Introduction
Mūsā Gul was born into a Jewish family in Herat around 1880. He began his commercial career as an itinerant pedlar—the customary entry point into commerce for Jewish merchants of the region. At some point he crossed the imperial frontier into Russian Central Asia, operating in Tsarist and possibly Bolshevik territory, before his trail leads us back to northern Afghanistan in the 1920s. By 1926, he had established himself as one of the most prominent Jewish merchants in the region, with capital, connections, and ambitions that went well beyond itinerant trade. In June of that year, together with three other Herati Jewish merchants, he submitted a petition to the Customs Duty Office (gumruk) in Mazar-i Sharif requesting permission to import machinery from the Soviet Union to establish several factories in the city. The petition was approved by King Amān Allāh’s court, the Ministry of Commerce in Kabul, and the provincial council (majlis) of Afghan Turkestan. By July 1927, several machines had arrived in Mazar-i Sharif and construction of the factory buildings had begun.Footnote 1 Mūsā Gul and his partners had become the first private individuals to bring modern industrial machinery to Afghanistan. Yet this success was short-lived. As early as 1928, while Amān Allāh was still in power, his production facilities in the north were closed after local producers accused him of attempting to monopolise cotton processing and of spying for Russia. In the early 1930s, repeated attempts to revive his factories and import new machinery were rejected by the state. In September 1933, the Afghan state ordered the expulsion of Jews from the northern part of the country, Mūsā Gul included.Footnote 2 He moved to Kabul, where he died in 1948.
This article traces Mūsā Gul’s trajectory to understand how Afghanistan’s economic modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century changed the commercial position of Jewish merchants. His story is not simply one of decline. For much of his career he operated successfully within Afghan economic and civic life, trading across imperial boundaries in British India and Tsarist Central Asia, building industrial enterprises, advising state officials, and participating in state-sponsored commercial structures. It was only from the late 1920s onward that the conditions supporting his commercial activities were progressively eroded. The 1933 expulsion of Jews from the northern part of the country ended Mūsā Gul’s commercial base in the north. The economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s then systematically restricted what remained of Jewish commercial life, including in Kabul, where Mūsā Gul spent his final years. Scholars have debated the ideological basis of these policies and their consequences for Afghanistan’s Jewish community, the majority of whom emigrated between the 1930s and early 1950s. Erich Brauer and Maxwell J. Fry emphasise economic considerations, arguing that state policy was primarily intended to break Hindu, Sikh, and Jewish minority dominance of foreign trade.Footnote 3 Sara Koplik places greater weight on ideological factors, arguing that the ‘rise of Nazi Germany brought a new kind of anti-Semitism to Afghanistan’ and highlighting the role of ʿAbd al-Majīd Zābulī, founder of the Afghan National Bank (Bānk-i Millī) and a central figure in Afghan economic policy during the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 4 Eunan O’Halpin, by contrast, argues that German influence was not a determining factor, pointing instead to ‘indigenous antisemitism and nativist economic ideology’ reinforced from the late 1930s by Muslim solidarity over Palestine.Footnote 5 By grounding the analysis in Afghan archival sources and in the internal logic of Afghan state practice, this article argues that the erosion of Jewish merchants’ commercial position resulted from the convergence of multiple structural processes—imperial, economic, and nationalist—that unfolded across decades and reinforced one another.
Afghanistan’s early twentieth-century economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, supplemented by trade and only limited industrial production. After decades of restriction and isolation under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (r. 1880–1901), the early twentieth century brought relative stability and the gradual re-establishment of commerce and cross-border trade, particularly with Russian Central Asia and British India.Footnote 6 Yet these developments unfolded within a framework of severe structural constraints: chronic shortages of capital, inadequate transportation and communication infrastructure, the absence of banking facilities and formal trade agreements, and limited diplomatic and economic contacts. Industrial development remained slow and uneven. Amān Allāh inherited a small number of state-owned workshops in Kabul, which functioned largely as royal monopolies supplying the Afghan army. Although he expanded this infrastructure by establishing additional factories and importing machinery from Japan and Germany, no major industrial projects were successfully completed during the 1920s.Footnote 7 It was within this context of state ambition outpacing state capacity that Mūsā Gul’s private industrial initiative in Mazar-i Sharif represented something without precedent in Afghanistan. Non-Muslim minorities—Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews, whom Vartan Gregorian described as the ‘three cosmopolitan minorities’ of AfghanistanFootnote 8—had long been disproportionately prominent in the long-distance caravan trade and commercial brokerage, and the Afghan state both relied on their commercial expertise and regarded their cross-border networks with ambivalence. From the 1930s onward, as the state adopted what scholars have described as a ‘guided economy’Footnote 9—establishing state-backed shirkats (companies) granted monopoly rights over key sectors—the question of who qualified as an ‘Afghan merchant’ (tājir-i afghān) and investor became increasingly consequential for merchants like Mūsā Gul. As a result, influential Jewish merchants were increasingly sidelined within the new commercial framework, their businesses replaced by those of Muslim merchants and investors.
The source base for this study is fragmented and varied. The core primary material consists of documents from the National Archives of Afghanistan, including official correspondence, administrative reports, and petitions that illuminate Mūsā Gul’s business ventures, his interactions with state authorities, and the political suspicions he attracted. These are complemented by contemporary Afghan newspaper sources, printed almanacs and regulatory texts, the chronicle Sirāj al-Tawārīkh of Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Ḥazāra, and memoirs and oral testimonies from members of the Afghan Jewish community, which contextualise archival references and fill gaps in the written record.
Between empires: Mūsā Gul’s formation and the imperial commercial world (circa 1880–1919)
Around 1880, Mūsā GulFootnote 10 was born into a Jewish family in Herat.Footnote 11 The available sources indicate that he spent part of his pre-1920s life in Tsarist—and possibly Bolshevik—Central Asia and worked for a time in Peshawar in British India.Footnote 12 Although precise dates are lacking, Israel Mishael, a Herati Jew who later became a local community official (kalāntar)Footnote 13 in Mazar-i Sharif, writes that Mūsā Gul ‘returned’ from Russian Central Asia, where he had also known his father, and opened a shop in Mazar-i Sharif.Footnote 14 This mobility across three imperial zones—the Russian, the British, and the Afghan—was not incidental to Mūsā Gul’s formation as a merchant. It reflects a common pattern among Jewish merchants of the region, whose commercial strategies relied on operating across imperial borders and shifting political regimes.Footnote 15 His commercial strategy, his linguistic range, his network of trust, and ultimately his exposure to political suspicion were all products of a life lived across the borders of competing empires. To understand his later career in Afghanistan, it is necessary first to understand the imperial commercial world in which that career was formed.
Mūsā Gul’s formative years unfolded during a period of state centralisation under emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (r. 1880–1901) that reshaped the conditions of life for all of Afghanistan’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities. The consolidation of the Afghan state under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān involved the forced conversion of the region known to Muslims as Kafiristan,Footnote 16 the expulsion of the small Armenian Christian community from Kabul,Footnote 17 and the imposition of the jizya, a poll tax levied on dhimmīs, which marked non-Muslims as legally subordinate subjects. A farmān (royal decree) issued by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khān to the governor of Herat in 1896 dispatched 220 printed forms for its collection, instructing that the tax be collected bidūn-i lihāẓ (without regard) to the payer’s personal circumstances, in three categories—adnā (lower), awsaṭ (middle), and aʿlā (upper)—depending on income, and individual receipts indicate it was still being collected into the late 1930s.Footnote 18 The jizya was formally abolished under Amān Allāh, but the ʿulamāʾ at the 1924 Loya Jirga demanded its reinstatement alongside distinctive dress requirements for non-MuslimsFootnote 19—a reminder that the legal status of non-Muslims remained actively contested throughout this period. New passport regulations sought to monitor cross-border movement across Afghanistan’s frontiersFootnote 20—measures that affected the full range of itinerant merchants whose livelihoods depended on regional mobility, including Muslim traders. Trade was further disrupted as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ordered merchants to redirect commerce away from Russia and towards British India,Footnote 21 reshaping long-standing caravan routes in northern and north-western Afghanistan. These combined pressures contributed to growing insecurity among Jews and formed part of the broader environment that drove emigration—of JewsFootnote 22 alongside Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Aimaq—particularly from central, northern, and north-western Afghanistan towards Russian Central Asia,Footnote 23 or that encouraged departure in search of better economic opportunities.
The region’s historically interconnected Persian-speaking Jews (who later became known as Bukharan, Afghan, and Iranian Jews) had close social and economic ties across the region.Footnote 24 Russian imperial expansion in Central Asia and the construction of the Trans-Caspian Railway in the late nineteenth century created new commercial hubs integrated into wider imperial markets, offering Jewish merchants new opportunities for cross-border trade connecting Central Asia, Afghanistan, Persia, and India. The legal and administrative structures of the Russian empire initially facilitated Jewish settlement and commercial activity in Turkestan, attracting Herati, Mashhadi, and Bukharan Jews,Footnote 25 and many families from Herat migrated to cities such as Merv, Bukhara, and Samarkand.Footnote 26
By the early twentieth century, broader geopolitical shifts had further shaped Jewish merchant mobility. The enforcement in 1911 of Russian regulations restricting foreign Jews—Afghan, Persian, and Bukharan subjects—from residing in border regions of Russian Turkestan,Footnote 27 combined with the upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, made commercial activity in Central Asia increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the situation within Afghanistan gradually stabilised, and the subsequent relative stability encouraged some Jewish merchants to return.Footnote 28 Mūsā Gul’s eventual reorientation towards Afghanistan fits this wider pattern of return migration among Jewish traders who had previously operated in Russian territories.
Itinerant pedlar and commercial formation
Mūsā Gul’s commercial career began with a traditional apprenticeship in itinerant trade. Like many Herati Jews, he engaged in mahalla-gardī,Footnote 29 the customary practice of peddling goods across villages, bazaars, and pastoral zones. This involved travelling between rural and urban bazaars to purchase commodities such as wool, karakul pelts, and hides, while selling imported manufactured goods such as textiles, sugar, oil, or small household items to local populations.Footnote 30 Male children were integrated into this system from a young age as they accompanied their fathers or other male relatives on their travels, while women and small children rarely left the confines of their courtyards and neighbourhoods.Footnote 31 Through such itinerant trade, merchants developed linguistic flexibility and knowledge of local customs, and they regularly interacted with village elders and regional state officials.Footnote 32 Maḥalla-gardī thus functioned as a formative phase in which merchants accumulated capital, built trust networks, and familiarised themselves with the region’s economic geography. It was also, crucially, a practice that crossed communal boundaries. For Mūsā Gul, these experiences provided the commercial and social foundation for his later large-scale enterprises.
When Mūsā Gul went to Russian Central Asia, the commodities he traded and the precise locations in which he operated within Russian Turkestan remain unknown. What is clear, however, is that he belonged to the wider commercial world of Herati Jewish merchants in Russian Central Asia. By the late nineteenth century, many Herati Jews were trading and operating shops throughout the trans-Caspian oblast of Russian Turkestan, especially in towns along the newly built railway. Their presence formed part of a broader and well-established Jewish mercantile network in the region. Haim Abraham, born in Merv in 1897 to a family from Herat, records in his autobiographical notes that the city was home to more than a hundred Jewish families organised into four distinct communities—Afghan, Bukharan, Persian (Jadīd al-Islām), and Ashkenazi—each maintaining its own synagogue. His grandfather served as rabbi of both the Afghan and Ashkenazi congregations, while his father and uncles ran shops selling all types of goods in Merv and later in Bayram-Ali, 27 km to the east.Footnote 33 Jews of various backgrounds were similarly active in Yolotan, Sarakhs, and Panjdeh.Footnote 34 The legal position of these merchants depended on how the Russian administration classified them. After the establishment of the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan in 1867, and under the administrative arrangements governing the region, the Russian authorities classified Persian-speaking Jews into three groups: ‘local Jews’, who had resided in the region before the Russian conquest and were granted Russian citizenship; ‘Bukharan Jews’, regarded as subjects of the Emir of Bukhara; and ‘foreign Jews’, considered subjects of Afghanistan or Persia.Footnote 35 As someone born in Herat, Mūsā Gul would have belonged to this last category. This legal distinction became particularly significant in 1911, when the Russian authorities expelled most ‘foreign’ Jews from the frontier region. The Judeo-Persian journal Rakhamim reported that Bukharan Jews were evicted in January, followed by Afghan Jews in early June: 40 persons left Bayram-Ali, 80 Jewish families departed from Merv, and 125 families left Takhta-Bazaar for Herat, often abandoning much of their property behind.Footnote 36
Mūsā Gul should therefore be understood as one of many Herati Jewish merchants whose commercial activities extended into Russian Turkestan. His subsequent reorientation towards northern Afghanistan may have been shaped by these expulsions or by similar political and economic pressures. A comparable trajectory can be seen in Haim Abraham’s family, who decided not to return to Herat but to move to relatives in Samarkand before leaving after the Bolshevik Revolution to settle in northern Afghanistan.Footnote 37 While Mūsā Gul was active in Russian Turkestan, his maternal uncle, Yitzhak Bezalel—with whom he is documented to have worked throughout the 1920s and early 1930s—had, according to family accounts, settled in Andkhoy in northern Afghanistan around the turn of the twentieth century. This account is supported by later documentation showing that Bezalel was based in Andkhoy until at least the early 1930s. As an important commercial centre linking Afghan import and export trade with the frontier town of Kerki, Andkhoy provided a strategic base within the cross-border trading networks connecting the northern Afghan borderlands with Russian Turkestan. Although Mūsā Gul’s collaboration with his uncle is only documented from the 1920s onwards, it is possible that their commercial cooperation began earlier, with Bezalel operating from Andkhoy and Mūsā Gul active on the Russian Turkestan side of the border.
After returning to Afghanistan, Mūsā Gul engaged in extensive commercial activities across several regions, including Kabul, Qataghan Province, Andkhoy, Maymana, and Herat. According to correspondence from the governor of Afghan Turkestan, he conducted individual (infirādī) trade in these areas until about 1925,Footnote 38 also in partnership with his associate Yitzhak Bezalel, who was his maternal cousin.Footnote 39 In the early 1920s, as the sources allow us to trace, Mūsā Gul’s trade focused on purchasing cotton, wool, and karakul pelts in northern Afghanistan for export to the Soviet Union, while importing Soviet-manufactured goods—textiles, oil, sugar, leather products, and porcelain—for distribution in Afghan bazaars.Footnote 40 This pattern demonstrates how his earlier transregional experience translated into a commercial model that linked Afghan raw materials with foreign markets and supplied domestic consumers with imported goods.
Among Jews in Afghanistan, Mūsā Gul had by this point gained a reputation as a leading merchant, mentor, and communal intermediary. Israel Mishael recalls meeting him as a young man seeking opportunity in Afghan Turkestan. Mūsā Gul employed Mishael and offered to teach him how to read Arabic script and Pashto, as well as the practical techniques of trade. In his memoirs, Mishael attributed his ability to communicate effectively with Afghan officials to this training, which resulted in his appointment as head (kalāntar) of the Jewish community in Mazar-i Sharif at a very young age.Footnote 41 By the 1920s, these cumulative experiences—training in itinerant trade, mobility across Russian Central Asia and British India, fluency in many languages, and the establishment of wide-ranging commercial networks—had positioned Mūsā Gul to take advantage of the reformist economic climate of the Amani period.
The Amani period: industrial entrepreneur and economic adviser (1925–1929)
A turning point in Mūsā Gul’s career occurred when he shifted from transregional trade to investment in industrial machinery and factory production. This move closely aligned with the reformist vision of King Amān Allāh, whose government explicitly encouraged national merchants to invest in industrial production. Although such initiatives were promoted rhetorically and institutionally, Afghanistan lacked a systematic plan for industrial development. State-owned workshops in Kabul remained the dominant industrial actors, and the growth that did occur was uneven and fragmented.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, the government sought to reduce reliance on imports by issuing the Law Encouraging Industries (Niẓām-nāma-yi tashwīqiya-yi ṣanāyiʿ), which was printed and circulated in the provinces to incentivise national investment in factories and machinery.Footnote 43
It was within this framework that Mūsā Gul decided, in 1926, to participate actively in industrial investment. He invested in the Shirkat-i Amānī, a centrally organised state-sponsored company with private shareholders operating across the country. Mūsā Gul acquired a 10 per cent share in the company together with three other Herati Jews: ḤājjīFootnote 44 Isḥāq—his closest partner in the caravan trade and later industrial ventures—Mullāh Shimʿūn Yahūdī, and Mullāh Amīn. These four were among approximately 20 investors in the enterprise. The principal objective of establishing such shirkats in the northern regions was to regulate the sale of Afghan commodities to the Soviet Union under state-controlled conditions. This arrangement was regarded as the only viable means for Afghan merchants to compete with Soviet state trade. Among those referred to in this language were Mūsā Gul and his partners.Footnote 45
The 1926 petition and factory establishment
Beyond his participation in the Shirkat-i Amānī, Mūsā Gul undertook a more ambitious initiative in 1926: the direct importation of industrial machinery and the construction of factories. A detailed letter from ʿAbd al-Karīm, the governor of Afghan Turkestan, addressed to King Amān Allāh via the Ministry of Commerce, records the establishment of several factories by Mūsā Gul and his three Jewish partners: Mullāh Isḥāq [Bezalel], Mullāh Shimʿūn, and Mullāh Amīn. According to the document, a petition requesting permission to import machinery was submitted in early June 1926. On 26 June, the minister of commerce informed the governor that the king had approved the petition. Following authorisation from Kabul, the provincial majlis in Mazar-i Sharif discussed the locations of the proposed factories, and later that year the governor received formal permission to proceed with construction.Footnote 46
The letter, however, reveals that official approval was accompanied by official scrutiny. Four principal concerns were raised: the nationality of the investors; the source of capital, particularly suspicions surrounding ‘Russian’ money; the potential employment of foreign engineers; and the question of why such enterprises were not being undertaken by local merchants. Under the Niẓām-nāma, investors were required to be Afghan nationals.Footnote 47 In response to the nationality question, the governor confirmed that Mūsā Gul and his partners were Afghan nationals from Herat holding national identity cards (taẕkiras), registered in Mazar-i Sharif as commercial taxpayers. The governor of Herat was separately contacted by Kabul, though the available documents do not clarify the nature or outcome of that enquiry. While not stated explicitly, the pattern of questioning suggests that the investors’ Jewish identity was itself subject to verification.
The second concern, regarding the source of capital, reflected broader anxieties about Soviet influence. The governor testified that the money came from the investors themselves, describing Mūsā Gul as an influential merchant who had traded across northern Afghanistan, Soviet Central Asia, and Peshawar, and who had accumulated his own capital through that trade. Notably, the governor also proposed that the state itself invest in the factoriesFootnote 48—a suggestion that, given his own 10 per cent shareholding in the Shirkat-i Amānī’s Afghan Turkestan branch, likely reflected both administrative and personal interests.Footnote 49 He further argued that state participation would allow closer oversight of the factories established by Mūsā Gul and his partners.Footnote 50 Whether such state investment was ultimately implemented remains unclear.
The third concern, regarding the employment of foreign engineers, is not resolved in the available document. The fourth concern—why local merchants were not undertaking such enterprises themselves—was addressed most directly by the governor, who argued that local merchants in Mazar-i Sharif simply lacked the capital to install machinery of this scale, framing Mūsā Gul’s initiative not as a threat to local commerce but as a necessary contribution to economic progress that local actors were unable to make.Footnote 51 By June 1927 this concern had translated into a direct instruction from the king: the governor was ordered to secure a partner for Mūsā Gul from among Afghan subjects. Although Mūsā Gul and his existing partners already held Afghan nationality, the instruction to locate a new partner suggests the state had a Muslim Afghan national in mind—consistent with the increasingly exclusionary connotations the term ‘Afghan merchant’ was acquiring during this period.Footnote 52
Taken together, these four concerns reveal the ambivalent and, in practice, conditional attitude towards minority entrepreneurs during the Amani period: the state welcomed the initiative in principle, while subjecting its Jewish investors to a level of scrutiny that reflected the conditional nature of their participation in Afghan economic modernisation. Despite this, the governor of Afghan Turkestan strongly supported Mūsā Gul and his Jewish partners.
The machinery: technical specifications
The governor of Afghan Turkestan forwarded a detailed inventory of the machinery purchased by Mūsā Gul and his co-investors, bearing the title ‘machinery of Mullāh Mūsā, son of Nūr Allāh [Nuriel], [grandson of] Yūf [Yoav], in Mazār-i Sharīf’.Footnote 53
The inventory documents a cotton gin (māshīn-i pakhta) capable of cleaning and processing 21,000 kg of cotton within 24 hours. An oil press (māshīn-i rūghan-gīrī) was imported to extract oil from cottonseed, sesame (kunjid), and flax (zaghar), producing edible oil, scented soap oil (ṣābūn-i ʿaṭrī), and washing soap oil, with residual by-products used as animal feed. A soap-making machine (māshīn-i ṣābūn-pazī) manufactured various types of soap from the extracted oils. The list further included an electric generator (chirāgh-i barq) capable of supplying power for approximately 3,000 lamps, a flour mill (āsiyāb-i ārd-kanī) able to grind 2,000 Kabuli sīr (circa 21 tons) of wheat into flour per day, and a metal workshop (āhan-sāzī) designed to repair and manufacture machine parts locally. A notable item was a traction engine (traktur/ātash-khāna) capable of hauling heavy loads, operating industrial machinery, generating electric power, and being fitted with agricultural implements. A smaller tractor was dedicated specifically to agricultural use.Footnote 54 A decree instructed the Ministry of Commerce to support Mūsā Gul’s development of both factory-based and handwoven carpet production and to provide him with a letter of introduction to facilitate trade with British India, with further state assistance promised if the initiative proved successful.Footnote 55
According to the governor, this assemblage constituted the first recorded introduction of modern machinery to Mazar-i Sharif. Additional sources indicate that Mūsā Gul also operated a brick kilnFootnote 56 and, according to his son David Vardi, produced blankets and socks. Together, these enterprises suggest an integrated industrial vision linking agricultural processing, manufacturing, energy production, and construction—a vision that was, by any measure, years ahead of what Afghan state industrial policy had achieved.
Resistance, accusations, and the first closure (1928)
Mūsā Gul’s factories started production in 1927. Israel Mishael, who worked for Mūsā Gul during this period, recalls that news of the factories’ success spread rapidly. But not everyone was pleased with this success. The introduction of newly imported machinery posed a direct challenge to the existing economic order: traditional small-scale cotton processing was widespread in northern Afghanistan, and Mūsā Gul’s cotton gin threatened to displace the livelihoods of local producers who depended on it.Footnote 57 Owners of small traditional machines submitted complaints to King Amān Allāh, accusing Mūsā Gul of attempting to monopolise production and labelling him a Russian spy.Footnote 58 According to David Vardi, these accusations circulated widely, including among Jews themselves. The accusation of monopolisation here referred specifically to cotton processing and the commercial dominance that mechanised ginning inevitably produced over traditional manual competitors. In 1928, under mounting pressure, the king ordered the suspension of Mūsā Gul’s factories and trading activities and urged him to relocate temporarily to Kabul. Importantly, he was neither arrested nor imprisoned.Footnote 59 The state acted out of concern over potential unrest in the north rather than as a result of wrongdoing.
Advising the state: the 1928 currency letter
Before his factories were closed, Mūsā Gul had also been operating in a different capacity entirely—as an intellectual contributor to Afghan economic policy. His role as an adviser to the Amani state is documented through a letter dated 20 Ḥūt 1306 (11 March 1928), written in his own hand and addressed to the minister of finance.Footnote 60 As a Herati Jewish merchant, he was exceptional in his ability to write Arabic script fluently, employing an elegant nastaʿlīq hand with occasional shikasta elements. His mastery of bureaucratic Persian allowed him to participate directly in formal state discourse.
The document follows modern Afghan bureaucratic conventions and notably lacks the traditional invocation praising God—a feature increasingly common among reformist officials during the Amani period. His signature appears in two scripts: as ‘Mūsā Gul Harawī’ in Arabic script and as ‘Mūsā Gul’ in Judeo-Persian. The internal address identifies him as ‘Mūsā-yi Yahūdī’—a designation he employs without apparent discomfort in formal contexts, suggesting that his dhimmī legal status, while marking him as legally different, did not preclude full participation in Afghan civic and national life. Throughout the letter, Mūsā Gul adopts nationalist rhetoric, consistently differentiating between ‘we’ (Afghan nationals) and foreign merchants—Europeans, Indians, Bukharans, Iranians. He refers to the government as ‘my sacred (muqaddas-am) government’ and frames his proposals as motivated by concern for ‘the progress (taraqqī) of my sacred and obeyed Government, of which I am a national subject (maṭbūʿa)’.
Titled ‘Treatment of the present silver currency and future banknotes of the Independent Government of Afghanistan’, the letter identifies three interconnected problems: severe currency devaluation, the dominance of foreign currencies and merchants in Afghan markets, and the absence of effective regulatory institutions. Linking currency stability directly to taraqqī, he argues that the state’s prosperity and political independence depend fundamentally on monetary stability. He criticises the government’s plan to introduce paper money (pul-i kāghazī) while silver currency was already losing value, reasoning pragmatically that paper notes would inspire even less confidence unless underlying structural problems were addressed.
Mūsā Gul attributes currency declines primarily to foreign merchants and currencies. He provides a detailed example of Bolshevik trade practices in northern Afghanistan. Approximately one year earlier, he explains, one Bolshevik chervonetz equalled a ten-rouble Tsarist gold coin in Moscow, Tashkent, and Bukhara. By 1928, however, three chervonetz were required to equal the value of the same gold coin. Despite this drastic devaluation, Bolshevik agents—operating through the Soviet consulate in Mazar-i Sharif and trade representative Barātov—continued treating the chervonetz in Afghanistan as if it retained its former value, establishing ties with Afghan ‘national merchants’ (tujjār-i waṭanī) and insisting on conducting trade exclusively in their depreciated currency. Mūsā Gul describes Afghan merchants as ‘deceived by Bolshevik politics’ and characterises these practices as deliberate currency manipulation and economic exploitation.
To address these problems, Mūsā Gul proposes establishing an ‘Administration of the Stock Exchange’ (idāra-yi būrsa)—an institution that did not yet exist in Afghanistan.Footnote 61 He envisions a central office in Kabul with branches in other cities, alongside a central ṣarrāfī (moneychangers’ office) in Chawk, Kabul. Under this system, all foreign merchants purchasing Afghan goods for export would be required to conduct transactions through Afghan national branches under state supervision. Only ‘national companies’ (shirkat-i waṭanī) would be authorised to transfer currency between locations. Drawing on a comparative example from Qajar Iran, Mūsā Gul notes that the British-established Imperial Bank of Persia (Bānk-i shāhanshāhī) functioned as both a commercial institution and a political tool regulating currency values. He suggests that Afghanistan could adopt a similar mechanism, using Mashhad as a hub for acquiring and distributing foreign currency according to Kabul’s directives, coordinated via correspondence or telegraph.
This letter suggests that Mūsā Gul was an integral part of the Amani reform environment, trusted enough to offer direct advice on monetary policy to senior state officials—a position that was not exceptional for prominent Jewish merchants of his generation, who were commonly embedded in the commercial and administrative life of the state.
Institutional suspicion of Jews
The closure of Mūsā Gul’s factories in 1928 was not an isolated incident. Among the accusations levelled against him by local producers was the charge of spying for the Soviet Union—a label that, as this section shows, had become a routine instrument of Afghan state administration when dealing with Jewish merchants engaged in cross-border commerce. By 1928, bureaucratic suspicion towards Jewish merchants had become sufficiently routinised that a confidential report produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mazar-i Sharif in the same year recommended the expulsion of Jews from the northern frontier entirely. When the Afghan state finally ordered that expulsion in 1933, the reasoning followed the same logic: Jews operating in the border region were administratively suspect, their cross-border commercial networks indistinguishable—in the eyes of state officials—from foreign political entanglement. To understand how this logic became institutionalised, it is necessary to examine both the 1928 report and the longer genealogy of suspicion that produced it.
The 1928 report on Imanuel Abraham
By 1928, bureaucratic suspicion towards Jewish merchants had become routinised in official correspondence with explicit ethno-religious generalisations. A confidential report produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mazar-i Sharif on 22 ʿAqrab 1307 (13 November 1928) exemplifies this development with particular force. Written during Amān Allāh’s final months but reviewed after the Ḥabīb Allāh Kalakānī takeover, the report requested an immediate recommendation regarding Jewish merchants in Afghan Turkestan and the northern frontier.Footnote 62
The report centres on Imanuel Abraham, a 19-year-old Jewish merchant in Mazar-i Sharif whose family had arrived from Russian Central Asia and held Afghan citizenship.Footnote 63 Despite this, the report portrays them as politically suspect because of their commercial activities and cross-border connections. One brother, Hasid, operated a photography shop ‘frequently visited by Russians’. Another managed the business affairs for a prominent Turkmen merchant. A third, Shaʿbān, traded across the Amu Darya.Footnote 64 The report accuses Imanuel of acting as an unauthorised intermediary (pīsh-kār) between Muslim merchants and the Russian Consulate, withdrawing money on behalf of two Muslim merchants—a Turkmen, ʿAbd al-Karīm Bāy, and a Hazara, Qambar ʿAlī—without informing the Foreign Directorate, in violation of regulations requiring ministry authorisation for all foreign contact. When questioned, both Muslim merchants admitted the transactions but framed them as procedural mistakes. Provincial authorities deemed these explanations insufficient.
The report then escalates from procedural violation to political threat. Imanuel and his brothers are described as ‘suspect’ (mushtabih), with speculation that Imanuel ‘has been from the Russian side’ or could easily be recruited as an agent. The language shifts from evidence to assumption: ‘the Russians can easily make him one of their own and obtain through him whatever aims they have’. Although the family possessed Afghan identity documents, the report describes them as only ‘in appearance our nationals’ (dar ẓāhir ṭābaʿa-yi mā), suggesting that their official Afghan status masked questionable loyalty.
The report closes with explicit cultural hostility disguised as administrative concern:
Merely seeing a stranger (ajnabī), they immediately swarm over his face like flies (magas). This community (qaum) have already shared their experiences with the entire world. Is it necessary for us to go through the same experiment? My purpose in writing is not out of prejudice against them, but from an administrative point of view they are harmful.Footnote 65
The conclusion recommends expulsion and economic isolation:
If the esteemed ministry deems it proper, it would be beneficial to expel (tabʿīd) these Jews from the frontier regions and keep them closer to the centre [Kabul]—thus we would be free from their dangers. The Ministry of Commerce should also define and limit the scope of their trade, otherwise they will monopolise all commerce from our merchants. If only our merchants knew modern commerce or were patriotic enough to avoid mixing with them! But on the contrary, the Jews have already subjugated them. Therefore, I humbly request that an immediate and decisive order be issued.Footnote 66
While the report shows no evidence of espionage, it illustrates how the state tracked individuals through their movements and economic activities. The actual procedural violations—Imanuel visiting the consulate without permission, Jews hosting a German national—are less important than the report’s ultimate purpose: recommending expulsion and economic isolation. The argument invokes vague references to how ‘the world’ has dealt with Jews, shaped by awareness of Bolshevik policies and Soviet Jewish refugees who fled to Afghanistan, particularly Mazar-i Sharif, after the Bolshevik takeover of Central Asia.Footnote 67
Viewed across the period from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān through the late 1920s, a pattern emerges. Accusations of Jews ‘spying for Russians’ reflected bureaucratic anxieties shaped by imperial rivalry, border insecurity, and state-building. Jewish economic intermediary roles were repeatedly reinterpreted as security threats. The Mūsā Gul affair and the Imanuel report represent moments within a broader genealogy of suspicion in which Jewish identity became entangled with the Afghan state’s efforts to assert sovereignty amid regional instability.
The genealogy of suspicion
The language and logic of this report did not emerge from nowhere. To understand it, it is necessary to trace the administrative genealogy of suspicion towards Jewish merchants that had been accumulating within Afghan state institutions since the late nineteenth century—a genealogy shaped as much by imperial rivalry as by any internal Afghan dynamic, and one that extended well beyond the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān into the Ḥabīb Allāh and Amani periods.
Espionage accusations in early twentieth-century Afghanistan were not unique to Jews—Muslim merchants and officials were equally subject to the state’s surveillance apparatus. What distinguished the Jewish experience was the cumulative and institutional nature of the suspicion directed at them specifically as cross-border commercial intermediaries.
The structural origins of this suspicion lay in the imperial entanglement of Jewish merchants in British and Russian ambitions—a dynamic that Bernard Lewis identified more broadly across the Muslim world as a ‘new tripartite relationship of the West, Islam and the Jews’ in which Jewish communities became entangled in imperial rivalries.Footnote 68 Both empires relied heavily on multilingual local intermediaries who could move across political and cultural boundaries, and Jews—embedded in commercial networks spanning Afghanistan, Central Asia, Persia, and India—were frequently drawn into these roles. British intelligence missions to Kabul, Bukhara, Kokand, and Khiva during the early nineteenth century illustrate this pattern. During the First Anglo-Afghan War, two Jewish brothers from Mashhad, Mulla Mūsā Nathan and Mulla Ibrahim Nathan, supported British operations by providing funds, transmitting intelligence, and assisting British prisoners held in Kabul.Footnote 69 Such involvement inevitably placed local Jews under scrutiny by both imperial rivals and the Afghan state itself. British colonial financial policies meanwhile systematically favoured Indian commercial networks over Afghan ones, producing commercial imbalancesFootnote 70 that generated lasting resentments and shaped the environment in which Hindu, Sikh, and Jewish merchants operated.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, this scrutiny was institutionalised through the Afghan state’s expanding surveillance apparatus. During the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, state-building combined territorial consolidation with unprecedented expansion of internal intelligence. Spies infiltrated every sector of Afghan society,Footnote 71 particularly the bazaars, where merchants were influential and information circulated quickly.Footnote 72 As Thomas Barfield argues, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s policies cast a ‘zombie-like shadow’ that shaped Afghan politics long after his death.Footnote 73 Afghan espionage practices demonstrate that suspicion of foreign influence was not abstract. In 1901, concerned about Russian expansion, the Afghan court initiated covert intelligence operations against Russian Turkestan from Herat and Mazar-i Sharif.Footnote 74 By 1909–1910, emir Ḥabīb Allāh had promulgated a manual for ‘overt news writers’ dispatched throughout the country to monitor governors, judges, and police chiefs, with a specific clause requiring surveillance of foreigners—merchants, military personnel, and migrants.Footnote 75 These overt agents were themselves monitored by secret agents (mukhbirān-i khafīya) reporting directly to the emir.Footnote 76
Within this climate, Jews too became targets of espionage accusations. One prominent case involved Āqājān (Reuven ben Shlomo Cohen), the kalāntar of Herat’s Jewish community since 1893.Footnote 77 In late 1899, he was arrested on charges of spying for Tsarist Russia, transported to Kabul in chains, and had his property confiscated.Footnote 78 The archival record surrounding his arrest—involving a disputed commercial debt claim that moved through Persian, British, and Afghan diplomatic channels before reaching the Kabul court—illustrates with particular clarity how imperial intermediaries and Afghan legal authority became entangled in cases involving Jewish merchants.Footnote 79 He remained imprisoned until 1905, when Ḥabīb Allāh ordered his release and reinstated him as communal leader.Footnote 80 In late 1898, another Jewish merchant, Mullāh Ṣāfī, was arrested while travelling between Balkh and Herat, accused of transmitting information to Russian officials. After being transferred to Kabul, he ‘met the punishment he deserved’.Footnote 81 Suspicion extended beyond proven cases. In one incident, a Muslim pilgrim claiming to be Pashtun was ordered to be escorted to Farah to verify his identity, with instructions that if his claim proved false, authorities in Kabul should determine whether he was ‘not a Jew’.Footnote 82 In another case, when a suspected European spy requested a Jewish interpreter during interrogation, the governor of Herat prohibited any Jewish involvement, fearing sympathetic collusion. The suspect died in custody in Kabul.Footnote 83 British intelligence reinforced this climate directly. In 1913, the British Consulate in Mashhad warned Afghan authorities about alleged espionage on behalf of Russia, naming several suspects, including two Jews.Footnote 84 The significance of this episode lies in the mechanism it reveals: British imperial authorities were actively transmitting their own classificatory anxieties about Jewish cross-border activity to Afghan administrative channels. Afghan officials thus received intelligence about Jewish merchants from both directions—from their own surveillance apparatus and from a foreign imperial power with its own strategic interests. That the British had simultaneously relied on Jewish intermediaries for their own intelligence operations, as the Nathan brothers case illustrates, captures precisely the double bind Lewis identified: Jewish communities were useful to empires and suspect to states, often as a result of the same cross-border activities.
Expulsion, economic isolation, and the fate of Mūsā Gul
The Kalakānī revolt of 1929 brought nine months of political anarchy and severe economic disruption. Mūsā Gul’s factories were damaged and partially burned during the upheaval. This damage to his factories—whether the result of deliberate targeting or the general disorder of the interregnum—marked the definitive end of his industrial career in the north. After Muḥammad Nādir seized power later that year, Mūsā Gul submitted petitions to the Ministry of Commerce seeking to revive his enterprises, requesting financial assistance and state credit (muʿāwanat wa taqāwī) to repair his cotton-ginning and soap-making facilities. The request was rejected on the grounds of the state’s poor financial condition.Footnote 85
Final attempts at industrial revival (1929–1933)
For a brief period after Nadir Shah’s consolidation, Jewish merchants could still operate in northern Afghanistan. In 1931, over a hundred merchants—including eight Jewish traders—gathered in Mazar-i Sharif to establish a Commercial Disputes Settlement Directorate.Footnote 86 During this window, Mūsā Gul continued petitioning. After being refused a loan, he proposed an ambitious state monopoly (inḥisār) over cotton processing in Afghan Turkestan, pledging 10,000–30,000 Afghanis annually in revenue.Footnote 87 Prime minister Muḥammad Hāshim rejected the proposal in November 1931, stating it would ‘impose excessive hardship on the people’.Footnote 88 Whether this rejection reflected awareness of the earlier accusations by local artisans, the state’s broader caution following the instability of the Kalakānī interregnum, or simply the difficult financial circumstances of the new regime, the documents do not make clear.
Undeterred, Mūsā Gul sought permission to import lapis lazuli cutting (māshīn-e sang-i lājaward) and spinning machines (māshīn-i nakh-tābī) to establish manufacturing in Kabul, requesting up to 50,000 Afghanis in state credit or financing through the Stock Exchange Company (Shirkat-i Āshāmī). For the spinning machine, he requested a business licence and temporary permission to employ a German engineer to train Afghan replacements. The prime minister ruled that permission would be granted only if Mūsā Gul financed the project entirely by himself.Footnote 89 Whether he succeeded remains unknown. That his final proposals focused on Kabul rather than Mazar-i Sharif suggests recognition of diminishing prospects in the northern border region.Footnote 90
ʿAbd al-Majīd Zābulī and economic restructuring
The question of how to reorganise Afghan commerce—and the role of minority merchants within it—gained new urgency after Nadir Shah’s consolidation. Muḥammad Hāshim and ʿAbd al-Majīd Zābulī knew each other from Moscow, where both had operated during the 1920s. While in Berlin, Zābulī prepared a detailed report assessing Afghanistan’s economy and proposing reforms modelled on Soviet Karakul trade practices.Footnote 91 His exposure to both Soviet and European nationalist economic thinking shaped the analytical categories through which he interpreted Afghanistan’s commercial landscape upon his return, his vocabulary of national economic sovereignty and foreign hands that must be withdrawn from national trade echoing the broader repertoire of mid twentieth-century nationalist economic thought.
Zābulī’s report explicitly ranked merchant groups by commercial success: first Jews, second Iranians, third Hindus, fourth Afghans. He asserted that Jews and Iranians, ‘taking advantage of our disorder and lack of knowledge’, manipulated prices to secure the highest-quality goods while leaving inferior merchandise for Afghan traders, and insisted that ‘the hand of foreigners must be withdrawn from [national trade] activities’.Footnote 92 Zābulī made no distinction between local and foreign Jews, arguing that minority merchants reinvested profits abroad rather than in Afghanistan.Footnote 93
After returning to Kabul, Zābulī emerged as the central architect of Afghan economic reform, establishing the Afghan National Bank (1933) and serving as minister of the national economy from the mid 1930s. His reform programme centred on reorganising trade through state monopolies and centralised procurement, establishing price-setting bodies and a Commercial Council (Majlis-i Tujārātī) to draft regulations. The administrative structures that emerged from these reforms were effectively closed to Jewish participation: the names and lists of individuals recorded in the almanacs for the relevant years show barely any Jewish presence among those appointed to the new commercial institutions and regulatory bodies. This is notable given that Zābulī had himself acknowledged Jewish commercial knowledge and expertise in his report—their absence from the new institutions was thus less a judgement on their competence than a reflection of the nationalist logic that defined economic citizenship in terms that excluded them regardless of their qualifications.
The National Jewish Company
As direct investment became increasingly difficult, some Jewish merchants invested through Muslim partners.Footnote 94 In 1940–1941, the Shirkat-i Kalīmiyān-i Waṭan (National Jewish Company)Footnote 95 was established under Bank-i Millī supervision, with 300,000 Afghanis in capital and an annual export quota of 40,000 lambskins assigned to Herat’s Jewish community.Footnote 96 The company’s nominally voluntary character masked coercive practices. Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Farhang recounts in his memoir travelling to Herat with the deputy director of the National Bank to organise the company: when two Herati Jewish merchants refused to purchase shares, one (Nasir Gad) was detained on a verbal order to compel compliance.Footnote 97 Family recollections corroborate this: Nasir’s son recalls that ‘when I was born, my father was in prison’, briefly released for the brit milah after months of imprisonment.Footnote 98 Haim Abraham recalls that while working in Kabul’s Sarāy-i Muḥammad Qumī, Jewish merchants sold primarily Russian fabrics. The government created a syndicate under the Minister of Finance, ʿAbd al-Majīd, to import Russian goods and distribute them through designated channels. Jews wishing to trade in these goods were instructed to ‘give a sum of money to the government in exchange for permission’. In response, the shirkat was formed, appointing a manager and pooling resources—Haim’s family invested 5,000 Afghanis.Footnote 99 The company remained active until at least 1945 with modest operations,Footnote 100 then dissolved, with invested capital reportedly lost. As Haim Abraham later recalled, ‘after a few years the company disbanded, and all the money invested went down the drain’.Footnote 101
The National Jewish Company must be understood as the institutional endpoint of the process that Zābulī’s reforms initiated—not the exclusion of Jewish merchants from Afghan commercial life but their incorporation into a supervised, restricted, and ultimately extractive corporate structure. By organising Jewish enterprise into a regulated company under National Bank oversight, the state limited its economic autonomy while maintaining access to Jewish commercial expertise and capital on its own terms. The difference between Mūsā Gul’s 1926 participation in the Shirkat-i Amānī as a voluntary investor with a 10 per cent share and an influence on the enterprise’s direction, and the coerced participation of Jewish merchants in the Shirkat-i Kalīmiyān-i Waṭan 15 years later measures the full distance travelled in a single generation.
Mūsā Gul’s final years (1933–1948)
After the expulsion order of September 1933, Mūsā Gul relocated to Kabul. His petitions for loans had been rejected and his monopoly proposals denied. The cotton company he had envisioned was eventually established by state-backed investors without his participation. In Kabul, what followed was prolonged indebtedness. According to his son David Vardi, ‘for eighteen years, our family faced hardship and urgent demands for repayment. My elder brother, Baba Jan, acted as guarantor and was required to report weekly to the police in Kabul to ensure the family did not flee.’Footnote 102 Whether Mūsā Gul invested in the National Jewish Company or in any other shirkat through Muslim partners during these years remains unknown.
Mūsā Gul died in Kabul in 1948. Abe Mor, born in Kabul in the late 1930s, recalled that Jews mourned him collectively. ‘Although his businesses had been destroyed by that time,’ Mor emphasised, ‘Mūsā Gul remained an influential and respected figure within the community until the end of his life.’Footnote 103 His son David Vardi noted decades later that ‘to this day, we retain deeds to properties in Mazar-i Sharif’Footnote 104—a reminder of the industrial venture that had briefly made a Jewish merchant from Herat a pioneer of Afghanistan’s economic modernisation. Further material on Mūsā Gul circulates in family and community memory, distinct from the interview testimony cited above. A retrospective account by his son David Vardi recalls him as a leading industrialist with a close relationship to King Amān Allāh; its specific figures—a workforce of 200 imported Russian craftsmen, a factory employing 2,500 people—exceed the scale documented in the archival record and should be read as family memory rather than verified fact.Footnote 105 Community tradition also holds that Mūsā Gul imported a used Soviet aeroplane to Kabul as a gift to the king, said to have been the first in the Afghan kingdom, to help offset his debts, and that Amān Allāh entrusted him with the royal treasury for transport to Mashhad during his 1929 flight from Afghanistan. None of these claims finds support in the available archival record; all three are noted here as evidence of the significant place Mūsā Gul continues to occupy in Afghan-Jewish communal memory.
Conclusion
This article has traced the career of Mūsā Gul—a Herati, Persian-speaking Jew and Afghan national who operated across multiple social and economic spheres—to investigate the changing relationship between Jewish merchants and the Afghan state in the first half of the twentieth century. For much of his career he was an integral part of Afghanistan’s commercial and civic life, trading across imperial frontiers, building the country’s first private industrial factories, and advising state officials on monetary policy. It was only from the late 1920s onwards that the conditions supporting his activities were progressively eroded, culminating in the expulsion of Jews from northern Afghanistan in 1933 and the restrictions of the following decade. His trajectory illustrates both the possibilities that existed for Jewish merchants during the Amani period and the structural processes that gradually narrowed them.
Those processes were multiple and intersecting. Imperial rivalries between Britain and Russia had long positioned Jewish merchants as commercially useful yet institutionally suspect, generating a climate of surveillance and espionage accusations that the Afghan state institutionalised across successive reigns. The resistance of local artisanal producers to mechanisation added a layer of economic pressure that fused, in 1928, with existing political suspicions. The nationalist economic reforms of the 1930s, shaped in part by Zābulī’s exposure to Soviet and European models of state-directed development, then centralised commerce within institutions from which non-Muslim minorities were effectively excluded—not through formal prohibition, but through the logic of national commercial loyalty that defined the new economic order. Jews were not formally prohibited from trade, but they were not part of the system.
The kind of monopoly Mūsā Gul had envisioned was later realised by state-sponsored companies, but without his participation. These layers did not operate independently—they reinforced one another in ways that the existing scholarly debate, focused variously on Nazi influences, indigenous antisemitism, or nativist economic ideology, has not fully captured. What Mūsā Gul’s career adds to that history is a body of archival evidence precise enough to show how the process worked—not as the application of a single ideology but as the convergence of imperial legacies, local economic pressures, and nationalist institutional reform, each reinforcing the others across decades. Through his fragmentary record—from maḥalla-gard to industrial investor, from flexible commercial environment to centralised nationalist economy, from adviser to the state to debtor under surveillance—we see how state-building, economic reform, imperial legacies, and competing visions of national belonging reshaped markets, identities, and ultimately the place of a centuries-old Jewish community within Afghanistan.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Eti Amit, Osnat Gad, Amnon Gad, Christoph Hopp, Ali Karimi, Thomas Loy, Abe Mor, Masuma Nazari, Ben-Zion Yehoshua-Raz, David Vardi, and Ze’ev Yekutiel for their generous assistance during the research for this article, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers. Any remaining errors are my own. This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), Grant No. 23–08007K.
Conflicts of interest
None.
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