History
The first primary written account of Jews in Central Asia dates to the beginning of the 4th century CE. It is recalled in the Talmud by Rabbi Shmuel bar Bisna, a member of the Talmudic academy in Pumbeditha, who traveled to Margiana (present-day Merv in Turkmenistan) and feared that the wine and alcohol produced by local Jews was not kosher. The presence of Jewish communities in Merv is also proven by Jewish writings on ossuaries from the 5th and 6th centuries, uncovered between 1954 and 1956.
Having developed over the millennia from Spanish Jewish and northeastern Persian and Arab Jewish communities, this Central Asian community has experienced alternating periods of freedom and prosperity, as well as periods of oppression. With the establishment of the Silk Road between China and the West in the 2nd century BCE that lasted well into the 16th century, many Jews flocked to the Emirate of Bukhara and played a great role in its development. After the Babylonian exile, they came under the Persian Empire, as they prospered and spread through the area. However, around the 5th century, began a period of persecution. Famous Jewish academies in Babylon were closed, while many Jews were killed and expelled (see Mishnah). After Arab Muslim conquest in the early 8th century, Jews (as well as Christians) were considered Dhimmis and were forced, among other things, to pay the jizya head tax. The Mongol invasion in the 13th century also adversely affected the Jews of Bukhara.
Read more about this topic: Bukharian Jewish
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)