Bukharan Jews and the dynamics of global Judaism / Alanna E. Cooper.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cooper, Alanna E., 1968-

Series:

Indiana series in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Uzbekistan--Bukhoro viloi͡ati--History.

Jews.

Jews--Uzbekistan--Bukhoro viloi͡ati--Social conditions.

Jews, Bukharan.

Social conditions.

History.

Buxoro viloyati (Uzbekistan)--Ethnic relations.

Buxoro viloyati (Uzbekistan).

Uzbekistan--Buxoro viloyati.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 305 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, [2012]

Summary:

Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tide 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 traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic research there as well as among immigrants to the United States and Israel, Cooper tells an intimate and personal story about what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Together with her historical research about a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews in other parts of the world, this lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history. Book jacket.

Contents:

First encounter: Bukharan Jewish immigrants in an Ashkenazi school in New York

Writing Bukharan Jewish history: memory, authority, and peoplehood

An emissary from the Holy Land in Central Asia

Revisiting the story of the emissary from the Holy Land

Russian colonialism and Central Asian Jewish routes

A matter of meat: local and global religious leaders in conversation

Building a neighborhood and constructing Bukharan Jewish identity

Local Jewish forms

International Jewish organizations encounter local Jewish community life

Varieties of Bukharan Jewishness

Negotiating authenticity and identity: Bukharan Jews encounter each other and the self

Jewish history as a conversation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780253006431

0253006430

9780253006509

0253006503

9780253006554

0253006554

OCLC:

777602256