Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

4 Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land

In addition to recounting Avraham Ya‘ari’s story of Yosef Maman, the previous chapter narrated the journey of Ya‘ari’s tale from obscurity into mainstream literature. This meta-narrative suggests that Ya‘ari’s depiction of Maman became accepted as a definitive moment in Bukharan Jewish history due to factors other than its accuracy. Indeed, the sources invite alternative possibilities for portraying this past. While Walter Fischel and others did not accept these invitations, two historians did. Their stories, however, have largely fallen into oblivion. This chapter resuscitates them, providing another framework for understanding the Bukharan Jews’ past. These two histories—as well as the meta-story of how it was that they came to be eclipsed—also allow for a reexamination of the dynamics of Jewish diaspora history, writ large. A. Z. Idelsohn’s Fractured Presentation of Yosef’s Emissary Work A. Z. Idelsohn’s brief article on Bukharan Jews appeared in a Hebrewlanguage journal almost thirty years before Ya‘ari’s works were published .1 In this piece, Idelsohn recounts the whole of Bukharan Jewish history—from the Jews’ origins in Central Asia until the present—in just three pages. Toward the end of his summary, Idelsohn writes of two emissaries who had an impact on Jewish life there: Rabbi Yosef, who came from Iraq, settled in Bukhara, and taught the people Torah, and Yosef ben Moshe Maman from Tetuan,2 who arrived via Persia four Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land 58 Eighteenth-Century Conversations and convinced the Jews in Bukhara that they were descendants of Jews exiled from Spain in the fifteenth century.3 Ya‘ari later drew on the same travelogues that Idelsohn cites. However , he dismissed some of their data in order to create a single, seamless narrative. By contrast, these discrepancies posed no difficulty for Idelsohn; the reports differ from each other simply because they refer to different people. Moreover, while Idelsohn’s presentation of the past focuses on two emissaries in particular, his narrative does not limit the possibility that others may have arrived. In this depiction, in which emissary work is not carried out by a single individual who arrives at one moment in time, there is no revolutionary instant sandwiched between a distinct “before” and a moment “after.” Without such a turning point, the binary nature of Ya‘ari’s categories falls away. There is no clear-cut distinction between a period of atrophy and assimilation on the one hand, and a period of vibrant education and literacy on the other. Likewise , the distinction between the “isolated, marginal community” and “the center” is blurred. Idelsohn’s narrative, in short, suggests that the emissaries’ arrivals occurred within the context of a long-standing and complex relationship between the Jews of Bukhara, the Holy Land, and nearby Jewish communities. In this model, the definition and naming of the categories center and periphery are opened to contestation. What happened to Idelsohn’s account? Unlike Ya‘ari’s story, which journeyed from obscurity to popularity, this one has languished. It was published in the first volume of the journal Mizrah u-Ma‘arav (East and West), which was founded in Palestine in 1920 (shortly after Britain assumed control of the mandatory authority). At that time, the rate of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe had reached an all-time high and the political and cultural prominence of Palestine’s Sephardi and Mizrahi4 Jewish population, which had been the majority until 1880, was rapidly becoming eclipsed. The journal represented a scholarly effort to incorporate these Jewish groups into the story of the Jews’ nineteenthand early twentieth-century migration to and settlement in Palestine. It was one of the earliest works that aimed to give greater attention to communities that until then had been marginalized in this body of literature. In their introductory volume, the editors explain: “There are certain [Jewish] communities with very small populations . . . but the whole world nevertheless knows of their happenings. . . . On the other hand, 59 Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land there are some large, important communities but no one knows a thing about them because no scholar has arisen to save them [from oblivion]. . . . This is exactly what has happened to the Sephardim of North Africa and the [Jews] of the East. . . .”5 Mizrah u-Ma‘arav aimed to work toward undoing this imbalance in scholarship. The journal, however...