There’s a village in Azerbaijan where the streets go quiet on Friday at sundown.

The men put on prayer shawls. The synagogue fills. The Shabbat candles go in the windows. This has been happening, more or less uninterrupted, for roughly 2,500 years.

The place is called Krasnaya Sloboda, and it sits across a river from the city of Quba in the northern part of the country. It’s the only all-Jewish town outside of Israel. Not a neighborhood. Not a quarter. A town, with its own synagogues, its own kosher butcher, and a school that teaches Hebrew alongside the regular curriculum.

The people who live there are called Mountain Jews, or Juhuro. They came to the Caucasus from Persia around the time of the Babylonian exile, possibly earlier. They’ve been in those mountains so long that their language, Juhuri, is a dialect of ancient Persian fused with Hebrew. It isn’t Yiddish. It isn’t Ladino. It’s something entirely its own.

They survived the Mongol invasions. They survived every empire that swept through the Caucasus over the centuries. They survived Soviet rule, which banned Jewish education, shuttered synagogues, and tried to strip religious identity from entire generations. They kept going anyway, underground when they had to and in the open when they could.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, many of them left. There are large Mountain Jewish communities now in Israel, in Queens, in Moscow. But Krasnaya Sloboda didn’t empty out the way so many Jewish communities have across history. People stayed. People came back. The synagogues are still open.

What makes this story even more fascinating isn’t only the longevity. It’s the setting. Azerbaijan is a Muslim-majority country, and the Mountain Jews have lived alongside their neighbors for centuries without the sustained persecution that destroyed Jewish communities across Europe and the Arab world. That’s worth saying directly, because it runs against the version of history that tends to dominate the conversation.

Jewish history is long, and it isn’t only a story of loss. Sometimes it’s the story of a community in the mountains of the Caucasus who kept lighting candles on Friday night for two and a half thousand years and are still doing it today.