The Jewish triangle
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran – “The Jewish triangle”
The Persian-speaking Jewish communities wedged between Afghanistan, Iran, and the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have received very little scholarly attention. Even in the modern period, we face significant gaps in the Jewish historical narrative and blank spots on the Jewish map of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran.
For centuries, the Jews of Central Asia were part of a broader Persianate world that thrived along the Silk Roads. This region was divided into three major states: the Safavid, the Mughal, and the Uzbek empires. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Persian-speaking Jewish communities became part of (Qajar) Iran, (Durrani) Afghanistan, the Bukharan Emirate, and (Russian) Turkestan. Islamic historiography and mapping refer to this eastern heartland of the medieval Muslim world, with its urban centers such as Mashhad, Herat, Balkh, Merv, Bukhara, and Samarkand, as Khurasan (“the land of the rising sun”). Jews sometimes referred to this vast area as the “Jewish Triangle.”
The end of the Jewish Triangle is closely linked to the restrictive policies of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan’s nationalization efforts in the early 1930s. These measures aimed to bring the trade of essential goods under state control, which deprived Jews in Afghanistan of the very basis of their livelihood. Consequently, the political and economic strategies of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union effectively dislocated the traditional Jewish commercial and cultural networks in the border region between Afghanistan, Iran, and Soviet Central Asia and dismantled what was once the Jewish Triangle.
After the founding of the state of Israel, most Jews emigrated from Afghanistan. The last families left Kabul in the early 1980s. The remaining Jews of Mashhad, who had kept their faith in secret, also left Iran between the 1940s and the 1980s. The borders of the Soviet Union remained closed. Only in the 1970s the Soviet government allowed Jewish citizens to leave. Within a decade, around 250,000 Soviet Jews had emigrated, primarily to Israel and the United States, among them many Bukharan Jews. However, in the early-1980s, Moscow stopped the first wave of legal Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. The mass exodus from Central Asia took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, there are no Jews left in Mashhad, in Afghanistan, or in most towns of former Soviet Central Asia. Most live in Israel and the United States of America.
The Project
We argue that this historical-geographical framework is still helpful in understanding and describing the history of the Persian-speaking Jewish communities in the early 20th century. So far, the history and historiography of these groups have been divided according to the borders of modern nation-states. In the literature, we read about the Jews of Iran, the Jews of Afghanistan, and the so-called Bukharan Jews—that is, those Central Asian Jews who came under Russian rule in the late nineteenth century, followed by Soviet rule from the 1920s.
These modern narratives suggest the existence of culturally homogenous and isolated communities, neglecting their broad cultural and linguistic commonalities and overlapping family biographies. Colonial, Soviet, and post-Soviet perspectives on and narratives of the region and its population, as well as a Eurocentric and Israel-centred Diaspora approach, have contributed heavily to these misunderstandings. These limited narratives also fed back into an exclusive self-consciousness of the respective Jewish groups, who developed their own distinct “national” group identities only after leaving their home countries in the twentieth century.
The framework of modern nation-states is insufficient to fully capture the diverse past and present of Persian-speaking Jewish communities, which have unique local experiences and intertwined histories. We argue that the spatial concept of the “Jewish Triangle”—comprising its key cities, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Herat, Mashhad, and many others—up to the 1930s provides a more effective framework for understanding the connections between these communities and their Muslim neighbors. To illustrate the links, disruptions, and mobility within Jewish life in the regions of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, we follow and examine several family histories that span the entire area.
Places and Spaces
At the same time, we will also stress the importance of locality. The Jews of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran spoke local varieties of Persian, which they wrote in the Hebrew script—so-called Judeo-Persian. Texts written in Judeo-Persian have been documented as far back as the 8th century, making them the oldest preserved written documents in New Persian. Like the Persian spoken by Muslims, the Judeo-Persian varieties of the “Jewish Triangle” varied from region to region and town to town. Depending on their place of residence, Persian-speaking Jews also differed in clothing, cuisine, and other cultural features, such as customs, art, and music. Deeply influenced by their Muslim cultural environment, they shared much of their Muslim neighbors’ culture, traditions, and tastes, including their language and literature.
A significant shift in population within the “Jewish triangle” began in 1839, when in Mashhad (in northeastern Iran), a group of Muslims attacked the town’s Jewish quarter and set fire to the synagogue. To prevent further escalation of violence against the Jews, Islamic religious leaders intervened and promised the rioters that the entire Jewish community of Mashhad would convert to Islam. With this forced conversion, the Jewish community of Mashhad officially ceased to exist, and the converts became known as “New Muslims” (Jadid al-Islam). Many of these converts became Muslims outwardly but maintained their Jewish faith and observed their religious laws and ceremonies at home and in secret. Others opted for emigration and moved towards neighboring Herat and other cities in northern Afghanistan and Central Asia. In Herat, these refugees became the dominant element in the Jewish community and turned the community there into the largest Jewish community in Afghanistan. Among Persian-speaking Jewish communities, the Jews of Afghanistan remain the least studied and least known.
Connections and Disruptions
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews considered Herat, Mashhad, and Bukhara sister cities. Merchants were active within the Jewish Triangle, maintaining connections between its major cities and surrounding towns with Jewish populations. Cross-border and inter-city marriages were quite common. Jews even founded new communities when the political and economic circumstances seemed favorable and more suitable for them being Jewish. The Russian conquest of Central Asia and the economic boom supported by the region’s connection to the Empire’s railroad network also brought new opportunities for Jews. The communities in Merv, Samarkand, and the Ferghana Valley grew considerably. Until the Russian Revolution, Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs were highly successful, with some families belonging to the richest classes in the Empire.
However, some Jews who had left the Triangle before the arrival of the Bolsheviks radically changed the political landscape. In the 1880s, Jews from Central Asia purchased land and established a colony outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. This new settlement quickly became the main center of book production for the Persianate Jews. Before the First World War, there was a lively exchange of people, goods, and ideas between the “Bukharan neighborhood” (Shekhunat ha-Bukharim) in Ottoman Palestine, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran.
The end of the European Empires also heavily affected the lives of Persianate Jews. Connections between Central Asia and Palestine were cut. The community in Jerusalem suffered bitterly. In Central Asia, the Bolshevik takeover was a catastrophe for the wealthy class of Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs. The Emirate of Bukhara was dissolved, and in 1924, the map of Central Asia was redrawn according to Stalin’s ideas of nation and nationality. For the next decade, a secular culture of the “national minority” of so-called native Jews was forged and supported by the Soviet state. At the same time, religious leaders were persecuted, and private entrepreneurship was banned. By the mid-1930s, when the southern borders with Afghanistan and Iran were finally sealed, about one-tenth of the “native Jews” had fled from Soviet Central Asia. This “Bukharan Jewish refugee crisis” (Sara Koplik) also led to the expulsion of the native Jewish population of northern Afghanistan and the end of the Jewish Triangle.
Publications:
Thomas Loy
Article: The End of the ‘Jewish Triangle’. Geography and Mobility in Central Asia. In: Jewish Communities in Modern Asia. Their Rise, Demise and Resurgence. Ed. Rotem Kowner. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023, pp. 25-46. (Book Chapter)
Abstract: This article introduces the concept of the Jewish Triangle as a lens to better understand the Jewish history of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia.
Article: ‘Linguistic compatriots’: on the relationship between Tajik and Judeo-Tajik language and literature, Central Asian Survey, (Published online: 03 Jun 2024)
doi: 10.1080/02634937.2024.2342492
Abstract: This article follows the traces of Tajik and Judeo-Tajik literature in the early Soviet period and compares some prominent and some rather unknown works and biographies of Tajik and Bukharan Jewish writers.
Article: Redkollegiia. In: Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm: A Reader. Eds. Christine Noelle-Karimi, Thomas Loy, Roxane Haag-Higuchi. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press 2024, pp. 329-345. (Book Chapter)
Abstract: This chapter deals with the preface to the Almanac of Local Jewish Belles Lettres, an anthology of Bukharan Jewish poets and prose writers published in Tashkent in 1934. Next to short biographical accounts of the three editors of the Almanac (the so called Redkollegiia) the article provides a translation of the preface and a contextualisation of this first anthology of Judeo-Tajik Soviet literature.
Article (forthcoming / in translation): The Jewish Triangle: Connections and Disruptions in Persianate Jewish Life during the 19th and 20th Centuries (in Czech / Novy Orient)
Abstract: This article in Czech gives a short overview and outline of our current research project.
Presentations:
Thomas Loy: Invited talk (11 January 2024, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany).
Title presentation: Jüdisches Zentralasien Die Bucharischen Juden im 19 und 20. Jhd.
Thomas Loy: Workshop participation (1-2 February 2024, FU Berlin, Germany): Borderland Capitalisms Reconsidered. Economic Practices and Contested Ressources in (Post) Imperial Siberia and Central Asia, 1822-1929. Title presentation: Haim Abraham: Borderland Encounters and Economic Practices of a Jewish Merchant between Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia.
Thomas Loy: Conference participation (7-9 June 2024, Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia. In cooperation with the Jewish Museum Moscow and the Ben Zvi Institute Jerusalem): At the Crossroads of Cultures: The Jews of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Title presentation: Jewish Merv – Colonial Encounters & Economic Practices between Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran.
Thomas Loy: Invited talk – Roundtable event (11 July 2024, SOAS, London, Great Britain): The Afterlives of Urban Muslim Asia. Title presentation: Bukharan Jewish photographic heritage.
Ahmad Azizy and Thomas Loy: Organizing and conducting the Workshop (6-7 October 2024, Prague): Jews in Central Asia & the Caucasus. Cross Border and Power Relations in an Imperial Setting. Participants: Chen Bram (Jerusalem), Christoph Hopp (Berlin), Zeev Levin (on zoom, Jerusalem). One outcome is the additional publication project Translating Hebrew Scholarship on CA Jews.
Thomas Loy: Conference participation (7-11 January, CESS/ESCAS meeting, Lisbon, Portugal). Geopolitics, Migrations and Identities in Central Asia. (Panel: Adaptation and resilience: Jewish migrations to, from, and within Central Asia in the 20th
Century) Title presentation: Mobility within – Bukharan Jewish migration in Central Asia (early 20th century).