JEWISH-TAJIK LANGUAGE, colloquial and literary language of Bukharian Jews. The number of speakers of the Jewish-Tajik language in the USSR before the start of the mass repatriation of Bukharian Jews to Israel (1972-73) was (according to estimates based on Soviet censuses) about 30 thousand people.
The Jewish-Tajik language belongs to the northern group of dialects of the Tajik language, which belongs to the Iranian group of languages and is, along with modern Persian and Dari (Farsi-kebuli), one of the three independently developing "descendants" of the classical Persian language. There are practically no dialects or dialects in the Jewish-Tajik language, although in the speech of a number of Bukharian Jews - natives of Tashkent and the Ferghana Valley, one can trace some phonetic features that are not characteristic of the phonetics of the Jewish-Tajik language in other places. At the phonological level, the Hebrew-Tajik language is characterized by the presence of pharyngeals /c/ and /ḥ/, including in words of non-Semitic, that is, non-Arabic and non-Hebrew-Aramaic origin (/ḥ/ is also found in some southern dialects of the Tajik language, but only in words , borrowed from Arabic), as well as a set of specific narrative, interrogative and exclamatory intonations, very different from similar intonations in the Tajik language. At the level of morphology, the Hebrew-Tajik language is characterized by some differences in verbal inflection and a greater limitation of a number of groups of nominal affixes. The syntax of the Jewish-Tajik language is characterized - in comparison with the syntax of the Tajik language - on the one hand, by greater freedom, on the other hand, by a smaller set of subordinate clauses. The vocabulary includes some (relatively small compared to a number of other Jewish languages) number of borrowings from Hebrew, both religious and ritual (beγed - tallit-katan) and everyday nature (šulḥon - low "eastern" table), as well as a number of Iranian words language fund, obsolete in the Tajik language, or possessing in the Jewish-Tajik language more ancient semantics, forgotten in the Tajik language.
Jewish-Tajik uses the Hebrew alphabet (the so-called oriental Rashi script in writing and square script in print). In 1929–40 the written Hebrew-Tajik language in the USSR used the Latin alphabet. Until the 19th century the literature of the Bukharian Jews continued to be created in the classical Jewish-Persian language and was part of the Jewish-Persian literature. The first literary monument of Bukharian Jews, written in a language that has phonetic, morphological and lexical characteristics of the Jewish-Tajik language, is the poem by Ibrahim ibn Abi-l-Khayr "Khudoydodoma" ("The Book of Khudoydod", early 19th century), dedicated to a Jew from Bukhara, who preferred death to conversion to Islam. The foundations of the literary Jewish-Tajik language were laid at the end of the 19th century. in Jerusalem by Rabbi Shim'on Khakham (1843-1910), the founder of a peculiar literary school, which was mainly engaged in translations from Hebrew into the Jewish-Tajik language of books of both religious and secular content, including works of Eastern European X askals. From the end of 1880 to 1914, over 100 books in the Jewish-Tajik language were published in Jerusalem - the result of the intensive translation work of Shim'on Khakham and a number of his associates and students. In Russia of this period, books in the Jewish-Tajik language were practically not published, but in 1910-16. in the city of Skobelev (now Ferghana), the Jewish-Tajik newspaper Rahamim was published.
In 1922–40 in the USSR there was a network of schools in the Jewish-Tajik language. In the 1920s and 30s. a number of periodicals were published and fiction in this language existed (see Jewish-Tajik literature), since 1932 a theater functioned in Samarkand. Any cultural and pedagogical activity in the Jewish-Tajik language in the USSR was terminated in 1940, and it became only a language of oral communication. This was one of the main factors that led to the fact that by the 70s. of the last century, even for significant parts of the middle generation of Bukharian Jews, the Jewish-Tajik language was only the language of the hearth. The younger generation preferred Russian to Jewish-Tajik and as a spoken language, children in many families spoke it only passively or did not speak it at all.
Editions in the Jewish-Tajik language were published sporadically in Israel in the 1950s and 60s. With the repatriation of Bukharian Jews to Israel in the 1970s. regular Israeli radio broadcasts began in the Jewish-Tajik language, from 1973 to 1986 the monthly bulletin "Thiya", an organ of the Union of immigrants from Bukhara, was published. In 1979, a book of poems by Muhiba (M. Bachaev) was published in Jerusalem in the Hebrew-Tajik language, and in 1981, a book of poems by Shulamit Tiglyaeva (a native of Jerusalem, taken by her parents to Bukhara as a child) was published in Tel Aviv; in 1934 . repatriated to Eretz Israel).
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BUKHARA JEWS (Central Asian Jews, Bukhori, Isroil or Yahudi) - a sub-ethnic group that lived at the time of Russia's conquest of Central Asia in the cities of the Kokand Khanate, the Bukhara Emirate and the Khiva Khanate; historically carriers of the Bukharian-Jewish dialect.
Origin of the term "Bukharian Jews"
European travelers, who before the Russian period visited places where there was a Jewish school and a prayer house (Beit Knesset), called them Bukharian Jews. However, when Russian power was established, when the Emirate of Bukhara was still a semi-independent vassal, the term appeared in Russian documentsBukharan Jews. They were called citizens of the Emirate of Bukhara, who fled as a result of religious oppression from the emirate to the border regions, completely controlled by the Russian authorities. Later, in Soviet times, the term was fixed as an ethnic definition, although the passports were written simply as Jews.
Communication languages
The traditional spoken language, called Bukharian, is a Bukharian-Jewish variety of the Samarkand-Bukharian dialect of Farsi or the Jewish dialect of the Tajik language. Other languages: Hebrew, Uzbek and Russian, as well as the languages of the countries of residence.
Major communities
The main communities are located in such cities as (in descending order of number): Samarkand (Uzb.), Tashkent (Uzb.), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), Bukhara (Uzb.), Kokand, Andijan, Margilan, Khatyrchi, Shakhrisabz, as well as in Southern Kazakhstan and in the capital of Kyrgyzstan - Bishkek.
population
Based on the available statistical data on the population of Central Asia, the number of Bukharian Jews can be estimated as follows:
at the end of the 19th century. - 16 thousand,
in the 1910s - 20 thousand,
in the late 1920s - early 1930s. - also 20 thousand,
in the late 1950s - 25 thousand,
in the late 1960s - early 1970s. - 30 thousand people.
In the 1970s, about 10,000 Bukharian Jews emigrated to Israel. Based on the 1979 census, the number of Bukharian Jews in the Soviet Union by the beginning of the 1980s is defined as 40 thousand people. In 1987, the total number of Bukharian Jews in the world (including the third generation in Israel and the West) was 85,000, of which about 45,000 lived in the Soviet Union, 32,000 lived in Israel, and about 3,000 lived in other countries.
In Israel, under the auspices of the Bukhara-Jewish Congress, a one-day festival "Bukhara a-Yaffa" - "Beauty of Bukhara" is held annually. Usually it is visited not only by Bukharian Jews - immigrants from Central Asia, but also those born in Israel. The number of visitors reaches 400,000 people. This number is an indicator of the number of Bukharian Jews.
Migration flows
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, emigration intensified and a significant number of Bukharian Jews left for Israel, the USA, Australia and other countries. Of the 17 thousand Bukharian Jews who left the Soviet Union, 15.5 thousand settled in Israel, the rest - in the USA, Canada and Austria. At the end of the 20th century, less than 10% of the former Bukharian-Jewish population remained in Central Asia. Thus, only about 100 families of Bukharian Jews lived in Samarkand. In Russia, according to the 2002 census, 54 people identified themselves as Bukharian Jews.
Story
The earliest archaeological evidence of the presence of Jews in the territory of the Central Asian region are the ruins of ancient synagogues and sherds with Hebrew inscriptions and names from the 2nd century BC, discovered during excavations in the cities of Merv Bairam-Ali in 1954−1956. In the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids, Jews lived in Babylonia, Asia Minor, Judea and Egypt. The Jews entered the Central Asian region together with the Greeks from Babylonia and lived in the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. This was a time when it was common for Jews to live in Greek colonies throughout the Hellenistic world. If over time the Central Asian Greeks assimilated and dissolved, then the Jews were able to maintain their religious identity. In the 4th century, the Jewish scholar Shmuel bar Bisna, who was a member of the Talmudic Academy in the city of Pumbedita, traveled to the Central Asian region of Margiana (modern Merv) and mentioned local Jews. This was the time when both Merv and Pompedita were part of the Persian-speaking Sasanian Empire. That is, the Jews who lived in this state were already Persian-speaking. The Persians, who professed Zoroastrianism, were well acquainted with Judaism and the followers of the Jewish religion were called Juhut. This Persian word is a distorted common name of the Jews from the self-name Yehudi. Judaism was widespread in the Sasanian Empire. From the 5th to the 10th centuries there was a clan of Jewish merchants, the Radanites, who controlled a global trading empire. The native language of this clan was Persian, but many of them spoke different languages. Their trade routes also passed through the Central Asian region. At that time, there was the state of the Khazar Khaganate, which included some Central Asian lands. The influence and number of Jews in this state was so great that the royal Turkic-speaking pagan dynasty, under their influence, converted to the Jewish faith. In the XII century. European traveler Veniamin Tudelsky traveled to the East and in his book mentioned Jews living in Central Asian cities:
From Isbagan (Isfahan) four days' journey to the Persian land of Shipaz, where there are about ten thousand Jews. From there, at a distance of seven days' journey, the large city of Gina (Khiva) stands on the banks of the Gozan River, in it there are up to eight thousand Jews; a city of trade, in which merchants from all nations in the world come with goods; located on a vast plain. At a distance of five days' journey lies on the border of the Persian kingdom the large city of Samarkut (Samarkand), in it there are up to fifty thousand Jews, among whom there are learned and rich people. The head of this community is Nasirabbin Obadiah. »
It was a time when control over the Central Asian region had already passed from the Abbasids and Ghaznavids to the Seljuks, who also subjugated the Khorezmshahs under their rule. About the relationship between Muslims and Jews in the Seljuk capital of Baghdad and about the relationship between the capital's Jews and provincial Jews, Veniamin Tudelsky wrote the following:
“... There are ten academies (yeshivas) in Baghdad; the head of the most important of them is Rabbi Samuel ben Ali, who, along with the heads of other academies (yeshivas), sorts out the litigious cases of all Jews living in this country every day of the week, except for the second day, or Monday. Rabbi Daniel, the son of Hasdai, called "resh-galuta (exilarch)", has genealogical acts proving his descent from King David. The Jews call him "adonenu - rosh ha-gola (Hebrew our lord is the head of the exile)", and the Ishmaelites (Arabs) call him "sayyidna ben Daud (Arab. our lord is a descendant of David)", and he has unlimited power over by all Israeli communities in the possessions of the "Commander of the Faithful (Khalifa)", the ruler of the Ishmaelites. This is how the Caliph bequeathed to his offspring and gave the exilarch a seal to assert his authority over all the Jewish communities living in the Caliph's dominions. He also ordered all Israelites and Jews and all the peoples of his kingdom to stand before the exilarch and bow to him, under fear of punishing the disobedient with a hundred blows. When the exilarch rides to worship the king, horsemen from Jews and other nations accompany him, shouting ahead of him in Arabic: “Amilu tarik li-sayyidna ben-Daud”, which means: “Give way to our lord, the son of David!” He himself rides a horse,
in silk embroidered clothes, with a high turban on his head, on which a large white scarf is thrown, and a chain on top. The power of the exilarch extends to all the Jewish communities of the following countries: the lands of Shinar, Persia, Khorasan, Saba, or Yemen, Diyarbekir, all of Mesopotamia, the land of Kut, whose inhabitants live on the mountains of Ararat, the land of Alania, surrounded by mountains and having no other way out except the Iron Gate (Fortifications in Derbent), the inhabitants of which are called Alans, the land of Sikaria, all the countries of the Togarm (Turkish) up to the Asna mountains, the country of the Gergens up to the Tikhon River, they are also ancient Gergesians and profess the faith of Christians, and further to the borders of the land of Tibet and India. The Jewish communities living in all these lands receive permission from the exilarch alone to appoint rabbis and chazans to the synagogues, who must come to him to receive ordination and the right to office, and on this occasion gifts are brought to him, as well as a well-known annual tax from all over Sveta. In the possession of the Exilarkhan are many large inns with groves and gardens in Babylonia; in addition, he has vast estates, inherited from him and which no one can take away from him. In Baghdad he keeps hotels for the Jews, receives a certain annual tax from the markets and from trade in general, in addition to what is brought to him from distant countries, so he is very rich. Moreover, he is a very learned man, a connoisseur of Holy Scripture and the Talmud, and hospitable: many Jews dine at his table every day. During the appointment, huge sums are spent on gifts to the Caliph, to his princes and nobles, and this is on the very day when the Caliph, by his ordination, confirms him in office. After that, he is put into the second royal chariot and driven, with the sounds of drums and flutes, from the royal palace to his own house, where he, in turn, appoints the heads and members of the academies (yeshivas) by the laying on of hands. »
In the XIII century. for the first time the Jewish community in Bukhara is mentioned, which since the 16th century. becomes the main center of concentration of the Jewish population in Central Asia. Until the beginning of the XVI century. Jewish communities in Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan were actually a single community. The collapse of this large community at the beginning of the XVI century. into the community of Persian Jews and the community of Jews in Afghanistan and Central Asia and the disintegration of this latter into Afghan and Bukharian Jews in the second half of the 18th century. connected with a number of events in political history that sharply weakened contacts between Jews living in the respective regions. In the city of Bukhara, Jews lived separately from Muslims in three neighborhoods - the mahalla: Mahallyai-Kuhna (Old mahalla), Mahallyai-Nav (New mahalla) and Amirobod (Emir's city). In Samarkand, the Jewish quarter (Mahallai-Yakhudien) was located in the eastern part of the city. The Samarkand synagogue "Kanesoi Gumbaz", built in 1891, has survived to this day. In the Emirate of Bukhara, buildings belonging to Jews by law had to be half an arshin lower than the corresponding buildings of Muslims, it was forbidden to buy land and houses of Muslims, sell food to them, and engage in agriculture. In the middle of the 18th century. the first mass forced conversion of Bukharian Jews to the Vistula takes place and a community of chala (literally “neither this nor that”) arises - Jews who continue to secretly profess Judaism. In the first half of the XIX century. the second wave of mass forced conversions to Islam significantly increases the number of members of this community. The remains of the Chala community exist in Central Asia, mainly in Bukhara, to the present day. Most of its members are Uzbeks by passport.
After the establishment of the Russian protectorate, all prohibitions and restrictions that existed for the Jews of the Emirate of Bukhara were canceled. Instead, a division into native Jews was introduced, who were able to document their presence in the territory of the Turkestan region at the time of the Russian conquest and the local origin of their ancestors and Bukharian Jews. Native Jews were considered Russian subjects, merchants were allowed to trade freely throughout the region and in the largest cities of European Russia. The Bukharian Jews, even if they were the closest relatives of the native laws of the Russian Empire, were not officially covered, they were considered foreigners and were deprived of the right to acquire land or real estate, to open their own business. In the 1920s, a number of Jewish cultural, scientific, educational organizations, Jewish collective farms operated in Uzbekistan. In the 1930s, all of them were closed, the Bukharian-Jewish intelligentsia was repressed. In 1951, the last school with teaching in the Bukharian-Jewish language was closed. The only functioning cultural center was the Samarkand synagogue Kanesoi Gumbaz
Traditional activities
The main traditional occupations of the Bukharian Jews were the dyeing of wool and fabric, as well as petty trade. The name of the dyers kabudgari comes from the Tajik kabud - blue. Paints were made independently and the secrets of their production were passed down from generation to generation. Among the Muslims of the emirate, even the expression "go to the Jew" meant the intention to give yarn to be dyed blue.
Australia and other countries. About 10 thousand speakers of the Jewish-Tajik dialect remained in Central Asia.
The Jewish-Tajik dialect belongs to the northern group of dialects of the Tajik language and is called in Tajik dialectology Samarkand-Jewish dialect. Basically, it is close to the Samarkand-Bukhara dialect, and in the speech of Bukharian Jews from Tashkent and the Ferghana Valley, some phonetic features of the Fergana dialects can be traced.
Writing
Jewish-Tajik uses the Hebrew alphabet (the so-called Eastern Rashi in writing and square type in print). In 1928-40. the written Hebrew-Tajik language in the USSR used the Latin alphabet.
Early version of the alphabet
a in d ә l n s r k m h t u x ş f p g o v z h̦ ƣ q e c ç i j ә̦ ƶ i u
Later version of the alphabet:
| A a | B in | c c | Ç ç | D d | e e | F f | G g |
| Ƣ ƣ | H h | I i | J j | K k | l l | M m | N n |
| O o | Pp | Q q | R r | S s | Ş ş | T t | U u |
| Ū ū | Vv | X x | Zz | Ƶ ƶ | Ә ә |
Education and literature
Until the 19th century the literature of the Bukharian Jews continued to be created in the classical Jewish-Persian language and was part of the Jewish-Persian literature. The first literary monument of Bukharian Jews, written in a language that has phonetic, morphological and lexical characteristics of the Jewish-Tajik dialect, is the poem by Ibrahim ibn Abi-l-Khayr "Khudoydodoma" ("The Book of Khudoydod", early 19th century). The foundations of the literary Jewish-Tajik language were laid at the end of the 19th century. in Jerusalem, Rabbi Shim'on Khakham (1843-1910), the founder of a peculiar literary school, engaged mainly in translations from Hebrew into Hebrew-Tajik of books of both religious and secular content, including works of the Eastern European Haskalah. From the end of 1880 to 1914, more than 100 books in the Jewish-Tajik language were published in Jerusalem - the result of the intensive translation work of Rabbi Shim'on Haham and a number of his associates and students. In Russia of this period, books in the Jewish-Tajik language were practically not published, but in 1910-16. in the city of Skobelev (now Ferghana), the Jewish-Tajik newspaper Rahamim was published.
In 1922-40. in the USSR there was a network of schools in the Jewish-Tajik language. In the 1920s and 30s a number of periodicals were published and fiction in this language existed, since 1932 a theater functioned in Samarkand. Any cultural and pedagogical activity in the Jewish-Tajik language in the USSR was terminated in 1940, and it became only a language of oral communication. This was one of the main factors that led to the fact that by the 1970s. the younger generation preferred Russian to Jewish-Tajik and as a spoken language, children in many families spoke it only passively or did not speak it at all. In the 1970s in fact, only for the older generation of members of the community, the Bukharian-Jewish language was the language serving all spheres of life. For a significant part of the middle generation, the language of culture is Russian, while the Jewish-Tajik language remains only the language of the hearth. The younger generation prefers Russian to Jewish-Tajik in everyday everyday use and often finds it difficult to speak the latter. Children in many families only understand the language but cannot speak it; there are many families where children no longer understand the native language of their parents. In other words, with a delay of one generation compared to the Ashkenazi community of the USSR, the same intensive assimilation process takes place that took place in the latter in the late 1920s and early 30s.
Editions in the Jewish-Tajik language were published sporadically in Israel in the 1950s and 60s. With the repatriation of Bukharian Jews to Israel in the 1970s. regular Israeli radio broadcasts began in the Jewish-Tajik language. Now Kol Israel (קול ישראל) is broadcasting in Hebrew-Tajik at 13:45 and 23:00 ET. Since 1973, the monthly bulletin "Thiya" began to appear, the organ of the Union of immigrants from Bukhara. In 1979, a book of poems by Muhiba (M. Bachaev) was published in Jerusalem in the Hebrew-Tajik language, and in 1981 a book of poems by Shulamit Tiglyaeva (a native of Jerusalem, taken away by her parents to Bukhara as a child) was published in Tel Aviv; in 1934 returned to Palestine).
Notes
- Saka: Khotanosak† Tumshukskosak† Kashgar†
Ossetian Yaghnobi Pashto Vanetsi
- Northern Pamir languages: Old Vanj† Yazgulyam Shugnan-Rushan cluster: (Bajuv Bartang Roshorv Rushan Sarykol Khuf Shugnan)
- Other Pamir languages: Wakhani Ishkashim zebaki Yidga Munjan Sargulyam
