Alanna E. Cooper’s book is the first scholarly monograph in English on Bukharan Jews, or those Jews who trace their heritage to Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, Dushanbe, and other Central Asian cities. Cooper’s research was conducted during the 1990s, during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mass migration of Bukharan Jews from their homes in Central Asia, making this a powerful document of Jewish life in communities that had a strong presence for over 1,000 years but are now virtually nonexistent. Throughout this engrossing volume, Cooper illustrates how the example of Bukharan Jews might spur a reconsideration of familiar approaches to large questions of Jewish history and narrative, Jewish identity, and internal dynamics among Jews.
In Part I, the introduction, Cooper describes her overarching concern: the different relationships between Bukharan Jews and their many Jewish “others.” These relationships are described in terms of competing paradigms of Jewish history and identity, with specific encounters between Bukharan and non-Bukharan Jews as examples of the “Center-Periphery paradigm,” with Bukharan Jews in a cyclical “lost and found” relationship to a normative Jewry, and the “Edah paradigm,” in which Bukharan Jews are one of many Jewish communities with their own history and authority. Her method is both historical and ethnographic, split nearly evenly between the historical discussions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century encounters, and eighteen months of field research providing the basis for descriptions of Bukharan Jewish life in the 1990s (the book has almost no information on events and circumstances following 2000).
Part II, Eighteenth-Century Conversations, focuses on the story of “Yosef Maman,” an emissary from Safed who arrives in Bukhara and, upon finding the Jews there in a particular state of decline and isolation, educates them back to Judaism. Piece by piece, Cooper brings us on her journey of discovering holes in this narrative and putting it back together. We learn that Maman is a composite of the historian Avraham Ya’ari, assembled from second-hand accounts of travelers. The narrative became taken for granted through repetition by other historians, and Cooper reframes Maman as a personification of the “Center-Periphery model” aimed at supporting a normative Judaism anchored by the Holy Land. She also discusses a crucial counternarrative from a Bukharan Jewish historian, Nissim Tagger, who instead presents Maman’s visit to Bukhara as a moment of contestation between the emissary and the local rabbinic authorities. Tagger writes, “Bukharan Jews were not cut off from the other [Jewish] diaspora groups, as some have claimed....There was never a break in their traditional and religious way of life” (61). Cooper’s juxtaposition of these two versions asks us to carefully consider what it means to portray a community as “isolated” and how ideologies can lead to historians’ errors.
In Part III, Nineteenth-Century Conversations, Cooper continues to define various models of Jewish Peoplehood through specific encounters involving Bukharan Jews and other Jews, this time at the end of the nineteenth century (and beginning of the twentieth century—nineteenth century is used loosely here) during the period of increasing Russian influence. Samarkand becomes a crucible for Bukharan Jews, containing both an old Jewish presence and new colonial culture. In chapter 6, “A Matter of Meat: Local and Global Religious Leaders in Conversation,” a 1904 controversy in Samarkand over dietary laws exemplifies another version of the Center-Periphery model in which, unlike the Maman story, no clear protagonist or “center” emerges. Instead, multiple rabbinical authorities from various centers (Bukhara, Palestine, Samarkand, Ashkenazic, Sephardic) debate on behalf the religious life of the community and its relation to global Jewry. In the following chapter, “Building a Neighborhood and Constructing Bukharan Jewish Identity,” Cooper describes a completely different framework: the “Edah paradigm” of Jews embracing the legitimacy of diaspora groups’ unique histories and traditions. She examines the Edah paradigm through the debates over organization and fundraising in the development of the Bukharan Quarter in Jerusalem. Cooper demonstrates how these conversations led to the construction of a “Bukharan Jewish” identity, and her discussion again raises crucial questions. How do such identites emerge? Who constitutes an “edah,” and who has the authority to decide this?
In Part IV, Twentieth-Century Conversations, Cooper shares the information gleaned from her field research in the 1990s. Focusing on the city of Samarkand, she provides enlightening information about Jewish customs during this period, including a wedding and a memorial service. She also documents dynamics in Samarkand between local Jews, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Chabad-Lubavitch. In chapter 10, “Varieties of Bukharan Jewishness,” the story of Dina (220–29), a woman with whom Cooper had a particularly strong relationship, is essential reading about the personal dilemmas accompanying the USSR’s dissolution: how Dina and her relatives considered emigration, her struggles studying abroad in Israel, the rush to emigrate to New York when the family learns that their visas cannot be renewed, her negotiating old and new courtship norms upon getting engaged, and the young couple’s difficulties in becoming pregnant.
As the title indicates, Cooper’s book is ambitious in scope. The work is remarkably successful overall, but her broad agenda reveals some gaps that require addressing. Cooper neglects substantive discussion of Bukharan Jews’ relations with their Muslim neighbors, although these interactions have defined Bukharian Jewry at least as much as the relationships between Bukharan and non-Bukharan Jews. Another lacuna is the absence of serious engagement regarding Bukharan Jews as a branch of Persian-speaking Jewry, despite her noting this important point (23); no sources in Persian languages appear in the bibliography, although it was the main Bukharan mother tongue through the twentieth century. These gaps surface in a few striking imbalances, as some historical details (such as Maman’s narrative and the 1904 dietary law controversy) are thoroughly dissected while others are treated too simply. For example, Cooper repeats the generalization that Safavid Iran meant that “ties were severed” between Iran and Central Asia, with Jews of those regions “unable to maintain contact” (23), but in fact migration and exchange between Iran and Central Asia were continuous if uneven. Similarly, Cooper writes “the cosmopolitan, global quality of the Bukharian Jewish community was short-lived” (139), ending in the 1920s, but those who are familiar with luminaries such as Gavriel Mullokandov, who toured throughout the USSR as a member of the Bukharian Jewish Theater in the 1930s, or Ilyos Mallayev, the poet and musician who toured globally from the 1950s through the 1980s, may disagree. These limitations would have been less of a factor with a more accurate representation of her sphere of research. (A final point: in the opening map, Samarkand is wrongly located on the border of Tajikistan due south of Tashkent, about 140 miles due ENE of Samarkand’s actual location.)
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[Review length: 1264 words • Review posted on March 1, 2015]