Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 213Samarkand. My father, too. My grandfather, too. Grandfather’s father,
too. Great-great-grandfather, too, in Samarkand. Bukharan Jews have
lived in Samarkand for two thousand years.” Even the Bukharan Jews’
spoken language is testimony to their deep connections to the local space.
Rather than being a language that is derived from experiences in a previ-
ous home—such as Yiddish, a Germanic language that marked the Jews
as outsiders in Poland—Bukharan Jews speak one of the region’s many
Tajik dialects.
In addition to feeling that they belonged to the local space, the Jewish
and Bukharan aspects of their identity had become strongly intertwined
during the Soviet era, further binding them to their Central Asian Di-
aspora home. When the region was incorporated into the USSR in the
1920s, heavy restrictions were placed on emigration and travel, mail was
monitored, and it became close to impossible to get access to religious
books printed abroad. The ties Bukharan Jews had formed with Jewish
communities in Europe and Palestine during the colonial era were sud-
denly severed. Tight boundaries were drawn around their own small
communities, which became largely impermeable to the influences of
Jewish life outside.^29
Confined in Soviet Central Asia, Bukharan Jews stopped identifying
themselves in relation to other Jewish groups. In Israel and the United
States, Bukharan Jewish music, dance, costume, and cuisine is celebrated
as one “brand” of Jewish culture within a multiethnic Jewish world.
But in Central Asia, Bukharan Jews simply saw themselves as Jews and
their culture as a Jewish variant of local culture. When I asked people
to describe what was unique about Bukharan Jews, their answers never
hinged on a comparison between themselves and other Jewish groups.
There was one exception: they distinguished themselves from the Ash-
kenazi Jews living in Central Asia, most of whom arrived in the region
during World War II after escaping or being forced out of their homes
in Eastern Europe.^30 Unlike the Bukharan Jews who maintained their
Jewish practices and a strong sense of Jewish identity throughout the
Soviet era, the Ashkenazi Jews in Central Asia tended to be highly as-
similated—both structurally and culturally—into the region’s Russian
population. The reference to themselves as “Bukharan Jews” and to the
others as “Ashkenazi Jews,” then, implied a comparison between those
who continued to practice Judaism and to strongly identify themselves as
Jews throughout the Soviet era and those who did not. We are the chistiye