Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York by Evan Rapport (review)

In Greeted with Smiles, Evan Rapport introduces the vibrant musical culture of a little-known community of Bukharian Jews, which in the last decade of the twentieth century joined the soundscape and ethnic medley of New York. Bukharian Jews, an offshoot of the Babylonian exile (that followed the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE), one of the "lost tribes," have inhabited Central Asia for more than two and a half millennia. The Bukharian Jews fit none of the three established Jewish communities—Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe, Mizrakhi from Arabic lands, and Sephardi, once from Iberia. Like Mizrakhi, Bukharian Jews for centuries have lived among a Muslim majority. But while Mizrakhi speak Arabic as a native language, Bukharian Jews speak Persian and/or Turkic. Although "Bukhara" refers to an old city in what is now Uzbekistan, the term identifies a small Jewish minority (1 percent of the Central Asian population according to Rapport) that resided in five former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan). Sharing Soviet twentieth-century history with their Ashkenazi brethren, Bukharian Jews also speak Russian, while remaining culturally different from European Jewry. Soviet policies promoted formal musical training as a channel for socialist ideology and discouraged religious practices, especially Jewish. Professional Bukharian Jewish musicians graduating from Soviet musical colleges and conservatories played maqom—a modal improvisation related to Arabic maqam, Iranian dastgah, and Azerbaijani mugham—on the concert stage and in mass media, holding their own religious practices underground. In the early1990s, the closing phase of the Soviet Union, the majority of Bukharian Jews immigrated to Israel and the United States.

Rapport writes the story of the recent Bukharian Jewish diaspora of New York through music. Exploring the musical genres, lyrics, and languages that define the rhythm of Bukharian performances, he places Bukharian Jewish music within Central Asian, Jewish, Soviet, and American contexts. Their classical tradition of maqomlinks Bukharian Jewry to Muslim culture in both the Central Asian and the wider Islamic belt of maqam. As a writer on Azerbaijani mughammyself, I particularly appreciate Rapport's discussion of modal system, education, and changes in Bukharian Jewish maqom.

As devout Jews, after the Soviet decades, Bukharians enjoy the freedom of religious expression in the United States. However, they find themselves in the midst of Jewish discourse on the necessity of a unified Jewish identity, on the one hand, and the long appreciation of Jewish pluralism/multiculturalism, on the other. Rapport shows how Bukharian Jews pursue what may seem contradictory goals of adopting established Jewish traditions—for example, their religious repertoire integrates Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions—while maintaining their own unique Jewish character. Preserved underground in Central Asia, religious traditions have undergone significant changes in the United States under "the competing pressures" of merging into a Jewish identity that at times does not coincide with Bukharian practices. (97) The religious traditions mediated between the Ashkenazi Orthodox community and Sephardim have transformed some historically significant elements of Bukharian religious practices, notably musical utterances of women, who used to partake in religious singing but now for the most part are denied the opportunity of singing in mixed-gender settings.

Rapport explores three musical repertoires central to the Bukharian Jewish identity: (1) classical maqom; (2) religious practices mediating between Jewish multicultural mosaics, Jewish unity, and their own ethnic/cultural preserved traditions; and (3) popular music performed at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and domestic gatherings.

While exploring the historical past of Bukharian Jewish community, Rapport, focusing on their American diasporic experiences, drives his reader through Queens, New York. The Queens Theater in the Park in 1999 witnessed a play about a historical master of maqom, Levicha Hafiz ("Levisha" is a diminutive of Levi; "hofiz," singer). The 1991 Smithsonian Folkways CD featuring the Bukharian Jewish ensemble identifies a specific place in...