Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

8 Local Jewish Forms

The cosmopolitan, global quality of the Bukharan Jewish community was short-lived. In the 1920s the Soviets dismantled the remaining vestige of the Bukharan emirate, cut through the old borders, carved new ones, and incorporated the region into the USSR. Where the emirate once stood, two new political entities were created: the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. For the Jews of the region, this new geopolitical landscape meant a sudden severing of their international ties. Under Soviet rule, their movement became highly restricted, bringing an end to their participation in social, religious, and mercantile networks that had stretched between Central Asia, Europe, and Palestine. Those who remained in Central Asia were no longer able to travel out, and religious emissaries from abroad were no longer permitted to enter. Tight control on human traffic extended to the flow of information as well. Just as people were forbidden from crossing the borders, so, too, was the written word. Letters were monitored and censored, and religious texts printed elsewhere in the Jewish world were not permitted entry. The severance of these transnational connections brought an abrupt end to the religious conversations in which Central Asia’s Jews had been engaged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the communist assault on religion made it difficult to teach, discuss, or practice religion in any open, public forum. Bukharan Jews did continue to engage in Jewish practice and to maintain a strong sense of Jewish identity despite their isolation from Jewish communities in other parts eight Local Jewish Forms 140 Twentieth-Century Conversations of the world, and regardless of having to practice in relative secrecy. Yet, over the course of the next seventy years of Soviet rule, their religion took on a localized form. This characterization refers to two qualities: first, the idiosyncrasies that emerged and were elaborated upon as a result of Judaism’s interactions with the particular non-Jewish world in which it was embedded. These forms became pronounced during the Soviet period because they were not tempered by interactions with Jewish communities outside the region. Second, the characterization of religious life as “localized” refers to the way in which Judaism was experienced in Central Asia during Soviet rule. As a result of going underground (to evade the authorities), people came to experience Judaism as intimately connected to local community life, with little sense of it as linked to an abstract, global religious system. Both these aspects of localization are addressed in this chapter. They set the stage for chapter 9, which returns to the Center-Periphery Paradigm to analyze encounters between Central Asia’s Bukharan Jews and representatives of international Jewish organizations who arrived in the region when the Soviet Union dissolved. Religion in Central Asia during the Soviet Period When the Soviet Union formed, peoples of vastly different cultural backgrounds who populated a massive swath of varied social and geographical terrain, which stretched from Eastern Europe to the borders of China and Afghanistan, were incorporated into a single empire. A variety of policies were instituted in an effort to unite these disparate peoples and places into a single classless society, and to realize a vision of a “new, thoroughly rational Homo Sovieticus.”1 Among them were policies directed at the eradication of religion, which was viewed as a primitive vestige of the past and a regressive social force. In Central Asia, campaigns were primarily targeted against Islam, the dominant religion in the region.2 In some periods, antireligious policies were particularly harsh: religious courts and schools were shut down, prayer services in mosques were banned, and members of the clergy were denounced as “exploiters, criminals and corrupters of moral values.”3 In other periods, greater leniencies allowed for the practice and transmission of religion. For example, during World War II, when “Muslim support for the Soviet state became a matter of vital interest to the party,”4 141 Local Jewish Forms some religious educational institutions were opened and permitted to operate . Their numbers, however, were limited, and those that were allowed to function were monitored and closely supervised under the auspices of state-sponsored “Spiritual Directorates.”5 While Jews constituted a tiny minority of the Central Asian population ,6 policies designed to bring about the demise of religion in the region were applied to them as well. Synagogues were closed and religious schools for children were banned, as were institutions for the training...