Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

Alanna E. Cooper

Description

Jewish life in the Central Asian community

Learn more about Bukharan Jews on the author's website Read an excerpt from the book

Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic research there as well as among immigrants to the US and Israel, Cooper tells an intimate and personal story about what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Together with her historical research about a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews in other parts of the world, this lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history.

Preface: Reining in Diaspora's Margins
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Introduction
1. First Encounter: Bukharan Jewish Immigrants in an Ashkenazi School in New York
2. Writing Bukharan Jewish History: Memory, Authority, and Peoplehood
Part 2. Eighteenth-Century Conversations
3. An Emissary from the Holy Land in Central Asia
4. Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land
Part 3. Nineteenth-Century Conversations
5. Russian Colonialism and Central Asian Jewish Routes
6. A Matter of Meat: Local and Global Religious Leaders in Conversation
7. Building a Neighborhood and Constructing Bukharan Jewish Identity
Part 4. Twentieth-Century Conversations
8. Local Jewish Forms
9. International Jewish Organizations Encounter Local Jewish Community Life
10. Varieties of Bukharan Jewishness
11. Negotiating Authenticity and Identity: Bukharan Jews Encounter Each Other and the Self
12. Jewish History as a Conversation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Judaism

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253006554
• Langue: English

Extrait

Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism
INDIANA SERIES IN SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES Harvey E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism
Alanna E. Cooper
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Alanna E. Cooper
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cooper, Alanna E., [date]
Bukharan Jews and the dynamics of global Judaism / Alanna E. Cooper.
p. cm. - (Indiana series in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00643-1 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00650-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00655-4 (electronic book) 1. Jews-Uzbekistan-Bukhoro viloiati-History. 2. Jews-Uzbekistan-Bukhoro viloiati-Social conditions. 3. Jews, Bukharan. 4. Bukhoro viloiati (Uzbekistan)-Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS 135. U 92C66 2012
305.892 40587-dc23
2012024374
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For Moshe
CONTENTS
PREFACE : Reining in Diaspora s Margins
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Part 1. Introduction
1 First Encounter: Bukharan Jewish Immigrants in an Ashkenazi School in New York
2 Writing Bukharan Jewish History: Memory, Authority, and Peoplehood
Part 2. Eighteenth-Century Conversations
3 An Emissary from the Holy Land in Central Asia
4 Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land
Part 3. Nineteenth-Century Conversations
5 Russian Colonialism and Central Asian Jewish Routes
6 A Matter of Meat: Local and Global Religious Leaders in Conversation
7 Building a Neighborhood and Constructing Bukharan Jewish Identity
Part 4. Twentieth-Century Conversations
8 Local Jewish Forms
9 International Jewish Organizations Encounter Local Jewish Community Life
10 Varieties of Bukharan Jewishness
11 Negotiating Authenticity and Identity: Bukharan Jews Encounter Each Other and the Self
12 Jewish History as a Conversation
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PREFACE
Reining in Diaspora s Margins
For countless generations, Jewish houses of prayer, schools, neighborhood associations, and markets dotted the landscape of Central Asia s ancient silk-route cities. Although historians are not certain when Jews first appeared in the region, most believe they were among those who were exiled-or whose ancestors were exiled-from the Land of Israel in the sixth century BCE at the hands of the Babylonians. They moved eastward, probably as merchants along trade routes, spreading out as far as the fertile river valleys of present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
As the centuries passed, their descendants continued to carry the collective memory of exile and loss of the Jewish homeland. Over time, however, their historical experiences became intimately linked to the Central Asian landscape in which they found themselves. So much so, that the Jews whom I met there in the 1990s characterized themselves as indigenous to the region. We arrived here before Islam was introduced to the area, and before the Uzbek dynasts conquered the territory , they explained.
Even their language testifies to their deep Central Asian ties. Like Jews around the world, they spoke a dialect that set them off as a distinct community, separate from the non-Jews among whom they lived. Unlike the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, however, whose language was derived from experiences in a previous diaspora home, the language of Central Asia s Jews evolved within the confines of Central Asia itself. Whereas Yiddish-a Germanic language-marked Ashkenazi Jews as outsiders in Poland, Judeo-Tajik is one of the many variants of Tajik (a Persian language) spoken in the region by Jews and Muslims alike.
In spite of their deep roots, the ties that bound the Jews to Central Asia were, nonetheless, not strong enough to withstand the changes that swept through the region at the end of the twentieth century. As soon as the USSR dissolved, these Jews (who lived in the Central Asian territories that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union in the 1920s) began emigrating en masse.
I met many of them as new arrivals in an immigrant school in New York, where I taught in 1993 (and which I describe further in the book). Curious to learn what it was like to be Jewish in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, I asked my students to tell me about the homes, schools, synagogues, and neighborhoods they had left behind. They began to answer my questions, but the language and cultural barriers that stood between us proved serious obstacles, and we quickly reached the limits of conversation. If you want to know the place we call home , they concluded, you will have to go visit for yourself . Several years before, this would not have been possible. Now, however, Soviet restrictions on tourism had been lifted and travel to the region was a real possibility. My curiosity was piqued.
But you had better go quickly , they warned. The rise in nationalism and antisemitism, coupled with economic instability and a fear that the window of opportunity for leaving might be short-lived, had led to rapid chain-migration. Everyone s aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and friends seemed to be packing their bags, leaving, and resettling in Israel and the United States. Soon it will be too late to see Jewish life in Central Asia , my students cautioned.
And they were right. In 1989, approximately 50,000 indigenous Jews lived in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. 1 Just a decade later, their population in the region had been reduced to about a tenth of its size. And today, no more than several hundred remain. In a historical instant, Jews have all but disappeared from this corner of the world, and a long chapter in diaspora history has come to a close.
The story of Central Asia s Jews deep roots and sudden rupture is not an isolated one. Indeed, it is part of a much larger phenomenon: a dramatic demographic shift that has occurred over the past century. Whereas today more than 80 percent of the world s Jewish population is concentrated in the United States and Israel, 2 several decades ago this portion of the world s Jewish population was dispersed across regions in which they simply are no more. Gone are the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which were decimated during World War II. Empty stand the Jewish communal structures of the predominantly Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East since the Jews mass departure in the middle of the last century.
As Jewish life the way it once existed in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Poland, Ukraine, and other locales waned (and in some instances disappeared), anthropologists of Jews and Judaism set to work capturing and documenting it. Lloyd Cabot Briggs, for example, spent time living among the Jews in the Sahara Desert town of Ghardaia in the early 1960s, during the months leading up to their mass departure to France. 3 Barbara Myerhoff elicited narratives from elderly Jews in Venice, California, about their lives in Eastern Europe prior to World War II. 4 Irene Awret used the paintings of artist Rafael Uzan, along with the tales he told to accompany them, to record the contours of Jewish life in a small town in Tunisia prior to the Jews great migration in 1956. 5 Jonathan Boyarin and Jack Kugelmass translated yizker-bikher (memorial books compiled by refugees) to shed light on everyday life in the Polish Jewish communities that were destroyed during World War II. 6 And Joelle Bahloul returned to her hometown to interview the Muslim neighbors among whom her family lived, in her effort to document the dynamics of Jewish-Muslim relations in Algeria prior to the Jews leaving. 7 While this body of work (which includes many additional contributions) serves to preserve a record of Jewish life that is now gone, it also highlights what has been coined the diversities of diaspora : 8 the great range of Jewish experience, the malleability of Jewish cultural forms, and the religion s flexibility and dynamism.
Aspects of this book have been inspired by these same concerns. Like Lloyd Cabot Briggs, who frantically worked to capture Jewish life in Ghardaia just before the entire community fled, I traveled to Uzbekistan in the 1990s to document Jewish life in Central Asia before it disappeared in the wake of the Soviet Union s dissolution. I attended synagogue services and participated in life-cycle rituals, spent time cooking with women in their courtyards, joined families at holiday meals, attended Jewish youth-club events, and sat in on classes in Jewish schools. In this effort, I was driven not only by a desire to document Jewish life in Central Asia before it was too late, but also to gain insight into Judaism s adaptability. Along these lines, this book adds to the body of ethnographic literature that describes Judaism as an embodied religion that is articulated through practice and is organically connected to the cultures across the globe in which it has been embedded. This particular case study focuses on Judaism s interactions with the Islamic, Turko-Persian, and Soviet cultures of which it was a part in Central Asia. For readers familiar with Judaism only in its Western contexts, the Jewish practices described and analyzed here will read as lively, col