The Long Journey. Geographic and Social Mobility along the Example of Bukharan Jews in the 20th Century

Crossroads Asia Lecture by Thomas Loy (HU Berlin) at ZEF in Bonn

The 20th century radically changed the world of the Jews of Central Asia, commonly known as “Bukharan Jews”. Political turns along with changing infrastructures and technical novelties had a strong impact on their mobility. Until the early 20th century Jews from the Bukharan Emirate and Afghanistan were attracted to Russian Turkestan. Parallel to the influx of Jews from various regions, in the late 19th century a first wave of Jewish emigration from Central Asia occurred. Until World War I, Jews from Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and other cities moved to Palestine. The Bolshevik revolution and the first years of Soviet rule brought many social and economic changes and caused a wave of flight from the region until the Soviet authorities managed to seal their Central Asian borders in the mid-1930s and stopped what they regarded as illegal emigration. For those Jews who stayed in the Soviet Union new options and destinations occurred within the Soviet borders. The 1970s saw a legal mass exodus of Bukharan Jews from Central Asia. It was completed in the 1990s, after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Based on autobiographical narrations and memoirs the paper aims at depicting the complexity and heterogeneity of the Jewish Diaspora in Central Asia in the 20th Century. It highlights the changing options and restrictions of mobility that occurred for these Jews in the Soviet peroid.

Time and location: 22 May 2013, 11-12.30, at ZEF Bonn, right conference room (ground floor).