Mountain Jews are the Mizrahi Jewish subgroup of the eastern and northern Caucasus, mainly Azerbaijan, and various republics in the Russian Federation: Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia–Alania, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, and are the descendants of Persian Jews from Iran. Mountain Jews took shape as a community after Qajar Iran ceded the areas in which they lived to the Russian Empire as part of the Treaty of Gulistan of 1813.