The Jewish triangle blog archive

Persian-speaking Jews active in Eastern or Chinese Turkestan (modern-day Xinjiang, China) in the 19th and early 20th centuries represent a little-known and under-researched part of Jewish diaspora history. ...

This blog entry examines the gradual disappearance of visible markers of Jewish life in urban Uzbekistan. Drawing on field observations from Samarkand, Marg’ilon, and Kokand alongside existing scholarship, it argues that the erosion of Jewish architectural heritage reflects broader state-led ...

In late November 1933, at the start of his journey from Herat to Balkh, the British travel writer, art critic, and historian Robert Byron on The Road to Oxiana encountered groups of Jews who were traveling in the opposite direction – not as travelers, but as refugees crammed onto trucks. ...

This text is a revised and shortened version of an article that first appeared in the Festschrift für Ingeborg Baldauf (2021). It portrays and analyses the story of the Arabov family. ...

In 1910, a correspondent of the Chicago Record-Herald travelled through Russian Turkestan along the Trans-Caspian railway with major stops in Ashkhabad, Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Kokand. ...

Thomas Loy (25-01-2026) In 2004, I began my PhD project on the history of the Bukharan Jews. A year later, I visited Samarkand and made the acquaintance of Nina Ishaqova and her husband, Boris. ...

Monsieur Moshe: A Bukharan Jew in the Service of the Afghan Embassy in Moscow Ahmad Azizy The story of Monsieur Moshe appears in Amīr ud-Dīn Shansab’s autobiography, Khaṭirāt: Hashtād Sāl Zindagī Yak Afghān (Memoirs: Eighty Years in the Life of an Afghan), first published in Peshawar in 1979 ...

Christoph Hopp In October and November 1888, Shmuel Moshe Rivlin published a series of five reports from Bukhara in the Hebrew periodical ha-Melits, called “Letters from Bukhara.” Ha-Melits was issued six times a week in Saint Petersburg. ...

The Forgotten Grave: Payrav Sulaymoni and the Untold Stories of Jewish Converts in Central Asia On June 9, 1933, the famous Tajik literary figure Payrav (Otajon) Sulaymoni died of typhoid fever in Samarkand. He left behind two daughters. ...

Haim Abraham’s Afghan Passports Haim (Aghajan) Abraham was born in 1897 or 1898 in the city of Marv, located in the Transcaspian oblast of Russian Turkestan. ...

The chapter presented here briefly summarizes the events and experiences of the Bachaev family in the city of Kokand in 1918. Mordekhai was six years old at the time. ...

Mordekhay Bachaev: “In the Stone Sack” – A Literary Legacy Mordekhay Bachaev’s two-volume memoir “Dar juvoli Sangin” (In the Stone Sack) documents his life from 1918 to 1944. ...

As part of our field and archival research in New York in November 2024, we explored the religious and cultural institutions of the Bukharan Jewish community in the city. One important institution in this effort was the Bukharan Jewish Museum, located in Rego Park, Queens. Image 1. ...

Secondary literature on the Jewish community in Afghanistan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries repeatedly emphasizes that hardly any written testimony produced by the community itself has survived (or remains in use). ...