating stories connected to the family dynasty for me to even scratch the surface—from the creation of the Dia Art Foundation in 1974 by Dominique’s daughter Philippa de Menil (and her art-dealer husband, Heiner Friedrich, and their close friend Helen Winkler); to Dominique’s other daughter, the fashion and jewelry designer Christophe de Menil, and more recently Christophe’s grandson, the hipster-artist Dash Snow (who sadly died of an overdose in 2009 after skyrocketing to fame with little more than a stash of gnarly salacious Polaroids that are nonetheless exquisite). Fortunately, even the outsize money and personalities of one of the world’s largest oil families do not contaminate the purity of the Rothko Chapel, which comes across as a place that, from day one, was simply meant to be. But where did it come from?

***

In his recent book Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, Christopher Rothko broaches the topic of the influence of Judaism on his father’s art. But one can sense the author’s reluctance to debate the subject, and rightfully so, for it can be almost painful to burden Rothko posthumously with an identity and faith he so deliberately and successfully shed in his lifetime. While Christopher Rothko admits that abstract expressionism may have a bit of the Talmud at its core—asking “Does Rothko’s fully abstract color-field style derive from biblical prohibition on making a graven image of the human figure?”—his answer is ultimately dismissive, which is harsh for the population of Jews in the world who want to claim Rothko as their very own mystical modernist prophet. Christopher has great conviction and sensitivity to the fact that his father was not a practicing Jew and that there is no clear sign in his writings or art that he ever thought of himself as a maker of progressive Judaica.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t disagree. But the chapel is a strange sort of anomaly and a departure from the rubric of abstract expressionism. And as gentrified as Rothko was by the 1950s and ’60s, underneath he was about as Jewish as they come. Born in Dvinsk, Russia, to an Orthodox Jewish family, Markus Yakovlevich Rotkovich formally studied the Talmud in a Jewish school, and in 1913, when the family immigrated and settled in Portland, Oregon, he became an active member of a Jewish community center, where he developed a rebellious, leftist Jewish attitude, which stuck when he went to Yale University and then to New York. Perhaps we are ready to investigate Rothko’s complexity and ethnicity without attaching labels? Perhaps there is also an increasing anxiety about an increasingly homogenous America that does too little to expose its real culture and roots? The venerable art historian Dore Ashton once compared Rothko’s use of light to the radiance of the Zohar, the principal text of Kabbalah. And I happen to think she was dead-on.

It was most likely Carl Jung who ushered in pop Kabbalah through his appropriation of Jewish mysticism in his famous book Man and His Symbols. But if this is true, then it is the German-born philosopher, historian, and Zionist Gershom Scholem who paved the way for Jung through his pioneering modern academic study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. According to Scholem, Kabbalah began in medieval times in Spain, when ideas about Will, Wisdom, Understanding, Kindness, Judgment, Beauty, Glory, Splendor, Foundation, and Kingship were written into the Zohar, an explorative commentary on the Torah’s Five Books of Moses. It is in the Zohar where the notion is articulated of humanity’s spark of divine light and primordial Adam possessing a unity of opposites.

Scholem explores how Kabbalah’s mysticism, metaphysics, and cosmology arose in reaction to a more rational conception of God (Socratic and Platonic in influence) as a distant and unapproachable deity. Soon in regions of Provence, Castile, and Gerona, a number of radical rabbinical leaders began to fuel a polemic that continued up until the Spanish “Edict of Expulsion” in 1492, when Sephardic Jews were driven out of Spain by the Catholic monarchs. (The edict was not formally revoked until—prepare yourself—1968.) About 400 years later, in 1933, a forum in Switzerland called the Eranos Conference convened for the first time, seeking to bring scholars of different religions together, Scholem being one of them. There he was given the opportunity to present his Hebraic research, which led to numerous articles in German and English journals, causing Kabbalah studies to become widely known for the first time among scholars of religion and psychology.

While Scholem and Jung did know each other personally, their influence on one another was complex. Jung suppressed his Jewish influences during the rise of Nazism, and in fact, he made many anti-Semitic remarks throughout the 1930s that he later retracted or contradicted. In 1928, perhaps as a result of his growing competition with Freud, Jung wrote, “It is quite an unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid.” But in 1934—possibly due to his contact with Scholem at the Eranos Conferences—Jung expressed his gratitude for a people who were essentially down with his crackpot ideas: “I came across this impressive doctrine,” he writes, “which gives meaning to man’s status exalted by the incarnation. I am glad that I can quote at least one voice in favor of my rather involuntary manifesto.” In another confession, Jung writes to a friend that he had taken a “deep plunge into the history of the Jewish mind” to transgress “beyond Jewish Orthodoxy into the subterranean workings of Hasidism … and then into the intricacies of the Kabbalah.”

In his book, Christopher Rothko talks about Rothko’s interest in the writings of Carl Jung as well as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, but he points out that it was Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious that had the greatest impact on his father’s thinking. “Whether or not Rothko subscribed to Jungian theory,” says Christopher Rothko, “it is clear that Jung’s ideas concerning the power and origin of myth were thick in the air that my father was breathing at the time.”

And what was this Jungian fog, exactly? Jung’s theories were, among other things, emissions of Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and Alchemy all fed with great erudition into a Christianized, modernized form of mysticism. The core idea: God is reduced to an inner divine spark in the primordial human, and religious experience is found through a turning inward into the Self. Indeed, Jung, in his own form of Alchemy, extracted gold, nugget by nugget, from the Kabbalah, in concepts such as microcosm mirrors macrocosm; God is unknowable and infinite; cosmic events can be conjured and related to the dynamics of our soul.

Rothko’s chapel can be seen as the perfect Carl Jung and/or Gershom Scholem case study house, for it seems to embody a yearning to elucidate a gap between transcendental and concrete experience. Archetypes—or paintings in Rothko’s case—are not merely expressive religious symbols, but a mechanism, a medium, for authentic transcendental symbiosis. But Rothko was not altogether cool with Jung’s morphing archetypes. In his 1947 essay “The Romantics Were Prompted,” Rothko says that the “archaic artist … found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods” in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. “Without monsters and gods,” says Rothko, “art cannot enact a drama.” Rothko’s caution can be compared to Walter Benjamin’s critique, or “war,” with Jung in the following 1937 letter to his close friend Scholem, claiming to be “waging an onslaught” on Jung’s doctrines and archaic images and theory of the collective unconscious after discovering Jung’s “auxiliary services to National Socialism.”

***

Writer, curator, and architect Alexander Gorlin in his recent book Kabbalah in Art and Architecture (Pointed Leaf Press), which was accompanied by an exhibition at Sandra Gering called “Light and the Space of Void,” bravely goes down the Kabbalah rabbit hole. He pinpoints Kabbalist allusions in Rothko and Barnett Newman, as well as in the architecture of Louis I. Kahn, not to mention gentile architects like Le Corbusier. In a 2013 interview in Metropolis, Gorlin piques the imagination by comparing the concept of the tsim-tsum (the void) in the Kabbalah to Newman’s “zip” paintings and to the central water channel in Kahn’s Salk Institute building.

Gorlin’s research also dredged up a very obscure Rothko piece from 1928. It is a hand-rendered map of ancient Jerusalem that he drew for a book authored by a man named Lewis Browne titled The Graphic Bible. It was a project that occurred very early in Rothko’s career and that ended in an ugly lawsuit. According to Rothko’s biographer James E.B. Breslin:

The hearing for the suit produced seven hundred pages of testimony, three hundred of them from Rothko himself—the most elaborate record we have of Rothko as a young man. More important, the legal confrontation between Rothko and Browne posed many of the deeper issues of Rothko’s identity: the questions of who he was, who he was in relation to authority, who he was as a painter, who he was as a Russian Jew in America.

Another recent Rothko biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, also examines Rothko’s relationship to Judaism in her book Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (published as part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series). She argues that throughout his life, Rothko remained connected to his father’s Orthodox Jewish ways and his own Talmudic education. In one section of the book, Cohen-Solal describes a studio party Rothko threw in 1969 as a “primal reception,” where, according to Robert Motherwell, he hung his paintings in a circle and stood at its center for the entire party, “as if it carried some totemic power.”

I suspect (although it may be an unfair projection) that Rothko was the classic depressive, self-hating Jew who was nonetheless open and honest about his Jewish soul-searching when he was among his closest Jewish comrades. An example of this honesty can be found in the amazing 1983 oral-history interview with the major American poet Stanley Kunitz, a recording that exists in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

Kunitz, who was Rothko’s very close friend right up to the end, speaks of Rothko’s undeniably Jewish disposition, calling him “the last rabbi of Western art”: “When I said that to him once, he enjoyed it,” says Kunitz.

It made him feel very good. I meant that there was in him a rather magisterial authority, a sense of transcendence as well, a feeling in him that he belonged to the line of the prophets rather than to the line of the great craftsmen. It partly had to do with his appearance and his mannerism. You could imagine him being a grand rabbi.

And Kunitz then adds:

He certainly had very little Orthodox religion, but I think he felt strongly that he belonged to a great Judaic tradition, and that this was central to his art and to his life. It had nothing to do with the practice of religion but it had to do with the sense of being. But it was something that he could not articulate in language.

In his probing philosophical writings, Rothko seems very good, in fact, at articulating what I would call the Jewish piece of the metaphysical puzzle. In his essay “The Integrity of the Plastic Process” (published in 2004 in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited by Christopher Rothko), Rothko shows the extensiveness of his knowledge of the history of religion and philosophy. “Christian art,” he says, “can no more be called new than Christian thought itself, for that simply is the consummation of the meeting of East and West in Asia Minor, where Greek Platonism is combined with the mysticism of the East and the puritanical legalism of the Oriental Jew.” And in another essay, “Subject and Subject Matter,” Rothko states:

Let us remember that both the Greeks and the Christians demanded “works as proof,” and, being essentially naturalists, they were not admonished for the demand as were the Jews. Their senses found those works in the phenomena around them. In a sense both Jesus and Zeus, were in the position of scientists who were called upon at will to demonstrate this power to order nature.

In Rothko’s writing (as well as his art), it is pretty apparent that his Jewishness was not something he ever wanted to analyze, or deconstruct, or question, or put on display, but a given, a counterpoint, to which he could repeatedly draw comparisons.

***

As I entered the chapel, I felt myself crossing a very subtle threshold into a startling room (60 feet across and large enough to hold about 300 people) lit from one source, a baffled cupola in the direct center of the ceiling. I was also taken by the floor’s durable asphalt tiles that created a rough industrial all-purpose feel. It was apparent that Rothko based the interior of the chapel on the studio he was using at the time to create the paintings, a cavernous space on East 69th Street in New York where he erected mock chapel walls exactly to scale, as though he were already standing in the “chapel.” The studio, which had originally stored and maintained horse carriages, had a similar cupola and floor.

There was also something distinct about the chapel’s acoustics. Sound was very important to Rothko, and he referenced it throughout his career in a variety of ways. Once, he rejected the idea that his paintings were a language, calling them instead a form of speech. Much has been written about the silence that seems to ricochet off the paintings (negative speech, if you will). Rothko once said, “Silence is so accurate.” In a famously brief talk he once gave at Yale University, he described his work as a search for “pockets of silence.”

As John Cage pointed out in his wickedly smart 1952 musical composition 4’33” (where the performer sits at the piano, lifts up the keyboard cover, and proceeds to play nothing for over four-and-a-half minutes), silence is an opportunity to hear new things. Maybe this explains why, upon entering the chapel, I was immediately seduced by a very curious low hum (which the guard informed me was the building’s air-filtration system). For a brief second, in any case, I was reminded of the composer Morton Feldman, who was a close friend of Rothko’s, and who, in 1971, wrote a piece specifically for the chapel that also explored the chapel’s Jewish implications. In Alex Ross’s 2006 article on Feldman in The New Yorker, he speaks of Feldman’s lamenting, fleeting, dissonant, echoing, and lonely music, “that seemed to protest all of European civilization,” says Ross, as if all of Europe “in one way or another, had been complicit in Hitler’s crimes.” On one occasion, Feldman was in attendance at a German music festival when another American composer asked him why he didn’t move to Germany, and Feldman stopped in the middle of the street, pointed down at the cobblestones, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!”

Rothko had strong political views about Fascism, Nazism, and the Vietnam War. But his rage carried over into many things, like bureaucratic museum institutions, the greed of the commercial galleries and collectors, and the critics who he generally felt were always getting him wrong when, for example, they would incorrectly label him a “colorist.”

Kunitz tells how Rothko’s depression, anxiety, and paranoia were beginning to get the best of him, especially after 1958, around the time he backed out of the Seagram Murals, a commission he had been given to paint a series of works for the lavish Four Seasons restaurant, which was still under construction at the time. After completing 40 breathtaking paintings in dark reds and browns, Rothko in an unprecedented fit of rage reneged on the deal, returned the advance, and stored the paintings until 1968, when they were given a permanent room at the Tate Gallery in London.

In 1968 Rothko’s health rapidly deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm. He continued to drink and smoke heavily and became increasingly isolated and strung out. On Feb. 25, 1970, at the age of 66, Rothko took his own life (the crated works for the Seagram commission apparently arrived in England on the day of Rothko’s death). Just about a year later, the murals were delivered to the chapel. They were lowered by crane down through the cupola and quickly installed in time for an opening. At the dedication, Dominique de Menil praised the work for bringing us to the “threshold of the divine.” Rothko never saw the chapel completed—an abstraction that somehow seems fitting.

***

Back at the chapel, the light had changed. The sun had passed behind a cloud. The paintings were now emitting a bit less color—now they all seemed to be the same cool shade of gray. It was lunchtime, and the chapel was beginning to fill up with visitors, who, I assume, were mostly locals. I noticed one woman meditating in lotus position on one of the plump zafu pillows set down around the floor. There were at least 10 people standing before various panels in deep concentration. The feeling was of focus and balance, and everyone was tuning in, as if to another frequency. No one was visibly praying (or davening, ha ha). No one was sobbing. Rothko is famous for having once said that “people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.”

But what about their color? They most certainly weren’t black. They have been called eggplant, aubergine, plum, chestnut brown, a velvety purplish black, and black mauves. They are indeed all of these colors in different lights, but they are also non-colors.

Maybe the canvases could be called “light catchers.” Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the highly respected conservator who has been involved with the chapel since 1979, once determined that Rothko had mastered this magical game of light-catching through his sensitive brush handling, and consistency of paint, but mostly through the medium itself. (His secret ingredient: egg.) Indeed, the chremamorphism in the paintings is dependent not only on pigment, but on Rothko’s control over the slightest hint of reflectivity across the painting’s surface, and it is easy to miss how rigorous he was in developing, modulating, this surface, layer by layer. It has been noted that Rothko’s aim was not so much to create a panel of paint as to enclose the viewer in a spiritual twilight.

The romantic that he was, Rothko saw a painting as a place for a kind of intimate encounter with the viewer—a place for a vicarious bodily contact. He seems to have put his trust in the presence of the painted canvas to embody his spirit but to also absorb the spirit of the viewer. This idea, of course, plays into the Kabbalistic idea of death being a kind of divide between two worlds, but Rothko wanted to have this thrill, this exchange, while he was alive. Simply knowing that people were standing before his paintings seems to have filled him with a kind of warmth and sense of approval—giving him life.

There I was in the chapel, standing before the main triptych, which hung on a wall that was designed to be recessed about 5 feet. The painting, thus, was not so much hung on the wall, but in a niche. I stared up at the canvas’ breathtaking 15-foot expanse, which is when I noticed that I could not see its top edge. The painting was muted, blended, with a shadow that seemed to have been cleverly orchestrated, so that it appeared to be part of the painting.

***

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Jeremy Sigler's new book of poetry, My Vibe, was published by Spoonbill Books.

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One thing about dictatorships, they’re either very expensive or very cheap to fly to. There’s no such thing as a midrange regime: Extremities charge extremities. I know a guy, it cost him $4,600 just to get to North Korea (Newark-Beijing-Dandong, and then across the DPRK border in a Jeep). I know another guy, it cost him $2,800 just to get to Laos (Newark-Tokyo-Bangkok-Vientiane). I flew nonstop from JFK to Baku, Azerbaijan, visa included, for all of $500. The plane was a brand-new Airbus A340; the pilots were military-grade, and the senior or just older pilot wore medals on his chest that resembled poker-chips: two black, one yellow, which at Trump casinos, back when there were Trump casinos, would’ve been redeemable for $1,200. The flight attendants, uniformed in sky-gray and blood-red, were gorgeous: The men were creatic gym creatures bursting out of their shirts, the women were dripping with makeup and curvaceous, their skirts slit as high as it gets, at least in the world of Islamic female flight attendant fashion. The three exorbitant meals they served over the course of the 10-hour, 30-minute, 5,812 mile/9,353 kilometer flight were culturally specific (mutton stews and breads) and hot (very hot). The in-flight-entertainment selection was operated by individual seatback touchscreen and generous and included, alongside the standard Hollywood and Russian offerings, an impressive selection of Azeri content, all of it bearing the seal of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Azerbaijan. I tried to catch up on Star Wars, the prequel trilogy, in order to prepare for the upcoming release of the sequel trilogy, though by the middle of Episode II, Attack of the Clones, I’d had enough and switched to an Azeri property, but it was only in Azeri—no subtitles, no dub—and so I wasn’t able to ascertain whether the lawyer was the good guy, or the bad guy, or not a lawyer at all, and instead a slick plastic surgeon on trial for corrupting his wife.

Most of the plane was empty, with no more than two dozen other passengers, about half of whom would terminate in Baku, with the other half Israeli—Russian-Israelis, Parsim (Persian Israeli), and Teimanim (Yemeni Israelis). Leave it to the Jews to find out that AZAL, the Azerbaijani government’s official airline, or flag-carrier, had been subsidizing ticket prices from America, and so that the cheapest way to get from New York to Tel Aviv was to go through Baku and wait. I’m not sure that this subsidy policy was created for the express purpose of saving Jews money, but then neither am I sure that it was created to encourage visits by American tourists and business travelers. Instead, dictator president Ilham Aliyev just cares about being able to boast domestically that his country now has a biweekly direct flight to New York. The airport, which Aliyev is constantly renovating, as if he were intent on expanding it in tandem with the expansion of the universe, is named for his father, Heydar Aliyev, the previous dictator president. At its center is a glitzy foreign-flights terminal that resembles the Galactic Senate from Star Wars. The landing was baby-gentle; the deplaning swift; the Israelis dispersed to window shop duty-free caviar and Rolexes until their departure for Ben-Gurion. I was processed through immigration and customs, asked no questions, but photographed twice. The first person in Azerbaijan to ask me any questions was my cabdriver: What you doing here? And, What you pay?

I answered the what I doing here? with, I’m a tourist, because to say that I’d come to this majority-Muslim authoritarian country as a writer, let alone as a journalist, would be like saying I’d come to prey on your youth, or to masturbate into the Caspian. I answered the what I pay? with, How about 20 manats?—because that was the amount suggested by “Zaur J” on a msgboard on tripadvisor.com. Other posts had suggested 14, 16, 25, 30, and taking the 116 shuttlebus to the 28th of May train station for 40 qepik, which was roughly a quarter. I settled on 20, because it wasn’t my money. A bit over $12. The driver suggested 25. Which was a bit over $15.

He still hadn’t asked where we were going.

***

Azerbaijan is a nation bordered by threats and built atop lies. This makes it not too different from any other nation, except: To the south is Iran, to the north is Georgia and a hunk of Russian Dagestan (which doesn’t do much to buffer the rumblings of Chechnya and Ossetia); to the west is a short border with Turkey and a long troubled ton of border shared with hated Armenia, with which Azerbaijan has been engaged in an on-and-off war over the Nagorno-Karabakh exclave since 1988; while to the east is the largest enclosed inland body of water on earth, the oil-and-natural-gas-rich Caspian, whose greatest local landlord is SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic), which partners with and administers contracts for the AIOC (the Azerbaijan International Operating Company), a consortium of extractors headed by BP (UK), and including—in order of declining equity—Chevron (USA), INPEX (Japan), Statoil (Norway), ExxonMobil (USA), TPAO (Turkey), ITOCHU (Japan), and ONGC Videsh (India). To make it clearer, Azerbaijan is a seabound country with dwindling but still significant reserves of oil, outsize reserves of natural gas, the highest Shia population percentage in the world after Iran, an ongoing conflict with an Orthodox Christian neighbor, close-enough experience of the Georgian/Abkhazian and Chechen Wars, a sense of Russia as representing the highest of culture, yet a sense of Putin as the lowest of thugs, bent on recapturing a toxic mashup of Soviet/Tsarist glory, and so perpetually reconnoitering the Central Asian steppes for the next Donbass, or Crimea. Dropping oil and natural gas revenues have sparked a rising interest in the previously inimical—because Sunni—Salafism blowing north from Iranian Kurdistan and south from Ciscaucasia. Over 1,500 Azerbaijani citizens are currently in Syria fighting for ISIS.

Baku, the capital, a city of approximately two million people, is a brash glam cesspit of new construction—newly stalled since the global banking crisis and again, since oil and gas have plummeted—surrounded by ruined farmland. To pass from Baku to the countryside is to pass from the twenty-first century to the nineteenth, skipping the twentieth entirely, which was such a downer anyway, everyone pretends not to notice. Throughout the country there isn’t a dominant culture, but an only-culture. Azerbaijani state power, though notionally secular, has the force of Islam and the same vertical structure: bow and scrape. The country’s best criminals are treated like businessmen, and the country’s best businessmen happen to be members of the ruling family. To get a good job, you have to have good connections. To get good connections you have to be born to a good family. To be born to a good family you have to be blessed by a good God. If you find yourself—like, say, the 7.4 million people in Azerbaijan who don’t live in Baku—unlucky enough to be excluded from this system of patronage, or nepotistic oligarchy, you’re fucked. All you can do, in your fuckedness, is put on a fake face and submit. Spend all your money on your car, or your clothes, so that you seem wealthier. Name your firstborn male child after the president or the president’s father so that he seems more employable. Have more female children, because only women can marry up. Take pride in the new pedestrian promenade, along the waterfront. In the skyscrapers you don’t work in. The malls you can’t afford to shop in. Embrace the falsehoods and lead a double life.

So, the truth of why I’d come here—if truth can be spoken, or even spoken of, in Azeri (whose word for truth, haqq, also means justice, and payment):

I was in Baku, only to get the hell out of Baku—to go to the edge of Azerbaijan and up into the Caucasus, the easternmost of the western mountains, or the westernmost of the eastern mountains, where, tectonically, Europe crashes into Asia. I was headed there to enact a submission of my own: to fall down at the Adidas-sneakered feet of the Mountain Jews—a sect of overwhelmingly short, hairy, dark-skinned Semites—who, as craggy cloudbound slope-dwellers, seemed perfectly positioned to offer me the wisdom I was seeking, without any annoying lectures on Orientalism.

I wanted to ask these Jews—these fellow Jews—what to do: about how to handle, how personally to handle, for example, the tragedy of capitalism, as it withers into kleptocracy; or Islamic fundamentalism, and the compounding quandary that is Zionism; about how to survive as a writer, when 99% of the world doesn’t read, and when the 1% that does just reads to get offended; about how to deal with publishers, who underpay; and with editors, who overedit; with publications that cut columns and cut rates; with schools that string me along as a lecturer without insurance.

While I didn’t seriously suppose that the Mountain Jews had all the answers, I did suspect, or hope, that they themselves would be the answers. After all, they—their community—might comprise the longest-running mafia in recorded history.

Or semi-recorded—because the Mountain Jews have never written their own history, because writing is too fixed, too fixing, and surely too unremunerative. Instead, they abide in strangers’ pages, shrouded in the oral.

Among their legends are the following, which I’ll list in order from “OK, I’ll Give You the Benefit of the Doubt,” to “Definitely Didn’t Happen”:

Toward the end of the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Samaria, and deported between one and ten of its tribes—between one and ten of the so-called Lost Tribes—for resettlement in their capital, Nineveh, present-day Mosul. But the Assyrian king, Ashur, whom the Mountain Jews associate with Shalmaneser V, mentioned in II Kings, grew so enraged by the Israelites for refusing to forsake their God and for the success they had in commerce that he exiled them to the edge of the empire—to the Caucasus Mountains, where they flourished.



Toward the end of the eighth century BCE, Hoshea, last of the Israelite kings, attempted to gain his kingdom’s independence from Assyria and, as recorded in II Kings, stopped paying the official tribute—10 talents of gold, 1,000 talents of silver—upon Shalmeneser V’s ascension to the throne. Shalmaneser V moved to recoup his losses by imprisoning Hoshea, laying siege to Samaria, and seizing the property of between one and ten of its tribes—the property of between one and ten of the so-called Lost Tribes—whom he or his successor, Sargon II, exiled to the edge of the empire—to the Caucasus Mountains, where they flourished.



Toward the end of the eighth century BCE, under the reign of Hoshea, around 20,000 Israelites fled the destruction of their kingdom—or left to seek unimperiled trade routes between east and west—or traveled en masse to Nineveh to post bail and free Hoshea from debtors prison, but failed—or traveled en masse to press an alliance against the Assyrians with the Egyptian King So (either Tefnakht of Sais or Osorkon IV of Tanis) but went astray. They passed through Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia before settling atop the Caucasus Mountains, where they flourished.

The more scholarly proposals of Mountain Jewish origin, the few of them there are, prove just as fascinating/unsatisfactory:

Jews came from the Israelite Kingdom to Persia ca. eighth century BCE; Persian Jews came to Greater Caucasia—the area between the Black and Caspian Seas—ca. fifth century CE. With the incursions of Goths and/or Huns from the Black Sea region, across the Pontic steppe, the Parthian and/or Sassanid Empires (third century BC to third century CE, the former) (third century CE to seventh century CE, the latter) required a border defense force. Considering the Jews to be exemplary warriors, the Parthian and/or Sassanid kings resettled them in the Caucasus.



In the fifth century CE, Sassanid King Yazdegerd II forced all the peoples he conquered to convert to Zoroastrianism and embarked on violent persecutions of Assyrian and Armenian Christians, and Persian and Armenian Jews, with the result that the latter two fled, either together or separately, to the Caucasus.



By the eighth century CE, a nomadic Turkic people called the Khazars, or Kuzari, had relinquished their syncretic religion of Tengriism (worship of the Turkic sky god Tengri), Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and converted exclusively to Judaism. Formerly a trading partner between Byzantium and the Sassanids, and then between Byzantium and the Ummayads, the Khazars now became enemies of both, as well as of Kievn Rus, whose prince, Sviatoslav I, razed their de facto capital, Atil—located along the Volga—whose population sought shelter in the Caucasus.



In or around the ninth century CE, one or more of the minor khanates around the Caspian attempted to break what it or they regarded as a Jewish monopoly on maritime and overland trade by expelling its or their Jews from the coastal plain to the Caucasus, where they flourished. Or one or more of the minor khanates sent its or their Jews up into the mountains to act as a frontier guard. Or sent its or their Jews up into the mountain passes to act as basically inspectors and toll collectors—enforcing tariffs, imposing duties. Or else the Jews, either compelled to quit or perhaps even quitting the coastal plain of their own accord, went rogue up in the Caucasus, and appointed themselves frontier guards, inspectors, and/or toll collectors—extorting tribute and/or protection payments from any and all passing through.



By the late 1600s, Jews of Persian descent, fleeing the persecutions of the Persian Safavids for the fraying borders of the Lak Gazikumukh Shamkhalate, had established themselves on the shores of the Caspian near Derbent—today the second largest city in Dagestan, and the southernmost city in Russia—in a settlement called Aba-Sava. The Shamkhalate, in a bid to prevent the Safavids from advantaging its weaknesses and annexing its holdings, struck an alliance with Catherine the Great. The Jews, who traded with everyone—the Shamkhalate, the Russians, the Safavids—had alliances with none. Aba-Sava was destroyed in either the second, or third, Russo-Persian War, and its Jews were half slaughtered, half scattered, and found shelter only under the Russian-aligned reign of Fatali Khan, ruler of the Quba Khanate, and conqueror of Derbent, who dispersed them to remote mountain towns of his dominion.

Regardless of which interpretation you hold with, the situation seems to be this: Somehow, a loose group of Jews that spoke a dialect of Persian that contained elements of Hebrew—a dialect now called Judeo-Tat, or Juhuri, or Gorsky—found themselves virtually alone high up in the rebarbative Caucasus, where—for a period of 200 years, or 2,000 years, give or take a grain of salt—they seem to have controlled most of the mountain passes, and so most of the caravanning traffic, on that tangle of routes as gossamer as thread that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) immortalized as the Silk Road (die Seidenstraße).

Few goods could cross the Pontic steppe—between Persia, Arabia, India, China, etc., and Europe—without the Mountain Jews taking a cut. Few good merchants could avoid saddling and gapping their peaks—unless, just before the Bolshevik Revolution, they wanted to take the Transcaspian Railway from Tashkent, Samarqand, or Bukhara, to Turkmenbashi, and then a steamer across the Caspian Sea to Baku, then the Trans-Caucasian Railway to Batumi, and then a steamer across the Black Sea to Odessa—unless, just after the Bolshevik Revolution, they wanted to take an airplane.

But then even since the invention of the airplane and intermodal freight, the Mountain Jews haven’t done too poorly.

Of the approximately 200,000 Judeo-Tats, or Juhuros, or Gorsky Jews in existence (gora means mountain in Russian), half live in Israel, and about 20,000 in the States; many of the rest are in Russia, mostly in Moscow—and in Azerbaijan, mostly in Baku. Only a few still live in their ancestral auls (fortified, or once upon a time fortified, settlements), midway up the flanks of mountains along two of the Caucasus’s three major ranges, many of which are inaccessible today because the lines they obey are of faults, not borders; and though the armies camped atop the crust can’t stop the sediment, Azerbaijanis can and do stop Armenians from crossing, and Armenians can and do stop Azerbaijanis from crossing, and each stops the other from crossing into the de facto independent but unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh; Turks stop Armenians from crossing and Armenians stop Turks from crossing; Georgians stop Russians from crossing, and Russians stop Georgians from crossing (not only the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachay-Cherkessia, but also the partially recognized breakaway-from-Georgia state of South Ossetia; the partially recognized breakaway-from-Georgia state of Abkhazia; and the breakaway-from-Georgian autonomous republic of Adjara).

What unites all these lands, besides their tramontane routes, are their Jews, whose ancestors had known all these lands under earlier names and under no names, and had traded with all of their peoples in their own languages. It was this ability to slip between states, endonyms, exonyms, and tongues that enabled the Mountain Jews’ survival—their continuity like rock—and earned them the contempt of countless dynasties that withered. It was also what caused the Nazis to recognize them as Jews, and to treat them accordingly—indeed, they were the most Eastern Jews the Nazis ever encountered and, after studying their customs, not excluding polygamy, it was decided that their Judaism was more “religious” than “racial,” though that didn’t prohibit the occasional massacre. The Soviets, however, in compiling their statistics on national minorities, formally indexed them not as Jews but as Iranians. With the Soviet collapse, Sunni extremists started kidnapping Mountain Jews for ransom in Dagestan and Chechnya (Mountain Jewish communities always pay ransom), so that today, Azerbaijan seems to be their safest haven in the Caucasus—the only country to have realized the benefits of touting its Mountain Jews as mascots of ethnic comity, while shrewdly using them as regional dragomans and trade intercessors with Russia.

Because if Azerbaijan has become the Mountain Jews’ sanctuary, Russia is now their bazaar—its appetites have made their fortune. Mountain Jews of my own generation, who came of age under Yeltsin’s two terms of larceny and greed, moved into Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the vast cities of Siberia that have less name recognition, but more manufacturing infrastructure and coal mines. There they went about privatizing. Here’s what privatizing means: When a state that owns everything disintegrates, suddenly everything’s up for grabs; if you want a shop, or a factory, or an entire industry, say, you just show up and claim it as yours; the cops can’t kick you out, because there aren’t any cops—the cops don’t stay cops when they’re not getting paid—and so you dig in, and, should other parties arrive to stake their claims, you just have to hope that you have more and bigger men, and more and bigger guns, than they do. To give two examples—not to accuse them of having done anything like this, but merely to admire them if they had—God Nisanov (b. 1972), and Zarah Iliev (b. 1966). Both moved to Moscow in the early ’90s and immediately went underground, taking over kiosks throughout the drafty cavernous Metro, whose stations had been designed to serve as bomb-shelters, but now were also becoming groceries and malls. Nisanov and Iliev began shipping produce to the capital, setting up construction firms, and investing in real estate. Today, they’re the largest commercial real-estate developers in Moscow, with properties including the Evropeyskiy Shopping Center, the Radisson Royal Hotel, the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, myriad office parks, and wholesale and retail commodity markets (food, appliances, electronics, etc.). As of 2015 Forbes estimated the net worth of each at $4.9 billion, which tied them for the title of twenty-fourth richest person in Russia. In 2014, Nisanov was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin and was elected to the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress.

Both Nisanov and Iliev were born in the most venerable of the Mountain Jewish auls, Quba. Pronounced Guba. Actually, they’re from a Jewish enclave located just outside Quba, which in Azeri is called Qırmızı Qəsəbə, and in Russian is called Yevreiskaya Sloboda (Jewish Town), though under the Soviet period its name was changed to Krasnaya Sloboda (Red Town). Now, it shouldn’t seem particularly strange that a village of fewer than 3,800 people produced two childhood friends who grew up to become billionaires together. But it should seem particularly strange that this village currently boasts four billionaires, and at least twelve (by one count) and eighteen (by another) worth in the hundreds of millions. They include, as already noted, major property developers and commodity importers, but also car importers, clothing importers, and the managers of the Azerbaijani government’s oil and gas portfolios.

***

I’d been introduced to the existence of the Mountain Jews, and of Quba, by a man a friend of mine met at the banya—a Russian bathhouse, in Brooklyn. This man happened to know, or in the course of sweating conversation claimed to know, my friend’s relative, a Brooklyn (non-Mountain) Jew who does something I’d prefer not to understand with slot machines, and has spent time as a ward of the state. I was told that this man from Quba, whose phone number my friend obtained for me, imported apples to New York—to the Big Apple, which, last time I checked, grows plenty of its own …

In any event, I called the man’s number, introduced myself, in English, as a novelist—not as a journalist. I figured, because my friend had told him to expect the call, that he already had my name, and I was searchable online; I also figured the man lived in America, he knew what a novelist was—he knew that it meant “vicarious thrillseeker,” or “coward.” He immediately tried frustrating my interest, but I continued to pester, and finally got him to set a meeting. Which he canceled. I got him to set another meeting, and he canceled again, but at least had pretensions to courtesy, and txted me a local, Baku, number. I searched the number online, and it was the same one listed on the site for the Mountain Jewish community office, whose address was the same as that of Mountain Jewish central synagogue. But by the time I realized all that, I’d already signed a contract, and a check for expenses had cleared my account. Not only that: I’d already flown halfway across the globe and was sitting on the bed of my hotel, the Intourist, laptop on my lap, phone suctioned to my cheek, being reminded—as the number I kept dialing kept ringing—why I’d given up writing nonfiction, for fiction …

I went to the address listed on the site, ostensibly just a leisurely stroll from the Intourist, but either the address was wrong, or the street sign was: Under the Aliyevs, many of the streets in Baku have been stripped of their Russian names and given appellations in Azeri. Some of the more conscientious businesses list both street names on their sites. Most, however, don’t bother. Then there’s the issue of Azeri orthography, which further complicates map usage. Formerly, Azeri had been written in Perso-Arabic; in the 1920s the Latinesque Common Turkic alphabet was adopted; in 1939, the Soviets forced the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet; after Sovietism, Latinesque Common Turkic was reinstated, and it was only in 1992 that the schwa, or ə, so prevalent in the name of the street I was searching for—Şəmsi Bədəlbəyli—was called into service to replace the diaeresistic—umlauted—a. One map listed Şəmsi Bədəlbəyli as Shamsi Bedelbeyli, and another as Shämsi Bädälbäyli (apparently a formidable Azeri theater actor and director). Whatever its spelling, the boulevard I eventually stumbled upon was a double-boulevard, and wide, but composed of many tiny lanes thronged with many tiny cars; its northbound and southbound congeries were divided by an island of freshly planted parkland—the grass not yet sprouted over the sprinklerheads—beyond which, on the distant side, was the dormant worksite of a massive condo project: Beaux-Arts trimmings atop concrete bunkers separated by gravel lots like bulldozer caravanserais. Catercorner to the condos, I found it: the community office, the central synagogue—the Baku HQ of the Mountain Jews. It was an immense new building of austere Art Deco detailing that, given its sharpcornered cleanliness and shine, seemed two-dimensional, like an architectural rendering, a placard of itself: This Will Be Built On This Site.

It was amazing to me that this structure had another dimension—it was amazing that I was able to step inside. Though only for a moment.

A man strode up and, in response to my asking in Hebrew, said he spoke Hebrew. He was tall, skinny like he had a parasite, and wore a flatcap and trenchcoat indoors. He was between thirty and forty, I’d guess, but had a sparse scraggly beard—like he’d five-fingered it off the face of a surly teenager. He wouldn’t give his name—I mean his own name—or he couldn’t. It turned out that he couldn’t speak Hebrew, or what he spoke of it wasn’t just jumbled, but jumbled with rigor: morning (boker) was evening (erev) and vice-versa, six (sheysh) was seven (sheva) and vice-versa, the ark (aron) was a prayerbook (siddur). After showing me around the synagogue proper, he took me into the facility’s community center portion and showed me a wall of portraits of Mountain Jewish heroes of Azerbaijan’s wars, and another wall of portraits of Mountain Jewish leaders posing alongside Putin, Netanyahu, both the Aliyevs, George W. Bush, Sheldon Adelson, and assorted Azerbaijani mullahs from the government’s Committee for Religious Organizations. Then he hit me up for a donation—he didn’t confuse the word for charity, tzedakah. I gave him 5 manats, and asked if he knew any Mountain Jews who’d be willing to take me to Quba. He shook his head—meaning he didn’t know? or didn’t understand?—shook my hand, and ushered me out the door.

From the six or so years I lived and worked as a journalist throughout Eastern Europe, I was used to this stripe of wariness. No one who grew up in an authoritarian regime likes to or, honestly, can, answer a question directly. Everyone hesitates, dissembles, feels each other out. Feels out, that is, the type and degree of trouble that truthfulness, if they’re even capable of truthfulness, might get them into. In most post-Soviet countries this Cold War ice can usually be broken or, at a minimum, thawed, by a bribe, or through the vigorous application of alcohol. But here, in this Muslim country whose signature intoxicant was tea, alcohol wasn’t an option.

So I headed back to Brooklyn.

By which I mean: I went to find the Azerbaijan Chabad House.

Chabad Lubavitch is a Hasidic religious movement based in Brooklyn, which—like a yarmulke-wearing, spiritually focused version of a UN taskforce or NGO—dispatches its rabbis all over the world, to provide essential religious services in places where there aren’t many Jews—in Asia, Africa, even Antarctica, though they’re especially active in places where there haven’t been many Jews for a while, thanks to the Soviets, or Nazis. They’re basically a missionary organization, except they don’t convert so much as reclaim: They bring the unaffiliated back into the fold. Now, that’s a laudable brief for an organization to have, but there’s also a dark side, in that Chabad, at one extreme, is something of a messianic cult (some of the rabbis proclaim an uncomfortable fealty to their deceased leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe), and insists on imposing its parochial brand of Ashkenazi Judaism—Eastern European Hasidic Judaism—no matter the local tradition, or preference.

There’s also this pesky issue that a few of their rabbinic emissaries have had with, OK, money-laundering.

What might’ve licensed that behavior is a quirk of history: European Jews, not just in the East but throughout the continent, had almost always been required by the governments of the countries they lived in to identify as Jewish. Even after forced registrations became census requests, Jews tended to continue the practice on their own: If they gave charity to or attended their synagogue, there was a fair chance their home city or province’s community had their name and address on file. These community rolls made the Nazi genocide that much more efficient. After the fall of Sovietism, amid the aforementioned rash of privatization, nascent independent countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia found themselves steeped in unclaimed property, a lot of which had belonged to Jews, a lot of whom were dead. Meanwhile, young ambitious Jews of the postwar generations, many with limited Jewish education and even limited Jewish identification, were busy reorganizing their official communities into nonprofit religious entities. Having varying levels of access to their prewar rolls, they applied to state, provincial, and city governments, not just for the restitution of their rightful infrastructure—their synagogues, and cemeteries—but also for the restitution of the properties of their exterminated members who’d left no next of kin. Not many of these Jewish communities had rabbis; Chabad had rabbis—trained in America and Israel. Chabad sent its rabbis to open Chabad Houses—from which they directed prayers, classes, food-and-clothing drives, and lifecycle ceremonies (mostly funerals)—and while the preponderance of the sect’s emissaries stuck to mission principles and successfully renewed Jewish life, a few were tempted, or invited, to infiltrate the administrations of their governmentally-sanctioned communities, and took up posts as official Chief or Head Rabbis—which gave them nominal power over the management of community real-estate portfolios. Some of this real estate was extraordinarily lucrative. For instance: much of the downtown tourist districts of Krakow and Prague. Local influential Jews, inured to the inversions of Sovietism, in which the state was the criminal, and they were merely businessmen, would cut deals with the Chabad rabbis assigned to them, supporting the movement and smoothing its way in return for using this reclaimed infrastructure to clean their money—say, a Russian Jew from Odessa who in the 1990s amid the ludicrous inflation and loan defaults of independent Ukraine gets involved in the counterfeit luggage racket, and launders his profits through a storefront in a community-owned, because community-restituted, building that before it’d been nationalized by the Soviets and devastated by the Nazis had belonged to a Jewish family that’d been liquidated in the camp at Bogdanovka. I once, at a very tender, pious, and moronic age, tried to report on this phenomenon—a phenomenon that, in retrospect, I now find utterly rational and tolerable—and, in return for my sanctimony, in the course of a single day, one man threatened my life, and another man handed me an envelope crammed with cash that kept me housed and fed and working on a novel for nearly all of 2004. Suffice it to say, I’m no Chabad booster. But still, if I could never completely bring myself to trust Hasidim, I could at least trust Hasidim to be Hasidim.

Chabad has its Azerbaijani House on Dilara Aliyeva Street, which used to be called Surakhanskaya, and under the Soviets was Pervomayskaya. I couldn’t figure out whether Dilara Aliyeva was related to the dictator president Aliyevs, or just shared their surname (two people said yes, the Internet said no), but I do know that she founded an anti-domestic abuse organization, and was a member of the opposition People’s Front, who died in what Russian media described, not without bias, as a mysterious car accident on the Azerbaijani/Georgian border in 1991.

The head of Chabad in Baku, conforming to expectations, introduced himself as the Chief Rabbi of Azerbaijan; his business card read “Cheif Rabbi” [sic] of “The Jewish Community of European Jews.” Whatever. I addressed him in Hebrew, just to be a schmuck, but also because it felt like the only language to use in Baku for a conversation with another guy from New Jersey. Rabbi Shneor Segal—robustly obese, copiously bristled, the suit I’d bet from Shemtov’s on Empire Boulevard, the Borsalino I’d bet from Primo’s on Kingston Avenue—asked me to put on tefillin and tallis to pray, and after I did, because prayer is the price of admission with Chabad, he asked me to explain my presence. I was a tourist, I said. From where? Brooklyn. Ah, he said, Brooklyn. Born there? Born in Atlantic City. Ah, he said, New Jersey.

It was English after that.

I told him we had mutual acquaintances, and named the rabbis in Prague and Krakow. He knew them. I named their wives, their children. He softened, reclined, released his belly over his belt. We talked about his difficulties getting a lease on a space to open up a kosher restaurant—there were so many people to “pay,” and so many people he might slight through a failure to “pay,” and all of them would be his only customers. We talked about my difficulties getting in with the Mountain Jews, and I wondered if he was in touch with any—if he knew any who’d take me around.

His face lit, and then his phone lit, and he was scrolling Contacts. He was giving me a number, but what he said was: I’m giving you a mitzvah.

There was this Mountain Jewish kid, he said, who was an orphan. His father had absconded, way back when. His mother had just died. He was having problems earning a living, but at least he had a car.