Central Asia (Uzbekistan)
Bukhara, an oasis city on the Zarafshan River in present-day Uzbekistan, was a Silk Road trading centre long before Islam. After the Arab conquests it became, in the 9th-10th centuries, the capital of the Samanid dynasty and a leading centre of Arabic and Persian learning. Genghis Khan's army sacked it in 1220; it recovered under later rulers, was the capital of the Khanate (later Emirate) of Bukhara from the 16th century, and came under Russian protection in 1868 and Soviet rule in 1920. It has also long been home to an ancient Jewish community, the Bukharan Jews.
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Bukhara through the eras
Jews are recorded in Bukhara and the surrounding region from the early Islamic centuries. Under the Samanids and later Turkic rulers they lived as a protected (dhimmi) community and developed their own Judeo-Persian speech, later called Bukhori.
Bukhara from the 16th through 18th centuries underwent severe religious decline: cut off from the wider Jewish world by Shi'a-Sunni political barriers and harsh dhimmi restrictions, the community lost most of its Hebrew literacy. The Khanate of Bukhara forced Jews to wear distinctive clothing, banned them from riding horses, and confined them to the increasingly overcrowded Jewish quarter. The arrival of R. Yosef Maman al-Maghribi from Tetouan, Morocco around 1793 — sent as a Tzfat shadar — saved the community: he stayed for 30 years and systematically reintroduced Hebrew literacy, the Sephardic-Mizrachi nusach, and Maimonidean halacha.
Bukhara in the 19th-20th centuries underwent dramatic transformation under Russian imperial rule (from 1868) and then the Soviet Union (from 1920). The Russian regime ended dhimmi restrictions, allowing the community to flourish economically and culturally; R. Shimon Hakham (1843-1910) translated the Tanach into Judeo-Tajik. The Soviet period dismantled the religious institutions but preserved the distinctive Bukharian Jewish identity. Mass emigration after the Soviet collapse (1989-1995) brought ~70,000 Bukharian Jews to Israel and ~50,000 to Queens, NY, where the Bukharian community now maintains over 50 synagogues. Today only a few hundred Jews remain in Bukhara itself.
Teachers who lived here
Works composed here
by al-Kalabadhi
by al-Kalabadhi
by al-Amiri
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
by Ibn Sina
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by al-Sarakhsi
by al-Sarakhsi
by al-Sarakhsi
Ideas shaped here
Concepts most frequently discussed in the works composed at Bukhara. Click any to trace the idea across time and place.