Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 211ments—that of feeling marginalized and that of feeling at home—were
weighed when making decisions about whether or not to emigrate.
Their sense of marginalization stemmed both from the feeling of be-
ing outside of the nationalist project and from the feeling of being on
the weaker side of tense Muslim-Jewish relations. Members of the older
generation carried the collective historical memory of the humiliation
to which the Jews were subjected prior to the arrival of the Russians in
the region in the late nineteenth century. Never specifically invoking the
term dhimmi, people did cite specific examples of subjugation, such as
being forbidden to ride on a horse and having to build low doorways,
which would force everyone to crouch upon entry. One elderly man
spoke about the Jews’ support for Russian colonial efforts, because they
forbade the Muslim rulers to persecute the Jews. Another quoted a great-
grandfather who was said to have often exclaimed, “I finally began to
live when the Russians arrived.” However, even among these elderly
people, this era of Jewish persecution under Muslim rule was portrayed
as a distant past. Although the Soviet Union had dissolved and Uzbeki-
stan had become independent of Russian rule, I never heard anyone sug-
gest that this era might return. By the time I arrived in 1993, it seemed
clear that President Karimov—who had been the republic’s Communist
Party leader during Soviet days—would remain in power. Unlike Presi-
dent Nabiyev in neighboring Tajikistan, Karimov was able to squelch all
Islamic oppositional forces (gaining an abysmal human rights violation
record in the process).
Regardless of this relative sense of religious security, a number of
people did describe experiences of prejudice against them as Jews in a
Muslim society. “The Muslims think all the Jews have gold buried in
the courtyards,” one man told me. Another man said, “The Uzbeks and
the Tajiks may hate each other, but they all hate the Jews.” This feel-
ing of being persecuted as Jews in a Muslim society, however, paled in
comparison to the feeling of being marginalized from the Uzbek national
project—not because they were Jews but because they were not Uzbek.
This sense most strongly manifested itself in discussions about language.
Throughout the Soviet era, the Jews, who were primarily educated
urban dwellers, spoke Russian, which they had learned in school. They
also continued to speak their native language, Tajik, a Persian language
that was also spoken by the large Muslim, ethnic Tajik minority living in