Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 201By the late fifteenth century, Uzbek dynasts (settled people of Turkic
lineage) conquered the land and divided it into loosely governed terri-
tories called “khanates” or “emirates.” The Jews of the region clustered
primarily in the Bukharan Khanate, where the cosmopolitan silk-route
cities Samarkand and Bukhara were located. Although these Jews were
still closely identified with the Persian-speaking Jewish population of
the larger geographical region, it was the emergence of the Bukharan
Khanate that set in motion the formation of their separate identity as
“Bukharan Jews.”
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Russians began coloniz-
ing the area, taking control of large parts of the khanates’ territories. In
1920, when the Soviets incorporated the region into the USSR, they faced
little local resistance, as the khanates’ boundaries had not coincided with
existing linguistic or ethnic borders.
With no sense of national (or even proto-national) identity in the re-
gion, the Jews were not viewed as foreign inhabitants. Rather, their inclu-
sion in and exclusion from the population among whom they lived was
derived from two other aspects of the region’s social patterns. The first
was linked to the dynamic between the sedentary and nomadic peoples,
and the second was related to the fact that unlike the majority of non-
Slavic people in Central Asia, they were not Muslim.
The Jews were sedentary like most others who lived in the khanates’
urban centers. Among these sedentary peoples, however, a distinction
was drawn between the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. The Tajiks, who were of
Persian stock, had always lived in the settled areas, whereas the Uzbeks,
who were of Turkic stock and were descendants of the region’s nomadic
conquerors, had become sedentary over time. Despite these differences,
contemporary scholars posit that these identities were not significant
boundary markers. Neither Tajik identity nor Uzbek identity was strong
enough to unify groups in a call for special rights or distinct sovereign
territories. Nineteenth-century travelers note that Uzbeks and Tajiks lived
side by side, they did not distinguish themselves with much “precision,
consistency or linguistic significance,” nor did they have distinct cultural
traditions.^4 Indeed, vis-à-vis the Kyrgyz, Turkomen, and Kazakhs, who
were still largely nomadic, the Uzbeks and Tajiks shared a strong sense
of commonality. So, while terms “Uzbek” and “Tajik” did carry some
historical value for the people who asserted these identities, their shared
culture, which set them off from neighboring nomadic groups, more