Judaism in Central Asia (c.500-present)

A stranger from the West enters the neglected synagogue of the once great city. The Jews here are many. By all accounts, Bukhara should be one of the great Jewish centers of the world. But after centuries of isolation, the people have forgotten their religion. There are no yeshivas, not even a rabbi among them. Instead, it will fall upon the stranger to rescue his fellow Jews from oblivion, eventually That is the famous story of how Yosef Mammon rediscovered the Jews of Bukhara, in Central Asia, and brought them back into the Jewish fold. And almost none of it is true. There have been many tales of how Jews first arrived in Central Asia, from being a lost tribe of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to envoys of Koresh the Great. But as far as can be told from contemporary evidence, the first permanent Jewish communities had arrived in the region by the late 4th century CE, in the great market city of Mariana. Following the Islamic conquests, Central Asia was revitalized as the midpoint of the Silk Road. And as trade increased with China's Tang Dynasty, so too did Jewish settlement, not only from Iran but from all over, even as far as the Caliphate of Cordoba. When Benjamin of Tudela went on his great journey across the Jewish world, he reported that Seljuk Persia was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, 256,000, a third of the Jewish population worldwide. But not all of those 256,000 lived within the borders of modern-day Iran. In fact, most of them lived in what are now Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. And in the centuries to come, these communities would transform into something else altogether– the largest Jewish community east of the Iranian Plateau. And in time, they would take a new name– the Bukharim. The gradual process by which Central Asia's Jews became distinct from those of Iran really began, as so much often does, with Timur the Lame and his imperial conquests. Now, in the previous video on Jews in Iran, I kinda glossed over Timur's relationship with Jews by saying he more or less let them be. But I was actually saving the juicy stuff for this video. Timur was born in Kesh, modern-day Shahr-e Sabz. That city had a small Jewish population, but more importantly, it was located on a branch of the Silk Road between the two biggest Jewish communities east of the Caspian– Samarkand and Bukhara. By Timur's time, the Silk Road had risen and fallen several times, first collapsing with the Tang Dynasty in the 10th century, and then again with the breakdown of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century. But in spite of these ups and downs, Jewish traders had never stopped moving goods between China and the West, bringing enormous wealth to Timur's own Chagatai Khanate, and further enriching the state through their work weaving and dyeing the silks brought in from the east. Even after conquering Iran, Timur kept Central Asia as the center of his empire. And after making Samarkand his capital in 1370, Jewish artisans were constantly moving in and out of the city, due to the emir's endless ambition for an ever-grander seat of power. Timur's rule brought Central Asian Jews together in such a way that they began to see each other as an edda, a regional community, distinct from other Persian Jews. But this transformation would reach a pivotal moment at the dawn of the 16th century. As the Timurid Empire collapsed and the Safavid dynasty began its conquest of the plateau, Muhammad Shaybani seized control over Timur's core domains to form the Khanate of Bukhara, from which Shaybani's Jewish subjects would henceforth take their name, as well as that of Bukhuri, the unique dialect of Persian spoken only by Jews in Central Asia. However, this was only the first of several cataclysmic shifts in both the Jewish world and the world at large that would cement the legacy of the Bukharim. At the very same time Shaybani was asserting Bukharan independence, a massive segment of the Jewish world had been expelled from Iberia, which had been the medieval epicenter of Jewish culture and thought, causing an unprecedented refugee crisis that would ultimately result in the publication of the Shulchan Aruch, a book which, quite unintentionally, established Sephardic legal theory as the standard for nearly the entire Jewish world. The Bukharim were among the few Jewish communities that didn't adopt the Shulchan Aruch, further distancing Bukharan Jewry from Persia. Although this can be attributed less to substantive intellectual disagreement with the concept of a universal halakhic standard, and more to Bukhara's growing isolation. Over the preceding centuries, Europeans had figured out how to design ships that were both large enough and fast enough to cross entire oceans. By the time of Bukharan independence, the Portuguese had already found a navigable route around Africa, meaning that it was now cheaper to move large volumes of goods between Asia and Europe by sea than by land, rendering the Silk Road obsolete for all-but-local trade. In Bukhara, there was a healthy enough regional market to keep the Silk Road going initially, but at the same time, the world was entering the Little Ice Age. Central Asia was hit particularly hard by desertification, resulting in population decreases that all-but-killed the Silk Road. Now, over the 19th and 20th centuries, Jewish historians tended to radically overstate the degree of isolation experienced by the Bukharim during this period. Silk Road or no, Bukhara remained an economic powerhouse for its silks and dyes. The Jewish community, while diminished, never lost touch with the wider world, nor did they forget Jewish law or the Hebrew language. In fact, it was during this period that the Great Synagogue of Bukhara was built. Before this, local authorities had upheld early medieval Muslim prohibitions against building new churches and synagogues, and Jews had thus shared the use of local mosques. What later sources would describe as the ignorance of the Bukharim was really only their failure to embrace the Shulchan Aruch, which… honestly says a lot. And the same can be said for their supposed rediscovery. Born in Morocco and educated in Safed, Rabbi Yosef Maman began traveling throughout the Jewish communities of the East in the early 1790s. Maman's original purpose in this journey may have been to collect funds to alleviate a famine in the Galilee, but after arriving in Bukhara, he apparently ingratiated himself so well to the community that he rose to become Chief Rabbi of the Emirate, a position from which he was able to finally bring the precedence of the Shulchan Aruch as far as the foothills of the Tian Shan. Now, however that may sound, Maman's actions weren't nearly as patronizing as his later acolytes made it sound. The Bukharim did not lose their identity. If anything, the 19th century would only set them further apart as one of the most distinct– and, I dare say, forward-thinking– edot in the Jewish world. In 1868, the Emirate of Bukhara was conquered by the Russian Empire, which caused some understandable fear among the Jews there. After conquering Poland in the late 18th century, the Russians had suddenly found themselves in possession of one of the world's largest Jewish communities. And I use the word possession very deliberately, because ever since then, the Russian government had implemented a series of onerous, coercive, and outright violent policies against its Jewish subjects, known collectively as Russification. I don't have time to get into the specifics in this video, but to put it simply, there was never a good time to be Jewish in the Russian Empire. Ever. Luckily for Bukharan Jews, they weren't in the Russian Empire. Bukharan resistance against the Russians had been fierce enough that Emperor Alexander II allowed Bukhara to remain as a semi-independent protectorate. So far from coming under the Russian boot, Bukharan Jews were now free to rebuild after decades of war, resulting in a cultural and political renaissance. During the war, a Jewish merchant named Moshe ben Eliyahu Abolha'ir had received the title of kalontar, or political leader, of the Emirate's Jewish population, enabling him to buy up land and build specialized Jewish neighborhoods in major cities known as mahalas. Unlike the ghettos of Europe, the mahalas were safe havens. Residents owned their homes. They could gather without fear of violence or forced conversion, which had been a huge problem during the war, and they could live as well as their financial means allowed. At the same time, Rabbi Shimon Chacham and Shlomo Musayef led a wave of Bukharan Jewish immigrants to Jerusalem, establishing the neighborhood of Habukharim in 1891, from which Bukharan culture became a major influence on the culture and especially the cuisine of modern Israel. But nothing lasts forever, and after a brief return to independence during the Russian Civil War, Bukhara was reorganized into the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and in 1926 was fully annexed into the Soviet Union. Initially, the Russian Revolution had been a moment of liberation for Jews in the former Russian Empire. But the rise of Yosef Stalin, whose ruthless purges and disdain for Jewish intellectuals would only intensify over the course of his 29-year reign, created a culture of fear that pervaded even the once-safe streets of Bukhara and Samarkand. Now, don't be fooled by the term Bukharan Jews. The term by this point had come to apply to all Central Asian Jews, over 18,000 of whom lived in Afghanistan, making that country an ideal destination for those fleeing the wrath of Stalin. But, and this always seems to happen, Afghani authorities became convinced that these refugees fleeing Stalinism were in fact agents of Stalinism. Beginning in 1932, Afghanistan closed its northern border, Of an estimated 60,000 refugees, 40,000 are reported to have died by 1935, either murdered in pogroms or having starved to death in Afghani custody or Soviet prison camps. By that time, even Afghani Jews were no longer welcome in their own country. In 1933, the new king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, revoked citizenship for all Jews, seized Jewish homes in the northern part of the country, and had them confined to ghettos in Herat and Kabul. Just as in neighboring Iran, Afghanistan's government developed close ties to Nazi Germany, which encouraged more restrictions against Jews. By 1938, Jews could only work as shoe polishers. Just as in Iran, Germany promised territorial concessions to Afghanistan if it joined the Axis. But unlike Iran, those territorial concessions were in British India, which Afghanistan would have to invade unassisted. That wasn't going to happen, so Afghanistan remained neutral, and policies against Jews were gradually relaxed, with the local population regaining Afghani citizenship by 1951. Back in the Soviet Union, the propaganda value of opposing the Holocaust put a pause to Stalin's anti-Semitic policies. And while those policies did resume after the Second World War, and did they ever, they soon came to an end with his death in 1953. While most Soviet Jews underwent a softer, more passive form of rucification in the coming decades, Bukharin Jews, located far away from the centers of population and power, held on to their cultural and religious traditions much more strongly. Beginning in the 1970s, Bukharin began defecting to Israel and the United States in large numbers, a trend that only increased after the implementation of glasnost in the 1980s. Today, more Bukharin Jews can be found in Queens, New York than in all of Central Asia, particularly the neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Rigo Park. I've never been, but I hear the food is excellent. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of New York's most celebrated Bukharins, Tony-winning actor Michael Aronoff. While both communism and Russian domination of Uzbekistan came to an end in 1991, the rise of hardline nationalist movements and civil wars in neighboring Tajikistan and Afghanistan only hastened the Jewish exodus from Central Asia. And on that note, it's time to tell the story that I assume you've all been waiting for. By 2001, pro-Nazi persecutions, the 1973 coup, civil war, the Soviet invasion, and the rise of the Taliban had reduced the Jewish population of Afghanistan from over 18,000 to two. Now, without getting too technical, Jewish society can't really function with only two people. Simintov had actually moved to Turkmenistan for a time in order to marry and have children, and he had to obtain special permission from a rabbi there to slaughter his own animals for kosher meat. After returning to Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Simintov was initially welcomed by Levin, but a dispute over the custodianship of Kabul's synagogue turned the two into bitter enemies, which resulted in both of them being routinely harassed and extorted by the Taliban. By the time of Levin's death in 2005, Afghanistan had come under a U.S.-led NATO occupation, and international programs for historic preservation and Jewish culture had invested heavily in restoring Jewish sites in the country. But when NATO withdrew in August 2021 and the Taliban returned, basically the entire Jewish world was wondering what would happen to Simintov. I certainly was. Before Kabul fell, Simintov had stated an intention to move to Israel, where his family had already been living for decades. But if he had done so, he likely would have been arrested for refusing to divorce his estranged wife. Following the Taliban takeover, he announced instead that he would remain in Afghanistan. But ultimately, he relocated to the U.S. on the 7th of September and finally divorced on the 28th, just as I was recording the narration for this video. It would seem that the history of Jews in Central Asia is genuinely coming to an end. But our story has not. For almost from the very start, one branch of Persian-speaking Jews had taken the Silk Road to its ultimate conclusion. And in the next episode, so shall we. Special thanks to my Patrons, including