Connecting histories and geographies: The Jews of Central Asia

The Jewish communities of Central Asia have a long and fascinating history. Yet until recently the Jewish groups which lived in the area wedged between Afghanistan, Iran and the former Soviet Republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, have attracted little scholarly attention. The 20th century radically changed the world for these communities and it witnessed their mass exodus from the region. Today, these communities are spread around the world. The largest of them are to be found in Israel and the United States. It is only now, when there are almost no Jews left in Central Asia, that the study of Bukharan Jews has seriously started.

The history and historiography of the Jews of Afghanistan, Iran and (Soviet) Central Asia is usually divided along the borders of these modern nation states, and most scholarly and popular literature portray these communities as distinct, secluded Jewish ethnic groups, disconnected from each other and from the wider Jewish world. These modern narratives suggest the existence of cultural homogenous and isolated communities, while their broad cultural and linguistic commonalities (and even family biographies) continue to overlap. 

Colonial, Soviet and national perspectives of narratives in the region and its population contributed to these misunderstandings and also mirrored back into an exclusive self-consciousness of the respective Jewish groups, who developed their own sense of group identities. The scale of states, though, is simultaneously too small and too large to grasp the past and present of these communities, with their specific and often quite diverse local experiences. For a better understanding of their intertwined histories, it is necessary to put these Central Asian Jewish groups (again) into a wider cultural and geographical context.

The Jewish triangle

At one time the Jews of Central Asia were part of a greater Persianate world along the silk roads, divided into three major states: the Safavid, the Mughal and the Uzbek empires. As time and Muslim rulers went by Persian-speaking Jewish communities became part of (Qajar) Iran, (Durrani) Afghanistan and (Tsarist/Russian) Turkestan/ Soviet Central Asia. Islamic historiography and mapping know this eastern heartland of the medieval Muslim world with its urban centres of Mashhad, Herat, Balkh, Merv, Bukhara and Samarkand as Khurasan (“Land of the rising sun”). Among Central Asian Jews this vast area is sometimes referred to as the “Jewish triangle”. Considering Jewish geographies and mobility, the connections between the cities within the triangle (and beyond) are especially important. For Jews from Central Asia, city affiliation is the most significant pattern of identification until today and it still matters a lot where one’s ancestors came from or where they are buried.

Like everywhere else in the Islamic world, the Jews of Central Asia were regarded and protected as ahl al-dhimma (the People of the Pact). This pact aimed at setting the Muslim and non-Muslim communities apart and it was based on three essential benefits: security of life and property, freedom of religion and internal communal autonomy. It also stipulated that Jews had to pay atax (jizya) to the local Muslim ruler and follow certain restrictive rules in relation to clothing, occupation, dwelling, houses of worship and behaviour in public. As internal strangers the Jews in Muslim lands were always heavily dependent on the ruling elite and the prevailing political and economic situation, and they adapted quickly to any form of transformation.

Compared to the Jews of Afghanistan and  north-eastern Iran, since the late 19th century much has been written about Central Asian Jews who came under Russian and later Soviet dominance (namely, those who became commonly known as Bukharan Jews). They frequently appeared in travelogues reporting on the Emirate of Bukhara and Russian Turkestan, and they became a community of interest for Russian colonial and later Soviet politics and social engineering programmes. Family, histories and genealogies of the Bukharan Jews show how tightly connected they were to Jewish communities in Afghanistan and Iran – at least until the mid-1930s when the Soviet state consolidated and closed its border with Afghanistan and cut off the Bukharan Jews from the West.

Until then, Central Asian Jewish communities were linked to each other and to Jewish communities in Europe, South Asia and the Arab world through merchants, pilgrims, teachers, travellers, family ties and the circulation of books. Time and again, individuals, families, and groups abandoned their place of residence, crossed borders and moved on to neighbouring or distant towns where they joined local Jewish communities or founded new ones. Even though they are (and always have been) rather small urban diaspora groups, the Jewish communities of Central Asia are made up of various subgroups with specific cultural and linguistic peculiarities.

Depending on their place of residence, Central Asian Jews differed in terms of clothing, cooking and other cultural features, such as customs, art and music. Deeply influenced by the Muslim cultural environment, they shared much of the culture and traditions of their Muslim neighbours, including language and literature. The Jews of Iran, Afghanistan and (Soviet) Central Asia, for example, spoke local varieties of Persian, which they wrote in the Hebrew script – the so-called Judeo-Persian. Texts written in Judeo-Persian are documented as far back as the eighth century – making them the oldest preserved written documents of New Persian. Just like the Persian varieties spoken by Muslims, the Judeo-Persian dialects of the Jewish triangle varied from region to region and from town to town.

Until the early 1930s, Hebrew (like Arabic for the Muslim population) was taught in religious schools and was used primarily as a liturgical language. In the early 20th century the Jewish vernaculars comprised of only a few Hebrew words. Bilingualism (in Persian and Turki/Uzbek) was a widespread phenomenon. After the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the Russian language gained influence among entrepreneurial Jewish families, but until the mid-20th century it had little impact on the broader Jewish population of Soviet Central Asia. Only for the generations born in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or later, Russian replaced Persian (or Tajik, as the language was called from the mid-1920s on) as the main language.

Waves of migration

A major shift in the population of the Jewish triangle began in 1839, when a group of Muslims in Mashhad attacked the town’s Jewish quarter and set fire to the synagogue. In order to prevent further escalation of violence against the Jews, Islamic leaders intervened and promised the rioters that the whole Jewish community of the city would convert to Islam. With this forced conversion, the Jewish community of Mashhad officially ceased to exist and the converts became known as the “New Muslims” (Jadid al-Islam). Many of these converts became Muslims outwardly, but maintained their Jewish faith and observed their religious laws and ceremonies at home and in secret. Others opted for emigration – many moving to neighbouring Herat and other cities in northern Afghanistan and Central Asia. In Herat, these refugees became the dominant element of the Jewish community and turned the Herat community into the largest Jewish community of Afghanistan. 

Attracted by favourable economic, legal and political conditions under Russian rule, many more Jews from the triangle and beyond settled in Russian Turkestan. The influx of foreign capital and technology into Central Asia led to a boom in the economy and attracted Jewish migrants and refugees from the Emirate of Bukhara, Herat, Mashhad, and Kashgar (Western China). The number of Jews in the towns of Russian Turkestan increased greatly, especially in the Ferghana Valley area – the region’s economic hotspot at the turn of the century. Several successful Bukharan Jewish entrepreneurs and trading companies (mostly family businesses) invested in cotton mills, coal mines, railways and other branches of the emerging industrial sector. Some of them also owned farmlands and were in ever rising demand of Jewish workers. The impact of the Russian economy and its exports led to an occupational shift among the Bukharan Jews, who gave up their unprofitable traditional crafts (like weaving and dying) and became engaged in various niches of the emerging service sector. From then on Bukharan Jewish tailors, hairdressers, cobblers, shoemakers and hatters also met the needs of the growing number of European settlers and modernised Central Asians in the region.

After the connection of Central Asia to the European railroad system, the trading of Central Asian goods to Russia and Europe grew considerably. Next to cotton, karakul wool was the main commodity of the day. Export numbers of this black sheep skin exploded when karakul jackets became the latest trend of the growing fashion industry in Paris, London and Berlin. Central Asian Jews often served as middlemen between the Central Asian Arab, Turkmen and Uzbek sheep-breeders and the international buyers and traders. The booming Central Asian market also became of interest for Jewish traders based in Mashhad and the towns in northern Afghanistan, who continued old-style caravan trade from the new railroad stations towards India and Persia, and kept Central Asian Jews connected to Jewish communities in Baghdad and Palestine.

In the late 19th century many Jews left Central Asia. Bukharan Jews were among the earliest immigrants to Jerusalem, where they founded a colony on the outskirts of its old town, which is known today as the “Bukharan Neighbourhood”. The Bukharan quarter in Jerusalem quickly developed into the most important cultural and religious centre for Central Asian Jews. More than one hundred religious texts and books on fine literature in Judeo-Persian were published here, and were sent back to their Central Asian brothers in faith. This first major wave of Jewish emigration was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War and the subsequent collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires.

Strengthen the differences

Bolshevik ideology and Soviet national policy had a massive impact on Bukharan Jewish culture, identity and everyday life. Synagogues were closed down and replaced by Soviet institutions. From 1925 to 1940, newspapers, textbooks and literature were published in the language of the Central Asian Jews (Judeo-Tajik in Soviet terminology). Motivated by the union-wide Latinisation campaign, Bukharan Jewish intellectuals adapted a Latin alphabet which, from 1930 on, replaced the Hebrew script. The Latin script remained in use until the late-1930s when the Soviet government terminated its “affirmative action” policy towards national minorities and no longer promoted secular/soviet Bukharan Jewish institutions. From then on, Judeo-Tajik was regarded as a dialect of Tajik and the appellation of Bukharan Jews disappeared from official use. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish communities under Soviet rule were grouped together under the label “Jew” (evrei), which was designated as their nationality on passports. Bukharan and Central Asian Jewish history stopped being a subject of research in the Soviet Union, and publications relating to the communities were removed from libraries; those who had been active in creating a Bukharan Jewish Soviet culture and national identity were prosecuted during the Great Terror or had to adapt or merge with the Soviet Tajik (or Uzbek) national enterprise.

In the 1920s and early 30s, thousands of Jews fled from Soviet Central Asia – not merely because of religion or ideology this time, but in order to escape state persecution and the rapid deterioration of living and working conditions under Bolshevik rule. Bukharan Jewish religious dignitaries and entrepreneurs – the so called NEP-men – were the first ones who fled. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin disposed of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and set up the first Five-Year Plan. Forced collectivisation and sedentarisation brought about a drastic deterioration of living conditions in Soviet Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands opted to flee to northern Afghanistan – among them about 4,000 Bukharan Jews (about one-tenth of the community) trying to make their way to Palestine. Almost every Jewish family had relatives or friends among the refugees. Others left towns in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and moved to towns in the recently established Tajik SSR, where there were job prospects for the educated Tajik speakers. In the following years Bukharan Jews contributed enormously to the creation of Soviet Tajik culture and society. New Bukharan Jewish communities were established, like the one in Frunze/Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), or grew considerably (in the republic’s capitals), while others shrunk (especially in the small towns of Uzbekistan).

Higher education and consolidation of the Soviet economy offered a wide range of opportunities for the further success for Bukharan Jews – even if upward mobility was limited due to state antisemitism. This was one reason why some changed their nationality on passports from Jew to Tajik. Others, well adapted yet critical of the Soviet system, waited for their chance to leave for Israel. This opportunity came in the early 1970s when the United States and Soviet Union agreed upon legal Jewish emigration. Within the next ten years around 250,000 Jews left the Soviet Union, including many Bukharan. The door of legal Jewish emigration was closed again after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent freezing of East-West relations.

Beyond the Soviet Union

Jews began leaving Afghanistan in the early 1930s when the new government in Kabul took hold of their economic niches and tightened its grip on communities. With masses of refugees pouring through the porous Soviet border into northern Afghanistan, Kabul also faced a “refugee crisis”. Both Kabul and Moscow tried to stop the ongoing mass cross-border migration. Bukharan Jews among the refugees were under general suspicion to be Soviet spies and many of them were mistreated, imprisoned and deported.

Nevertheless, the massive influx of people, animals and goods also had advantages – at least for the Afghan side. In an effort to nationalise and monopolise the lucrative karakul trade, the Afghan government pushed local Jewish communities out of this business – back then Afghanistan’s most valuable export good and it was main source of income for Jews in northern Afghanistan. In 1933, Kabul decreed that all Jews who were working and living in the towns along the Soviet border had to return to their hometowns, Herat and Kabul. The dissolution of Jewish trading communities in Northern Afghanistan bereft them of their very basis of existence. From then on, the escape via Afghanistan and Iran became too great of a risk – especially for Jews. With no Jews left on the south-side of the border, the Soviet Jewish refugees had no other place to go. This policy finally and effectively dislocated Jewish commercial networks within the triangle.

After the Second World War and the foundation of Israel, more and more Jews in Afghanistan opted for emigration. Finally, the Soviet invasion and outbreak of the still ongoing war ended the Jewish presence in Afghanistan. Iran also witnessed Jewish mass emigration, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Estimates of Jews still living in Iran vary between 8,500 and around 20,000, with an unknown number of so-called Crypto-Jews living anonymously.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Bukharan Jewish communities that have existed in Central Asia for many centuries faced a rapid decline. In Central Asia itself, the once large communities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Dushanbe and several towns in the Ferghana Valley have now been crumbled to small remnants, while in many other towns in the Jewish triangle the history of the Bukharan Jews has already come to its end.

Thomas Loy is scientific member of staff at the Central Asian Seminar of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. His research interests are oral history and commemorative culture in Central Asia and Afghanistan, migration and mobility and 20th century Tajik and Dari language and literature. He is co-founder of the internet blog tethys.caoss.org and edition-tethys publishers.

Bukharan Jews, Central Asia, history, Jewish history