Anisimov (Nissim-Oglu), Ilya Sherbatovich
ANISIMOV (Nissim-Oglu), ILYA SHERBATOVICH
ANISIMOV (Nissim-Oglu ), ILYA SHERBATOVICH (b. 1862), ethnographer of Caucasian Jewry. He was born in Tarka (Dagestan). His father was the first "*mountain Jew" to study at the *Volozhin yeshivah, becoming rabbi of Tarka, and later of Temir Khan Shura, also in Dagestan. Anisimov studied engineering in Moscow and later worked in the Rothschild Naphtha Company in the Caucasus. He drew the attention of Russian philologists to the Tat language spoken by the Caucasian mountain Jews. In 1886 he was sent by the Moscow Archaeological Society to the Caucasus where he visited 88 localities and gathered a vast amount of ethnological and statistical material on the Jews there. His study on the Caucasian Jews, published in 1888, is of great ethnological value.
bibliography:
S.A. Vengerov, Istochniki slovarva russkikh pisateley, 1 (1900), 75; Voskhod, 9 no. 1–2 (1889), 92–110; 9 no. 3 (1889), 49–64; I. Ben-Zvi, The Exiled and the Redeemed (19612), 39–48.