Bukharan Jews

Bukhara gave its name to a Jewish community whose historical reach extended well beyond that city, encompassing Samarkand, Tashkent, the Ferghana Valley, and other Central Asian centers.[2] Bukharan Jews form a branch of Persian Jewry, with historical communities concentrated in territories now belonging principally to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.[4] Their community is distinct from Central Asia’s Ashkenazi Jews, who arrived from other parts of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.[1][4]

The designation “Bukharan Jews” became established in the nineteenth-century setting of Russian expansion into Central Asia.[1][2] The Russian annexations of 1865–1873 brought Jews from the Bukharan emirate into Russian-administered territory, where the designation distinguished them from other Jewish populations.[1] Community members also used names including “Israel,” “Isro'il,” and “Yahudi,” while local Turkish-speaking populations used “Jugur.”[2][3] The emirate itself encompassed parts of present-day southern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan; the Soviet republics’ national boundaries were established during the 1920s and 1930s.[5]

Language, family organization, religious observance, and neighborhood life distinguished Bukharan Jewish society within the wider Soviet Jewish population.[4] Many families continued to inhabit Jewish quarters, or mahallas, and extended households organized around courtyards.[4] Bukhori preserved a Persian linguistic foundation alongside Hebrew vocabulary, while Russian became increasingly important through Soviet schooling and public life.[2][6]

Migration connected the community to Jerusalem well before the Soviet period and later established major centers in Israel and the United States.[3][6] Queens, New York, developed schools, synagogues, restaurants, a newspaper, and a museum serving Bukharan Jews.[7] In Uzbekistan, remaining communal life centers on Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand, with smaller groups in the Ferghana Valley and Andijan.[1]

A documented Jewish presence in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan reaches back to the fourth century C.E., and a large community in Samarkand is documented by the twelfth century.[1] Tenth-century Arabic accounts refer to substantial Jewish populations in Central Asia, while early eleventh-century references identify a significant community at Balkh.[2] Benjamin of Tudela’s account of Samarkand around 1170 also records a substantial Jewish community.[2]

The community’s culture developed through connections with other Jewish populations, including migrants from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Morocco who traveled through the Silk Road region.[8] Following the sixteenth-century destruction of Samarkand, Jews moved to Bukhara, which became a center of Central Asian Jewry.[2] Jewish communities also developed in Kattakurgan, Karshi, Shakhrisabz, Kokand, Margelan, and other cities.[1]

Under the Bukharan Khanate and emirate, Jews lived with diminished rights and restrictions on residence, clothing, commerce, and public behavior.[1][2] In Bukhara they were confined to a designated quarter, required to wear a distinguishing sign, and subjected to a special tax whose collection could include a humiliating slap.[2] Jewish shops had to be lower than Muslim shops.[2] An early-1860s traveler’s account also described requirements for a yellow patch and a conical, fur-trimmed sheepskin hat, together with prohibitions on riding horses or donkeys.[5]

Forced conversions to Islam occurred from the middle of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century.[2] Some converts maintained Jewish observance secretly and were known as chala, a term glossed as “neither this nor that.”[2] Under Soviet classifications that emphasized ethnicity rather than religion, some chala publicly identified again as Jews, while others retained Muslim religious affiliation and Uzbek or Tajik identities.[2] Eighteenth-century persecution and conversion pressures severely reduced the community’s population.[8]

Rabbi Joseph Maman Maghribi, a Moroccan Sephardic Jew associated with Safed, arrived in Bukhara in 1793 and remained for approximately thirty years.[3] His activities included introducing Sephardic prayer traditions, recruiting religious teachers from Europe, and encouraging migration to the Land of Israel.[3] Sephardic liturgy became an important component of Bukharan Jewish religious life.[2] Chabad rabbis subsequently influenced the community during the nineteenth century and again after the Soviet period.[5]

Community institutions expanded during the nineteenth century as additional Jewish quarters developed, including New Makhalla and Amirabad in Bukhara.[2] A communal leader known as the kalontar was selected from respected members.[2] Jewish schools called khomlo operated, while restrictions on synagogue construction sometimes led families to hold services in wealthy households.[3] Samarkand’s Jewish residential quarter was established in 1843, when the city remained within the Bukharan kingdom.[9]

Russian expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century changed the community’s political and economic circumstances.[2] Many Bukharan Jews welcomed Russian occupation because the new authorities initially imposed fewer discriminatory policies, and some moved from Bukhara to Russian-administered Samarkand and Tashkent.[2] Discriminatory edicts were canceled in annexed territories.[1] Later Russian restrictions differentiated Jews regarded as native residents from those who had arrived after the occupation, although these limitations were rarely enforced in practice.[2]

Railroads and the telegraph opened commercial opportunities and helped produce a wealthy, widely traveled merchant class with business connections extending from China to France and England.[6] The Trans-Caspian railroad, constructed between 1880 and 1905, connected Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent, facilitated contact with European Jews, and made travel to the Land of Israel easier.[3] Some Jewish families accumulated substantial wealth, exemplified by merchant Mirza Davud’s courtyard mansion, built in Bukhara in 1886 and later used as a restaurant.[5] Jewish cotton-industry entrepreneurs included the Vadyaev brothers, whose fortunes were taken after the Bolsheviks came to power.[10]

Bukharan Jews began moving to the Land of Israel in the middle of the nineteenth century, with further waves reaching Jerusalem in the 1870s and 1880s.[8][11] By 1889, Jerusalem’s Bukharan community numbered approximately 200 and had organized the Zion Society of the Holy Community of Bukhara and Its Surroundings to develop a new neighborhood.[11] The residential initiative took shape around 1890, and in 1891 the community purchased 65 dunams west of Beit Yisrael.[6][11] Named Rehovot, meaning “wide spaces,” the neighborhood was planned with broad, grid-pattern streets, planting areas, and large courtyard houses.[11]

The Moussaieff Synagogue, completed in 1894, was the quarter’s first structure and contained ten prayer rooms.[11] Rabbis Yosef Kojainov and Shlomo Moussaieff oversaw development, whose plan included 300 housing units.[11] Wealthy Bukharan families built summer residences for visits between Passover and Shavuot.[11] Other buildings included the Moussaieff Hammam, built in 1900, the Davidoff House, later used by the Hebrew Gymnasium, and the five-dunam Moussaieff House, later occupied by Kamenitz Yeshiva.[11]

By 1914, approximately eight percent of Bukhara-born Jews had moved to Rehovot or Jerusalem’s Bukharan Quarter, and an early aliyah movement involving about 1,500 people continued until the outbreak of the First World War.[3] The war disrupted Jerusalem’s community through Ottoman military conscription, interrupted financial connections with Bukhara, and the departure of wealthy residents.[11] Afterward, large houses were subdivided and rented largely to poorer Kurdish and North African Jewish families.[11] Educational institutions suffered financially, and Rabbi Yisrael Porat enlisted Rabbi Moshe Porush to assist their revival.[11]

Soviet rule brought campaigns against religious institutions beginning in the second half of the 1920s.[2] Synagogues and religious schools were targeted for closure, although enforcement eased temporarily during the Second World War.[2] Early Soviet cultural initiatives produced textbooks, newspapers, poetry, and theater in the community’s language, but the Samarkand Jewish theater established in 1932 was subsequently closed.[2][6] Bukharan Jewish schools closed, and publication in the Jewish dialect of Tajik ceased in 1940.[2]

Authorities also attempted to move Jews into collective agriculture.[3] One estimate places the number of Jewish collective farms established in Uzbekistan by 1929 at 26, with only two farming communities remaining by the 1950s.[3] Many projects broke up quickly, in part because land allocated to Jews was unsuitable for agriculture.[2] Despite restrictions on departure, approximately 4,000 Bukharan Jews emigrated to the Land of Israel during the 1920s and early 1930s.[2]

During the Second World War, more than one million Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied eastern Europe passed through Uzbekistan, a regional wartime movement rather than a count of Bukharan Jews.[1] Many Ashkenazi newcomers arrived after fleeing or being evacuated from European parts of the Soviet Union.[4] These arrivals added another Jewish population with linguistic and social patterns distinct from those of established Bukharan communities.[4]

Approximately 10,000 Jews emigrated from Uzbekistan to Israel during the 1970s.[1] Departures accelerated as borders reopened in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.[6] Economic disruption, weakened welfare systems, job losses, exclusion from universities and nation-building projects, and minority status encouraged emigration; civil war made circumstances particularly precarious in Tajikistan.[6] Nationalist riots in May 1990 significantly damaged Andijan’s Jewish quarter.[1]

More than 80,000 Jews overall left Uzbekistan during the mass emigration of the late 1980s and early 1990s, chiefly for Israel and the United States, with smaller groups choosing Russia, Austria, and Germany.[1] Before 1991, approximately 45,000 Bukharan Jews lived in the former Soviet Union, overwhelmingly in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.[4] A separate estimate suggested that by 1993 about half of the region’s 50,000 Jews had departed.[6] Samarkand’s Jewish quarter subsequently lost its Jewish residential population, and physical markers of Jewish history gradually eroded.[9]

Bukhori, also called Judeo-Tajik or Bukharian, is a Jewish variety of Central Asian Persian closely related to Tajik, with Hebrew vocabulary and distinctive grammatical and phonetic features.[2][12] It was the community’s principal spoken language before the late nineteenth century, while Russian became a major language of schooling under Soviet rule.[6] A 2024 estimate placed the number of Bukhori speakers at approximately 50,000, including speakers in Central Asia, Israel, and Queens.[13]

Traditionally written in Hebrew characters, Bukhori was subjected to Soviet script reforms, with a Latin alphabet used from 1929 to 1940 and Cyrillic also entering use.[2][13] Publishing in Bukhori was banned in 1940.[13] Russian use varied between households and cities; one account of a Tashkent family describes Russian as prominent, while relatives elsewhere used Bukharian Persian as frequently as Russian.[12] In Samarkand’s 1979 census returns, 17.3 percent of Bukharan Jews declared Russian their mother tongue, compared with 89.8 percent of Ashkenazi Jews.[4]

Bukharan Jewish literature included Persian-language works written in Hebrew script and verse retellings of narratives concerning Purim, Hanukkah, Joshua’s conquest, and Moses.[6] An early twentieth-century literary revival developed partly in Jerusalem.[6] There, Shimon Hakhama inspired a literary circle that published approximately 100 books in the Bukharo-Jewish dialect.[2] The biweekly Raḥamim, published in Fergana, was the first Judeo-Tajik newspaper; surviving holdings cover May 27, 1910, to July 16, 1914, and comprise 306 issues totaling 756 pages.[14]

Bukharan Jews preserved religious practice despite Soviet pressure, including ritual slaughter, major Jewish holidays, and widespread religious circumcision.[1][4] Anti-religious campaigns were implemented less harshly in Central Asia than in some other Soviet regions, enabling continued observance through much of the Soviet period.[4] Domestic ceremonies sometimes proceeded without prayer books or instructional guides.[6] Religious weddings might take place privately, often late at night, after the civil ceremony.[6]

Civil registration and religious marriage remained separate stages in family formation.[4] Couples might register at the state ZAGS office and celebrate with relatives but continue living separately until a rabbi performed their religious wedding several days later.[4] Extended families often lived patrilocally in multi-unit courtyard houses, with married sons remaining within the paternal household.[4] Historical estimates for Tashkent in 1962 placed marriage to non-Jews at 7.7 percent among Bukharan Jews and 33.7 percent among Ashkenazi Jews.[4]

Anthropologist Alanna E. Cooper describes traditional marriage as a joining of families, with brides moving into the groom’s parents’ home and raising children under their mothers-in-law’s supervision.[15] She writes that arranged marriages remained common in the Central Asian setting she studied and that couples often had little opportunity for courtship before marriage.[15] Her account identifies tensions between these expectations and American ideals of romantic partnership among immigrants.[15]

Yushvo is a distinctive mourning custom accompanying the seven-day shiva period.[6] It combines a multi-course meal of symbolic foods with eulogies, mourning songs, and prayers.[6] Gatherings occur each evening during shiva and recur at intervals during the first year of mourning.[6] A reported Passover custom has spouses serve each other the first of the seder’s four cups of wine while exchanging personal greetings and wishes.[10]

In an account of Bukharan Sukkot observance, Michael Freund describes willow branches used as sechach and wreaths of willow and wildflowers placed at the sukkah entrance.[16] He notes that a photograph taken in Samarkand in 1902 depicts such a sukkah.[16] Another reported penitential custom involved men receiving lashes in a synagogue courtyard before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur while reciting a Hebrew blessing printed in Cyrillic characters; participation and the force of the blows diminished over time.[17]

Crafts and trade were central to historical livelihoods, especially textile production, dyeing, and weaving along Silk Road routes.[3] Male yarn dyers included indigo specialists called kabudgar and other color dyers called rangborchi.[2] Men also worked as jewelers and tailors, while women’s occupations included cooking, laundering, bread selling, and wedding dancing.[2] Bukharan Jews were especially associated with dyeing and trading ikat, silk woven from threads patterned through dyeing before weaving.[18]

Dyeing was regarded as a low-status craft because it stained workers’ hands, although the resulting textiles could be used in brilliant coat linings.[18] Garments such as the kaltachak might contain vivid ikat, whereas mourning cloaks avoided bright colors.[18] Embroidered caftans and golden-tassel caps were characteristic cultural forms.[6] A men’s holiday garment, the jumah, is described as a colorful plaid robe woven with gold thread.[10]

Jewish musicians in Uzbekistan perform Uzbek folk music and shashmaqam, the classical Central Asian musical tradition.[1] Bukharan cuisine features rice, vegetables, long-simmered stews, soups, fried dishes, and meat, particularly chicken and beef.[19] Traditional ingredients also include mutton, fruit, flour products, and dairy, with meat and dairy separated according to Jewish dietary law.[2] Persian and Iraqi cooking contributed to the cuisine, alongside influences identified from Italian and Chinese food traditions.[19] Hospitality and food occupy an important place in community life.[19]

Jerusalem’s surviving Bukharan Quarter embodies a connection to the Land of Israel established generations before the mass departures of the late Soviet period.[8][11] Its architecture combined Central Asian and Western European influences.[6] During the latter half of the twentieth century, many Bukharan residents moved to newer neighborhoods while haredi residents increasingly settled in the quarter.[11] Municipal rehabilitation began in 1968, and the neighborhood joined Project Renewal in 1979.[11]

Later Bukharan immigrants settled across Israel, including Jerusalem, Petah Tikva, Holon, Bat Yam, Ramla-Lod, Or Yehuda, Kiryat Malakhi, and southern Tel Aviv neighborhoods.[19] Community-leader and press estimates reported in 2020 placed the population at approximately 125,000 in Israel and 75,000 in the United States.[6] These figures describe the two principal diaspora centers created by successive migrations from Central Asia.[6]

New York received a small stream of Bukharan immigrants beginning in the early 1970s and a much larger influx after the Soviet Union’s collapse.[7] In 2017, community leaders estimated that approximately 50,000 Bukharan Jews lived in Queens.[7] The community had schools, restaurants, a museum, a newspaper, and a cemetery, while one leader described growth from a single synagogue thirty years earlier to forty.[7] Many immigrants came from Uzbekistan, including families originally from Bukhara.[7]

Bukharan Jews in the United States often favored Orthodox synagogues while maintaining levels of observance that were not uniformly strictly Orthodox.[7] Community concerns included preserving Central Asian customs, meeting Jewish day-school costs, and retaining young people’s involvement.[7] Lev Leviev financed Bukharan schools, including Ohr Avner in Elmhurst, which opened in 2002.[10] The Russian-language weekly Bukharian Times provided another communal institution.[10]

Young Bukharan Jews in Queens organized a Queens College Hillel club and an annual Bukharian Night featuring traditional food, dancing, and music combining American, Russian, and Uzbek styles.[20] Cultural ties with Iranian Jews reflected the communities’ related linguistic backgrounds.[20] In Vienna, hundreds of Bukharan Jews settled during the 1970s, and community members later became prominent in kosher food and catering.[10] Extended-family assistance, including interest-free loans, remained a reported feature of communal economic life.[10]

In Uzbekistan, traditional mahallas survive in some cities, and Jewish cultural centers operate in Tashkent and Bukhara.[1] Communal institutions include the monthly Russian-Jewish publication Shofar and Jewish day schools in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent.[1] The first legal Jewish secular organizations in the region emerged between 1988 and 1999.[1] Continuing emigration has been associated with economic difficulties and government Uzbekization policies.[1]

A 2018 estimate based on community accounts put Uzbekistan’s total Jewish population below 10,000, including approximately 6,000 Ashkenazi Jews and fewer than 2,000 Bukharan Jews.[21] Bukharan residents were concentrated in Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, and the Ferghana Valley.[21] The same reporting identified a shortage of rabbis: the Ministry of Justice had accredited one Bukharan rabbi in 2014 and none afterward through the report’s coverage period.[21] Community members regarded the shortage as a constraint on religious practice, religious interest, and communal growth.[21]

Bukhara’s two synagogues have coordinated their schedules so that the remaining worshippers can assemble a prayer quorum in at least one.[5][10] A 2016 description recorded lengthy Shabbat services while congregants waited for others to arrive, and elderly women moving downstairs because the balcony stairs had become difficult.[10] By 2025, local institutions included a Jewish National Cultural Center, charitable activities, a burial society, and services supplied by a rabbi based in Tashkent, including kosher slaughter.[5]

Local Muslims maintain Bukhara’s Jewish cemetery with financial assistance from the Bukharan diaspora.[5] A school in the old Jewish quarter teaches Hebrew and Jewish tradition to Muslim children as well as its small Jewish enrollment.[22] A 2025 account described 400 pupils, including fourteen Bukharan Jewish children, studying in a school offering Hebrew, Jewish history, and tradition.[23] Community preservation efforts also assist visiting relatives from abroad in locating family graves.[23]

Samarkand’s remaining community has likewise become small and elderly.[22] A 2023 account estimated approximately 140 Jewish residents and described a surviving synagogue where Jewish events occurred mainly on holidays or when Israeli groups visited.[22] Many former residents had settled in the United States, Austria, Germany, and Israel.[22] Samarkand’s Gumbaz synagogue has also been identified with a Bukharan rabbi affiliated with Chabad.[1]

Material records preserve the community’s religious and social history beyond its former neighborhoods.[8][24] A late-nineteenth-century Bukhara-made Mizrach poster indicates east, the direction of prayer toward Jerusalem, and depicts the Western Wall, worshippers, the Ten Commandments, Aaron before the Menorah, the Binding of Isaac, and Moses holding the tablets.[8] Its central sun illustration contains Psalm 113:3: “From the rising of the sun until its setting, the name of the Lord is praised.”[8]

An archive covering 1882–1992 preserves letters, community registers, marriage contracts, charms, manuscript fragments, and photographs from the Bukharan-Jewish Museum in Samarkand.[24] Its catalog includes Russian, Hebrew, and Judeo-Persian materials.[24] Together with Bukhori newspapers and Jerusalem’s surviving buildings, these collections retain records of communal institutions, family life, and religious expression across Central Asia and the diaspora.[11][24]

Traditions trace Bukharan Jewish origins to the Assyrian exile and Lost Tribes, the Babylonian exile, or the reign of Cyrus, but these accounts do not establish a verified ancient settlement date.[3][8] Published historical accounts distinguish early Jewish presence from evidence of continuous settlement, which some place securely by the eighth or ninth century C.E.[3] Archaeological material invoked to support a second-century B.C.E. arrival has instead been dated to the sixth–eighth centuries C.E., and the cited review states that no ancient synagogue has been discovered in the region.[25]

The portrayal of Rabbi Joseph Maman as rescuing a community that had forgotten basic Judaism has also been challenged.[6] Recent scholarship and Bukharan Jewish historians question this narrative as a legend that can delegitimize local religious traditions, instead placing his arrival within continuing Jewish movement between eastern and western communities.[6] The timing and origin of the name “Bukharan Jews” are likewise debated, including whether late-nineteenth-century travelers popularized it.[4]

Post-Soviet religious renewal brought differing definitions of Jewish identity into contact.[4] A late-1990s study distinguished Uzbek state nationality, Israeli legal identity, and Orthodox religious identity, each involving different descent criteria.[4] Local understandings often treated nationality as inherited through the father, whereas Orthodox religious authorities applied matrilineal criteria.[4] One case involved Sasha, the son of a Bukharan Jewish father and non-Jewish Russian mother, whom family and local state definitions treated as Jewish but whose wedding a Chabad rabbi would not conduct without conversion.[4]

Population estimates require particular care because dates, geographic scope, and definitions differ, and many figures count all Jews rather than Bukharan Jews specifically.[1][6] Published Uzbekistan totals include a 2018 estimate of 3,200 Jews alongside another figure of approximately 13,000, including about 3,000 Bukharan Jews.[1] Estimates of Bukhara’s remaining population also distinguish census totals from local estimates of residents and practicing Jews.[5] These figures cannot be combined into a single consistent current count.[1][5]

Jerusalem’s Bukharan Quarter experienced significant tensions over its changing religious character, including reported harassment, vandalism, violence, and disruption of Shabbat soccer games during the 1980s.[11] Later conservation efforts also encountered ownership disputes.[11] These neighborhood conflicts form a separate chapter from the community’s broader migration and cultural history.[11]