#10

"From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive."

- Pope John Paul II

As we have seen throughout this course, the Silk Road is definitely ripe with culture and religious tradition. From antiquity to the present day, Central Asia has been glistening with religious trend. From the early days of Buddhism to the common era of Islam, this region has seen many beliefs come and pass. One such example would be Judaism. When one imagines a Jewish destination they tend to rely with Europe, North America, and the Middle East. However, this is not certainly always the case as evidence proves that there has been a Jewish community on the Silk Road for thousands of years. Minorities for sure, but nonetheless they have been present.

When discussing Central Asian Jewry one usually divides these many different peoples into 3 groups. Bukharan Jews, Kaifeng Jews, and the rest. Of the Jews in the area, the majority of them fell under two distinct ethnic groups. What we are left with though, are small groups of Jews that fall into neither of these categories. These lonesome Jews could be attested as being differing Ashkenazi or Sephardi settlers, who by coincidence found themselves to be living in such an unnatural environment. Now let us discuss the 2 thriving Jewish Central Asian identities.

Of the two, the Bukharan Jews are understood as the more genuine and historic population. Tradition suggests that these Jews are the ancestors of those who escaped Babylonian Captivity in the 5th-6th century BCE, and made this their home. They get their name from the Emirate of Bukhara which used to be a Central Asian Emirate before Russian colonization shaped the region into the modern nation states we are used to today. Bukhara is, of course, the present day capital of Uzbekistan so we can correlate that the home of the Bukharan Jews is Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

These Jews are ethnically Tajik thus being Iranian and related to other Persian peoples. They speak a hybrid language of Farsi mixed with Hebrew and have historically lived in their own segregated communities. On the topic of history we can mention that their history has always been rather sad as Jews in a predominately Muslim area. They were always dhimmis and therefore required to pay a tax for being different, in earlier times they were even expected to wear certain clothes to label them as Jews in public.

With the dawning of the USSR their conditions rose as Russian policy leaned towards Atheism. To be honest though, ever since the dawning of modern times and globalization almost all of these Jews have found ways to emigrate from this region to more accepting destinations like Israel, U.S.A., and Europe. There are maybe around 150,000 Bukharan Jews in the world and statistics assume that about 100,000 of these are in Israel, 40,000 in America, 10,000 in the EU, and lastly maybe only a couple hundred left in Central Asia.

The Kaifeng Jews are a different story. These Jews are an extremely much smaller population, of only about 1,000 in total, in a much larger environment, that being the PRC. They have lived in the Chinese city of Kaifeng from at the very least the time of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), as records suggest. Interestingly enough, it is reported that a Jewish community entered this region at about this time from Bukhara. So, Kaifeng Jews are the descendants of Bukharan Jews.

Jews they may be, but the Kaifeng Jews have assimilated heavily into Han society. Even genetically they look precisely the same as all other Han and very non-Jewish. Historically this cultural adaptability has allowed them to be treated ethically by their government. Back in the day these Jews were much better off than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Contemporary and antique scholarly work on the Kaifeng Jews is actually rather engaging as it is entertaining to read about Jews from a Chinese perspective, something hardly known about in this part of the world. To add to their uniqueness and wonder, a few scholars have recently criticized their validity as a true Jewish group by stating that their practices are not in accordance with standard Jewish rituals. Ironically though, we have lately seen a rebirth of Kaifeng Jewry and only about half of them have emigrated to Israel.

All in all, criticisms aside, here we have two unique and beautiful groups of Jews in the most unlikely place in the world. Their teachings and practices have been cut-off from the rest of the Jewish world for thousands of years but they have still been able to preserve their beliefs, some better than others. Some might argue and contest that they are not true Jews, or real Jews, but all we need to realize is that as long as they profess Judaism wholeheartedly they are Jews, regardless of ancestry.