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11. Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan
- University Press of Florida
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11 Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan Alanna E. Cooper On a chilly evening in the late winter of 1997, Essya Yitzchakov1 and her children spent their last hours in the Jewish quarter of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, sitting on the floor, surrounded by the boxes and bundles they would bring with them to the United States. Only one small table remained in the cavernous space that was once home. Still, when I arrived to bid them farewell, Essya extended her hospitality in warm Central Asian fashion. “Have some tea,” she said, gesturing for me to enter. When the pot was emptied, she tucked it into a carton and proceeded to wipe down the tablecloth; the last bit of cleaning she would do in this house. Moments later, a van pulled up. Misha, Essya’s son, swung open the iron gates and began working with his sisters to load their belongings. Essya stood watching. Absent was her husband, Ilya, who had passed away a year before and whom she was leaving behind in Samarkand’s cemetery. When the contents of the house were all crammed into the van, the family members hovered by the door of the vehicle, unable to bring themselves to step inside. Essya caught sight of her daughter’s tears. “These are all my things I am leaving behind here,” she snapped. “You, though, will find a rich smart husband there in America. You do not cry!”—a painful articulation of the rupture between the Bukharan Jews’ millennia-long past in Central Asia and their future lives, scattered in distant lands. 200 · Alanna E. Cooper The Yitzchakovs are just one family, but they are among the many thousands who have left Central Asia, where Bukharan Jews have made their homes for centuries. I begin with the details of their leaving because it is an aspect of the story of the Jews’ recent migration from Uzbekistan that is largely absent in both scholarly as well as popular reports. While much media attention has been given to the Bukharan Jews’ migration from their Central Asian homes, it has mostly been portrayed as a flight, in which little consideration has been given to what these immigrants have left behind. Likewise, in the popular portrayal of their en masse departure as an escape—rather than as a choice—the various factors people weighed when making the difficult decision to leave are absent. This essay is meant to begin to fill in these blanks. It is not only an effort to tell the story of the end of the Jewish community in this particular corner of the world, but also to suggest an approach that might be used to tell the story of the mid-twentieth-century mass migration of Jews from Muslim lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Background: History and Culture of Central Asia’s Jews The Jews’ migration at the turn of the last century can only be understood in the context of their long history in the region. While little information is available about how and when Jews appeared in Central Asia, the data available suggests that the first to arrive were among those who were exiled—or whose ancestors were exiled—from the land of Israel in 586 bce at the hands of the Babylonians. They were among those who moved eastward, probably as merchants along trade routes spreading out from Babylonia (contemporary Iraq) into the territory that is today Iran.2 They moved further east to Afghanistan and to the fertile river valleys and oases of present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This area, classically called Transoxiana, was controlled by various Turkic and Persian empires for centuries.3 The Jews who settled there spoke Persian and were closely connected to other Jews in the Persian sphere of influence (such as those in the territories that would become modern Iran and Afghanistan). The Jews of Transoxiana also shared much in common with their neighbors. Unlike the Turkic nomadic peoples who lived in the area that would become present-day Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, the people among whom the Jews lived spoke Persian and were sedentary inhabitants of Transoxiana’s urban centers. [3.94.77.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:03 GMT) Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 201 By the late fifteenth century, Uzbek dynasts (settled people of Turkic lineage) conquered the land and divided it into loosely governed territories called “khanates” or “emirates.” The Jews...