Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

2 Writing Bukharan Jewish History: Memory, Authority, and Peoplehood

Geographical and Temporal Boundaries On my first day of teaching at Torah Academy, before I knew that my students were immigrants from Soviet Central Asia, I looked at the many faces in my classroom, and was perplexed. Noticing that most had olive skin, deep-brown eyes, and dark hair, I wondered why they looked so different from the fair-skinned Soviet Jews I had seen in pictures. Glancing over the attendance list, I was puzzled further. As I stumbled through the roster of names, most of which I had never heard—Mullokandov , Abdurakhmanov, Illyayev, Shalamayev—my students corrected me and snickered among themselves in a language that did not sound anything like Russian. To gain some insight into my students’ backgrounds, I had them fill out cards telling me how long they had been in the country and where they had come from. I learned that most of them had immigrated within the past two years, and that they were from cities that had names with which I was largely unfamiliar: Tashkent, Dushanbe, Novaii, Andijan , Namangan, Bukhara, and Samarkand. Studying an atlas, I found that they were all located in the newly independent states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which until 1991 had been republics within the Soviet Union. When I spoke with my students further about their origins, I learned that they did not call themselves “Uzbeki Jews” or “Tajiki Jews.” This, in fact, came as no surprise, as I knew from my exposure to the refusenik two Writing Bukharan Jewish History: Memory, Authority, and Peoplehood 16 Introduction movement that Soviet Jews were marked as outsiders on their identity documents. Rather than being labeled “Russian” or “Ukrainian,” for example , the Soviets identified them as “Jews,” regardless of the republic in which they were born. What was surprising to me, though, was that no matter which city they were from, they referred to themselves as “Bukharan Jews.” Why they used this label and what exactly it meant to be a Bukharan Jew was not clear to me, and when I asked them about it, I got no simple response. My students, all recent immigrants to Queens, New York, tended to speak in a certain characteristic way about what it meant to be a Bukharan Jew. However, as I learned more about the Bukharan Jews living in Queens, I found that among this community of some 30,000 people were several thousand who had immigrated in the 1970s (when there had been a slight ease of migration restrictions from the USSR). Furthermore, there was another small group of people who had immigrated (or whose parents had) in the 1920s, just as Central Asia was being incorporated into the vast Soviet Empire. Each of these immigrant groups had a different way of explaining why they were called “Bukharan Jews” and each had different ways of characterizing the essential features of “Bukharan Jewishness.” For example, those who had left Central Asia in the 1920s pointed out that many of the recent immigrants had abandoned “traditional” Bukharan Jewish culture as a result of their exposure to three generations of Soviet atheist, communist policy. The newcomers, on the other hand, spoke about the culture of Bukharan Jewish old-timers as having been spoiled by the Western, American values that they had adopted. The question of what Bukharan Jewishness is all about, and who might be considered most representative of the Bukharan Jewish population became more complicated when I considered the variations among those who had lived in different areas of Soviet Central Asia: those who immigrated from the city Bukhara itself, versus those who came from other cities and towns; those who immigrated from cities that had been strongly influenced by Russian culture, such as Uzbekistan’s cosmopolitan capital, Tashkent, versus those who came from small towns on the margins of the Soviet sphere of influence; those who immigrated from Uzbekistan where the national language is Uzbek (a Turkic language, which the Jews generally did not use), versus those who came from Ta- 17 Writing Bukharan Jewish History jikistan, where the national language is Tajik (a Persian language, which the Jews spoke). The problem became knottier still when I left New York to go to Israel to conduct further research among immigrants, and then to Uzbekistan to seek out those who still remained there. As I accumulated many different, and often contradictory, descriptions of Bukharan Jewish culture, history, values, and identity, the task of...