The Divergence of Judaism and Islam. Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil

Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 221

to the forces of exile or expulsion, but also as active agents, navigating
a new political stage and making decisions about how to contend with
difficult transformations.
Finally, an honest ethnographic approach also makes a serious attempt
to separate the worldview of the researcher and author from that of the
people whom she or he is studying. The narrative of the Bukharan Jews’
mass migration from Uzbekistan that has appeared in the English-lan-
guage press has been largely informed by Western fears of Islamic fun-
damentalism. Likewise, the narrative of the Jews’ mass migration from
North African and the Middle East has been largely informed by politi-
cally charged concerns about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The analysis in this
chapter is an attempt to focus, instead, on the views and understandings
of those people who were themselves making migration decisions. This
approach depicts the mass migration as a nuanced process that mirrors
the complex space the Jews occupied in Muslim lands, as individuals
who were marginalized in certain respects but who were also deeply in-
vested and tied to the people and lands in which they lived.

Notes

1. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of all individuals.


2. Mikhael Zand, “Bukharan Jews,” Encyclopedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yar-Shater
   (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), 4:531.


3. Transoxiana was bound in the south by the Persian province of Khorasan
   and by the Amu Darya (in ancient times called the Oxus River) and in the north
   by the Syr Darya (in ancient times called the Jaxartes River).


4. Sergei Abashin, “The Transformation of Ethnic Identity in Central Asia:
   A Case Study of the Uzbeks and Tajiks,” Russian Regional Perspectives Journal 1,
   no. 2 (2003): 32–33; Seymour Becker, “National Consciousness and the Politics
   of the Bukhara People’s Conciliar Republic,” in Edward Allworth, ed., The Na-
   tionality Question in Soviet Central Asia (New York: Praeger, 1973), 160; Robert
   L. Canfield and School of American Research, eds., Turko-Persia in Historical
   Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12.


5. Itzhak Ben-Zvi, The Exiled and the Redeemed (Philadelphia: Jewish Publica-
   tion Society of America, 1957), 80–84.


6. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
   1984), 20–21; Harvey E. Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries (Bloom-
   ington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 3.


7. Ben-Zvi, The Exiled and the Redeemed, 73, 78, 87.