Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic research there as well as among immigrants to the US and Israel, Cooper tells an intimate and personal story about what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Together with her historical research about a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews in other parts of the world, this lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history.

English description: Although the Jews of Central Asia have a long, eventful and fascinating history, the community of the Bukharan Jews attracted very little attention from researchers until recently. This new work encompasses twelve scholarly articles in English concerned with historical, linguistic and other aspects shaping the identity of this diaspora group in the 20th century. German description: Die Geschichte der Juden Zentralasiens ist lang, ereignisreich und faszinierend. Dennoch sind die so genannten Bucharischen Juden eine der am wenigsten erforschten judischen Gemeinden. Der vorliegende Sammelband vereint zwolf englischsprachige Beitrage die sich mit historischen, sprachlichen und anderen identitatsstiftenden Aspekten dieser Diaspora im 20. Jahrhundert befassen.

Zeev Levin seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of government efforts to socialize the Jewish masses in Uzbekistan, a process in which the central Soviet government took part, together with the local, republican and regional administrations and Soviet Jewish activists. This research presents a chapter in the history of the Jews in Uzbekistan, as well as contributing to the study of the socialization process of the Jewish population in the USSR in general. It also contributes to the study of relations among political and government bodies and decision makers. The study is based on archival documents and provides a unique glance at the implementation of Soviet nationalities policy towards Bukharan Jews while comparing it to other national minority groups in Uzbekistan.