In those days, Jews used to live in and around the city of Shamakhi (mainly in the village of Mücü), but the community has been non-existent since the early 1920s.

Archaeological excavations carried out in 1990 resulted in the discovery of the remains of the 7th-century Jewish settlement near Baku, and of a synagogue 25 kilometres to the southeast of Quba.

The movement remained strong in the short-lived Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (1918–1920) marked with the establishment of the Jewish Popular University in 1919, periodicals printed in Yiddish, Hebrew, Judæo-Tat and Russian, and a number of schools, social clubs, benevolent societies and cultural organizations.

In the early 1920s a few hundred Mountain Jewish families from Azerbaijan and Dagestan left for Israel and settled in Tel-Aviv.

Most of the Azerbaijani Jewish population fled amid rising antisemitism and violence against Jews during the Soviet dissolution and independence of Azerbaijan.

Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir expressed hope that the Azerbaijani Jewish refugees could be settled in occupied West Bank.

However, Israeli diplomat Miron Gordon, who oversaw issuing visas, welcomed Azerbaijani Jews regardless of whether they settled in Israel or the occupied territories.

Gordon stated that of all the collapsing Soviet republics, the Jews in Azerbaijan faced the greatest threat of violence, and thus their immigration was prioritized by the Israeli Consulate.

German and French lobbyists bribed by the laundromat frequently sought to portray Azerbaijan as a friend of Israel.

[10] Mountain Jews are believed to have moved north making way to mass migration of Oguz Turks into the region.

Throughout the medieval epoch Mountain Jews were establishing cultural and economic ties with other Jewish communities of the Mediterranean.

[11] According to the 1926 Soviet census, there were 7,500 Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan (roughly 25% of the country's entire Jewish population).

The theory of common origins of Tats and Mountain Jews (previously referred to as Judæo-Tats) has been vehemently dismissed by a number of researchers.

Ashkenazi Jews continued immigrating to Azerbaijan until the late 1940s, with a number of them being World War II evacuees from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who chose to stay in their country of refuge.

[16] Similar to many immigrant communities of the Czarist and Soviet eras in Azerbaijan, Ashkenazi Jews appear to be linguistically Russified.

There were only around 200 of them left in 1997 (when the region was visited by a research group from Saint Petersburg) with many planning to move to Russia and leaving virtually no chance for further preservation of this unique community.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, a yeshiva opened in Baku in 1994 and an Ohr Avner Chabad Day School was established in 1999.

[1] On 31 May 2007, a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the Ohr Avner Chabad Centre for Jewish Studies took place in Baku.

[22] In 2005 Yevda Abramov, himself a Jew, was elected to the National Assembly of Azerbaijan as an MP representing the Rural Guba riding.

As of 2017, there are seven synagogues in Azerbaijan: three in Baku (one for each community, the Ashkenazi, Mountain and Georgian; the second one being the largest in the Caucasus), two in Qırmızı Qəsəbə near Quba, and two in Oğuz.

During the interview, Shapiro said that "the delegation met with the Jewish community in Azerbaijan and saw they are very happy and feel very comfortable living in the country".