Was Lavrentiy Beria Jewish?

Lavrentiy Beria is possibly the person most synonymous with the Red Terror in the Soviet Union after Stalin and Lenin themselves, but typically Beria’s multitude of crimes have long been brushed under the rug by the mainstream media and parts of academia, and they are both personal and professional as I have explained in my previous article on Beria. (1)

Perhaps predictably through the years I have seen various claims that Beria was jewish although not much evidence has ever been adduced for this claim; it has never-the-less been made. Thus, is behoves me to correct this misapprehension lest it be used to try to invalidate the charge - and reality - of Judeo-Bolshevism.

Beria was born on 29th March 1899 in the village of Merkheuli in what is known Abkhazia to Pavle Beria and Marta Ivanova Jaqeli.

His father was a prominent local landowner in the Sukhumi district of Abkhazia and was from the Mingrellian ethnic group in Abkhazia and Georgia. (2) Who subsequently died while ‘Beria was still attending higher primary school (similar to a middle school) in the town of Sukhumi, not far from his native village of Merkheuli.’ (3)

While his mother – who had previously been married and then widowed – Marta Jaqeli was from a prominent Georgian princely family the Jaqelis. (4)

Beria’s academic biographer comments regarding her that:

‘Beria’s mother, Marta Ivanova, was born in 1872. She was a simple, deeply religious woman who attended church regularly all her life, maintaining close ties with other members of the religious community.’ (5)

Further most of Beria’s family also lived in Abkhazia. (6)

So put another way: Beria was Georgian/Abkhazian and while a completely evil man; he was not in fact jewish.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/lavrentiy-beria-stalins-rapist-in

(2) Amy Knight, 1993, ‘Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 14-16

(3) Ibid., p. 15

(4) Ibid., pp. 14-16; Ronald Grigor Suny, 1994, ‘The Making of the Georgian Nation’, 1st Edition, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, esp. pp. 41-52

(5) Knight, Op. Cit., p. 15

(6) Ibid.