Introduction

For many centuries, Persianate Jews lived in cities and towns across Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Today, after several waves of emigration, most of these regions are without a Jewish presence, sometimes even without traces of their Jewish past. Against this background, the concept of the “Persianate World” applied here is not limited to a strictly linguistic approach, such as Persian-speaking communities. Rather, it is used as a framework for a historically shared cultural sphere (cf. Amanat and Ashraf, The Persianate World; Green, Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca; Fragner, Die “Persophonie”; Kia, Persianate Selves) – today consisting of many different nation states, whose internal connectivity was of profound relevance for the Jewish communities who populated it.

Scholarship on the history of Persianate Jews as well as on the history of other Jewish communities in the Muslim world tends to be shaped by two dominant strands: the first is based on sources from outside of these countries, such as colonial records, missionaries or travellers. The second strand is influenced by the emergence of modern nationalisms, which propelled the actual and imaginary movement of these communities away from the Persianate sphere and the building of new homes, mainly in Israel, the United States, and Europe. This repositioning of Persianate Jews also brought about the formation of new narratives about their past.¹

From the early nineteenth century onwards, European travellers, missionaries, and colonial officers came to Persianate societies: they mostly portrayed the Jews as wretched and isolated from the environment in which they lived.² Jews were framed as passive and static groups, without contact to their surrounding environment, as well as lack of knowledge of “proper” Judaism. This view precluded an understanding of the social mechanisms of a particular time and place, the leeway of self-determination that minority groups might have had, as well as their internal diversity. In nineteenth-century Persianate societies, religious conduct was one of the most important markers of public life, yet it also coexisted with a considerable degree of informality and fluidity. As Monica Ringer has pointed out in the context of Iran, this did not resonate with concepts of religiosity that had come to prevail in European societies.

The following military and economic advances of imperial powers in the region reinforced disconnections within the Persianate world. New borders and economic policies profoundly affected Jewish networks, as part of wider movements across the regions. From the twentieth century onwards, new forms of nationalism sought to incorporate Persian-Jewish histories into new ideas of belonging, leaving little space for the distinct and multifaceted lived experiences. Formerly common forms of multiple identification came to be seen as contradictory.

If we were to follow this perspective, the lives of Jews in Iran, Afghanistan, or Central Asia were nothing but a short intermezzo – one could even think of an aberration. We would risk erasing a long history of Jewish presence in this region for the sake of creating a new communal consciousness.

As Mary Douglas (How Institutions Think) explained, nations keep their shape by moulding their citizens’ understanding of the past, causing its members to forget those events that do not accord with its “righteous image” while keeping alive those memories that do. In the process of turning away from and settling down outside of the Persianate world, those discursive patters influenced the self-identification of Persianate Jewish communities: narratives of communal history evolved that retrospectively moulded the past into the framework of “diaspora” – that is living within, yet “hermetically sealed” from their surrounding societies.³

Likewise, their former home countries are engaged in different processes of creating histories that support their current agendas, which ranges from marketing Jewish history for touristic purposes to its neglect and erasure. As the people who actually lived in these countries are slowly passing away, narratives of the past are endangered to become broad-brushed and unambiguous. But Jewish life in Persianate societies was far from that. We find those “little whispers” when attending to individual biographies, family histories, and micro-histories of daily life. They challenge and enrich stories of a singular Jewish experience.

Historicizing separation

Within the framework briefly outlined above, different axes of separation have shaped the documentation and understanding of modern Persianate Jewish history: their perceived isolation from European Jewry, but also from Jewish centres of the Sephardic/Middle Eastern world, and more recently, the drawing of borders separating the Persianate sphere into modern nation states.

However, the seeming “isolation” of Persian Jews, which tends to be lamented as reason for their religious and spiritual “decline,” was because Europe was not their center of the world: Jews from today’s Afghanistan, Iran and Uzbekistan lived together in cities such as Samarkand, Herat, Mashhad, and Merv – today located in four different nation states. They married, moved, and traded across the borders of these regions, often living scattered among different Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In order to understand their live worlds, we thus have to approach them through the connections that were relevant to them, rather than to follow categories based on national borders, that were only established rather recently.

This “isolation” of Persianate Jews is also reflected in scholarship on the Middle East, in which Persianate history usually occupies a niche – as well as in regard to Jewish history, where it does not seem as representative as studies on the intellectual or religious elites from Baghdad, Alexandria or Aleppo. However, Jews lived as “ordinary cosmopolitans”⁴ in a vast territory, now perceived as liminal, for many centuries and constituted a significant part of the respective social, political, cultural, and economic life. This Special Issue is dedicated to these liminal histories, as bringing them to light will provide new and unexpected insights into the Persianate world and Jewish history as part of it.

From the mid-1930s, when the Soviet Union closed its southern border, Xinjian, Afghanistan, and Iran were separated from its territory. This development has also influenced academic research on the topic, as scholars either deal with Jewish history in Iran, or with Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. Until now, there hardly have been any attempts to overcome this political and disciplinary division. This issue endeavours to make a start, and for the first time brings together researchers from both sides of the “Iron Curtain,” portraying the diversity, interconnectedness, and agency among Persianate Jews across the region.

This publication is the outcome of a workshop held online in May 2021, titled “Narratives of Being Jewish in the Middle East” at the Institute for Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. It was originally set to take place in March 2020, right at the outbreak of the pandemic, was thus postponed and held online more than a year later. I would like to thank Arash Abaie, Mehrdad Amanat, Chen Bram, Lea Danialy, Shervin Farridnejad, Judith Goldstein, Thomas Loy, Miriam Mahshid Nissimov, Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad, Piera Rossetto, Heather Sharkey, and David Yeroushalmi for bringing their perspectives to this workshop and for their engagement with each other’s research, particularly in the back then still highly volatile pandemic situation. For two intense days, these scholars from Iran, Israel, the United States, and Europe, from the fields of Anthropology, History, Iranian/Central Asian – Middle Eastern – and Jewish studies, came together. In the process of completing this publication many connections emerged, which I hope will be continued in person.⁵

Outline of this issue

In order for Persianate Jewish history to not fall into oblivion, it is necessary to revisit some of the dominant narratives about Persianate Jews in academia and beyond. New forms of questions about and perspectives on Persianate Jewish history, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth century are due in order to be able to reconstruct this entangled Jewish history. Based on these considerations, this issue set out to address two clusters of topics:

First, what do we mean when we speak about “Muslims” and “Jews” and is the concept of Muslim-Jewish relations not one already born out of modern epistemologies of belonging and difference? Which social, political, and cultural factors shaped forms of identification and allowed for mobility between religions in particular periods?

Second, the changing role of religion in shaping one’s identity, community, and relations to the “Other” led to questions about how communal boundaries transformed due to the rise of modern nationalism and migration.

The first contribution in this issue is an interview with Heather Sharkey under the title “The Display of Religious Identity: Towards a Theory of Indistinguishability among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Modern Middle East.” Sharkey elaborates on a new framework for how we can conceptualize religious difference in the modern Ottoman Middle East. She discusses the fine lines between difference and similarity and the limits of generalizing groups as minorities/majorities, Jews/Muslims, or liberal/religious as they need to continuously be calibrated with other categories such as social status or region (e.g. urban–rural). Based on encounters in daily life, which included a number of fleeting cues, she points to the role of the “unknown” for understanding how members of different religious communities might have encountered each other in different contexts. Sharkey proposes how acknowledging these sensory cues – despite the impossibility to reconstruct them – can be a productive site for inquiry.

The second article by Thomas Loy, “Crossborder Biographies: Representations of the ‘Bukharan’ Jewish self in changing cultural and political settings” introduces the concept of the Persianate sphere and the metaphor of “border crossing” as integral for studying Jewish history in this region. In an attempt to decolonize the historiography of the Bukharan Jews, Loy describes the role of the Central Asian border regions for Jewish networks and mobilities, as well as how the advent of Soviet rule affected forms of self-identification among Bukharan Jews. Based on biographical accounts, he discusses forms of multiple religious belonging that were characteristic for nineteenth-century Persianate societies.

After the introduction of the Persianate as a shared cultural space, Chen Bram takes us to modern-day Azerbaijan and Iran, with his paper titled “The Jew in the Mosque.” Based on a selection of short personal narratives, he discusses the religious as a venue for exchange between Muslims and Jews. Bram thereby challenges assumptions about secularism as prerequisite for religious diversity: the religious worlds he gives us insights into, allowed for a communality based on different premises than restricting religion to the private sphere. In distinction from religious tractates or rules, precisely what defined individuals as different, could also allow for intense communality in practices of daily life.

In her article “A Genealogy of Social Integration: The Path to the Community’s Politicization,” Miriam Nissimov describes how new ideas of modernity and community were processed by the Jewish communities of Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These new forms of political consciousness were introduced to Jewish communities through European Jewish institutions such as the Alliance Schools, but also as part of the burgeoning national movement within Iran. In narratives about national awakening, the formation of associations, institutions, and identifications, those who were not part of the urban, educated, and upwardly mobile social groups are usually overlooked. Nissimov gives us insights into some of these conflicting views within the Jewish community at the time, thereby also pointing out the limits of these processes.

Lea Danialy’s article about a modern Persian translation of the Torah, based on a fourteenth-century Judeo-Persian versification by the poet Shāhin, examines the intersection of Jewish and Persian culture in literature.⁶ Danialy discusses specific expressions of Shāhin’s work as a reflection on how Jewish identity can be conceived of in Iran today. While mutual influence between Persian and Jewish culture is established for early history, this is much less taken for granted in the modern period.

This also came up at the workshop, for example when Arash Abaie pointed out how the religious climate since the revolution in 1979 has led to a new Jewish infrastructure in Iran: While the size of the community has shrunk considerably (there are fewer than 10.000 Jews living in Iran today), the country has now Kosher restaurants, as well as supervisors in factories that approve Kosher food – something that did not exist prior to the revolution, when religion was actively pushed out from the public sphere. Siddurs in Persian and Hebrew, Tzitzit, and Tallith are produced in Iran, as a conscious break with the era before the revolution, when such items were imported. Elements of Jewish religious practice are thus incorporated into the national framework of the Islamic Republic and have become part of the country’s ideal of self-sufficiency. This is not to idealize (Jewish) life in Iran, but to point out the limits of dichotomous views along the lines of either acquiescence or opposition. At the same time, the communities who remain in Iran or Uzbekistan today are far from constituting remnants of a pristine Persian-Jewish culture. They are undergoing rapid transformation, including many of their former traditions and practices being reshaped or extinct. This also points to the need of engaging with a variety of dynamics, discourses, and histories, of the respective societies, but also within global Judaism, rather than framing these communities as static and uniform.

The final paper in this issue, titled “When a Neighbourhood Falls off the Map” by Alanna E. Cooper focuses on the former Jewish quarter of Samarkand. The article discusses the (im-)possibilities of remembering Jewish history in connection with processes of nation building in Uzbekistan, based on examples of the built environment. Cooper argues how early twentieth-century Jewish architectures were simultaneously built into their local landscapes and dis-embedded from them through connections to a new transnational aesthetic, attesting to the multiple ties that shaped Jewish life in the region. Cooper connects the marginalization of this history with new national narratives that emphasize the pre-Soviet legacy of Uzbekistan. While Jewish history dates back far beyond Soviet times, the built environment does not reflect this trajectory, leading to its eventual disappearance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ariane Sadjed

Ariane Sadjed is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is currently leading two research projects, focusing on the modern history of Iranian Jews and on Jewish-Muslim relations in Austria. She has published on the connection between consumer culture and religion in Iran, the Iranian diaspora, and religious minorities. Her recent publications include “Belonging from afar. Diasporic religiosity among the Jews of Mashhad.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2021 and “Conversion, Identity, and Memory in Iranian-Jewish Historiography: The Jews of Mashhad,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2021, 53(2).

Notes

1 Notable exceptions are the volumes “Irano-Judaica” edited by Shaul Shaked and Amnon Netzer. The volumes mostly focus on antiquity and the early modern period. For an account of Jewish communities in nineteenth-century Iran, which provides “internal” sources, see Yeroushalmi, The Jews of Iran in the Nineteenth Century. When dealing with such documents however, it needs to be taken into account in how far they mirror changing ideas about belonging. As such, letters to Jewish organizations outside of Iran display a different narrative and language than letters and petitions from Jewish communities directed to Persian authorities (cf. Sadjed, “Connecting ‘Liminal’ Spaces”). It is thus necessary to include the intentions and anticipated position of the recipients in the analysis of such documents. Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of auto-ethnography, in which people describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them, is useful in this context.

2 See Viswanathan’s Outside the Fold for how the emancipation of minorities in Britain was connected to the development of a national community and accustoming colonial subjects to British rule.

3 For a critique of this reading of Jewish history see e.g. Rustow, “Karaites Real and Imagined.”

4 This term is based on the discussion of cosmopolitanism by Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality.

5 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments to each of the papers, as well as the editors of the journal, especially Yaron Peleg and Glenda Abramson, for their willingness to engage with this uncharted territory.

6 Judeo-Persian manuscripts date as far back as the second half of the eighth century and constitute the first recorded texts in New Persian: Basch Moreen and Carmely, The Bible.