This study of the Jewish communities of Central Asia—primarily the cities of Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand, and smaller surrounding settlements—is an impressive synthesis of ethnography and cultural history. It is the product of many years of patient interviews, participant observation, and archival research. While its overall organization is roughly chronological, it maintains throughout a sophisticated sense of the multiple retrospective fashionings of these communities’ history.
Early in the text, Cooper offers an important reminder that her project “extends well beyond the borders of modern-day Israel and begins long before the history of contemporary Zionism or European colonialism” (13)—although the effects of both those forces are well documented in the book. Also, rather than providing yet another picture of timeless remoteness (though she does stress the very ancient roots of this population), she documents the pre-Soviet (largely Ottoman) dynamics of interaction between Palestine and Central Asian communities, as well as post-Soviet interactions with Chabad and the Jewish Agency.
Cooper offers an exemplary analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records of the legendary tale of Yosef Maman, said to have “headed eastward as an emissary of the Holy Land, driven by a desire to educate Jews living in the far reaches of the diaspora” (36). That claim was belied by the suggestion of other sources that before Maman arrived, Jews of Central Asia were already “well connected with many Jewish communities in the West” (43). In the later account of Avraham Ya'ari, Zionist historian of the “Jerusalem school,” “the respective positions of the homeland and the diaspora are fixed and enduring” (53). By contrast, in A.Z. Idelsohn's earlier Hebrew-language account, “the definition and naming of the categories center and periphery are opened to contestation” (58). Thus her review of the available historiography is conducted through the lens of a critical understanding of what she calls the “center-periphery” model of Jewish collective dynamics.
Cooper documents the period of Central Asian Jewish involvement in the textile trade, especially through and with Russia, which resulted, according to one late nineteenth-century account, in Bukharan Jews having better residence privileges in Moscow than Polish or Lithuanian Jews (73). She articulates a revealing contrast among the situations in Tashkent, a newer and more dynamic Jewish settlement; Bukhara, well established and, as it were, relatively traditionalist; and Samarkand, whose Jews “retained a local religious sensibility, but at the same time became cosmopolitan, multilingual businessmen” (85).
Another archival chapter narrates a long-standing dispute over kosher meat standards, sparked by the residence of a Chabad hasidic emissary from the Ashkenazi community in Hebron, Shlomo Lev Eliezerov, whose influence continues to be felt down to the present. As a result of a vast quantity of meat being deemed non-kosher and the ensuing crisis felt by butchers and consumers, the controversy reached both the Sephardi chief rabbi in Palestine and the Bukharan community in Jerusalem. On this matter, the locals remaining in Bukhara chastised their fellows in Jerusalem as “the dispersed ones, in diaspora from the Bukharan homeland” (99). Cooper's conclusion is anti-teleological: “this turn-of-the century encounter between Bukhara's Jews and those in Ottoman Palestine is embedded in an ongoing relationship, with no absolute beginning or end, and likewise no clearly defined center or periphery” (118).
In addition to the center-periphery paradigm mentioned above, the second paradigm Cooper identifies as structuring current discourses about the Bukharan Jews is what she calls the “edah paradigm.” This model, as she lucidly explains, “celebrates cultural diversity among the Jewish people. . . . by defining diaspora groups as discrete units, edot. . . and by legitimizing and celebrating their unique histories and traditions” (121). In fact, these people became known collective as “Bukharan Jews” in Jerusalem (xvii, 128), in a process which Cooper describes (drawing on Fredrik Barth's still-classic Ethnic Groups and Boundaries) as the dynamic production of themselves as an ‘edah (132). The core of this production was the development of the neighborhood originally known as Reḥovot, then Reḥovot ha-Bukharim, and then finally Shkhunat ha-Bukharim (134), the “Bukharan Quarter.” Cooper notes that the concept of ‘edah is “generative by nature” (xvii), by which she appears to mean historically contingent rather than naturally fixed, though she also realizes that museum and other displays of Bukharan Jewishness have tended to present it as “static and [in anthropologist Johannes Fabian's terms] ‘out-of-time’” (125).
Cooper deftly and unobtrusively weaves her own interactions with this community into her account. She documents—in the context of her larger discussion of the rhetoric and felt reality of a worldwide Jewish commonality—a feeling experienced by many Jews: “the curious sense of familiarity that I felt among Central Asia's Jews” (xii). And she is quite willing to turn the ethnographic mirror back on her own Jewish identity, noting that for the Bukharans, “Ashkenazi Jews” means those who are less identified and less competent Jews (10). Rather than trying to overturn either of the two central models, she recasts the center-periphery paradigm as a “dynamic and ongoing struggle to define the meaning” of the local and global, and asserts that this is what holds Judaism together (xvi).
Countering what has been called the stereotype of “thin” Jewish identity under Communism, she notes the Bukharans' maintenance of persistently strong Jewish identity during the Soviet period (21), largely through kinship networks (142), the maintenance of kashrut (which in this context meant “engaging in a private communal landscape”) (146), continuing neighborhood residence patterns, and religious observances at private homes tied to a cycle of mourning commemorations, known as yushvo; thus (she says, “ironically,” but it is quite commonplace for mortuary practices to have this function) “death rites. . . yielded a vibrant and active prayer community” (152). All of this led to a practice of Judaism that, more than “formal,” was primarily “bodily, aesthetic, and communal” (148).
A straightforward narrative tone is maintained throughout, without the need for extensive disquisitions on reflexivity as seemed de rigueur a few short years ago. Thus she describes a Bukharan wedding in New York, states that she assumed it was how Bukharan weddings had been celebrated before the great migration, and then adds, revealingly and efficiently, “I could not have been more wrong” (154).
A fascinating aspect of the analysis concerns folk and Soviet state contexts that encouraged viewing Jewishness as inherited through the patriline (165–167). The contingent character of Jewish identification in the present is hinted at when Cooper describes how, as a result of the efforts of organizations such as the Jewish Agency and Chabad to extend services to local Jews and give them opportunities to emigrate, “Plenty of Jews may be leaving, but new ones appear every day” (180). Rather than a bulwark of stability, strong kinship networks actually have served to encourage the mass migration of Bukharan Jews from the homeland (219). All of this contributes to a fracturing of identity among those who remain.
Moreover, in their very efforts to sustain a strong Bukharan Jewish identity outside of the homeland, those who identify with this community “cannot help but engage with others who also identify as Bukharan Jews, but who have very different ideas about what this means” (239). This ambivalent engagement is exemplified in Cooper's 1997 conversation with Marik Fazilov, director of Samarkand's Bukharan Jewish Cultural Center, who told her on the one hand that “Just because someone says he is a Bukharan Jew doesn't mean that he is one” but who admits, on the other, that “The name ‘Bukharan Jew’ is a problematic one.” (250). A fascinating and productive problem, as richly documented and analyzed in Cooper's book.
