Bukharan Jews

Bukharan Jews: a Jewish ethnolinguistic group in Central Asia, primarily in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They called themselves Isroil and Yahudi. As early as the 12th century, the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela noted the presence of a large Jewish community in Samarkand. The first reliable evidence of Jews in Bukhara dates to the 13th century; from the 16th century on, Bukhara has been the center of the Jewish population of Central Asia. The Jews lived compactly in Bukhara, Samarkand, Margelan and several other cities. They used the Persian language and Hebrew alphabet. In the late 18th century, rabbi Iosef Mashon Magrebi, a native of Morocco who spent several years in Central Asia, introduced the Sephardic ritual in the Bukhara communities in place of the Persian. This led to a spiritual revival in the community. A new Jewish quarter even appeared in Samarkand in the 19th century. The Bukharan communities were headed by elected secular leaders, the kalantars. The basic occupation of the Bukhara Jews was dyeing yarn and fabrics. The Bukharan Jews supported the annexation of Central Asia by the Russian Empire because of the oppression they suffered under Islamic rule, including forcible conversion to Islam.
The 1868 peace treaty between Russia and the Emirate of Bukhara contained special clauses protecting the rights of the Bukharan Jews, but from the 1880s on the Russian government pursued a restrictive policy toward them. Yet even in the early 20th century, Bukharan Jews enjoyed greater freedom of movement than other Russian Jews.