Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism

Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of this ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper travelled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life there before it disappeared. Built around a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews from other Jewish centres from the 18th century to the present and drawing from Cooper's work among immigrants to the US, the book tells an intimate and personal story of what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Cooper's lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history.