When I made this edition of MBS, I already talked about Deben Battacharya and his recordings in Israel in 1957, and we listened to a piece of music by Yemenite Jews. Visit it if you didn’t read it before, as his work there was outstanding, a real legacy to teach and please us today. His portrait is also linked.

At that moment I was already considering to come back to these recordings to listen some of the Uzbek pieces and here you are!I hope you are well! I want to ask you something.

If you like this, please share it with your friends. It really helps me to keep this initiative going on week after week, to see that it reaches more people with these musics that capture the History of civilizations.

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I have had the luck of visiting Uzbekistan twice, for the Sharq Taronalari – International music festival in Samarkand (thanks to the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Madrid), as a journalist in 2017 and with the band I manage, Vigüela, in 2019. The people there is really warm and caring. One of the most enjoyed moments for us was to share the table with Muslims of Persian background, Orthodox Christian Russians and Tajiks.

Following my obsession of searching for the synagogues whereever I go, we searched for the one in Samarkand. It was not easy, but finally we found it, as well as the Jewish quarter. Samarkand is not only the outstanding Registan square and the big avenues full of flowers, it is also little and tidy streets, with little shops, little mosques, kind people doing their lifes. That is the kind of street where the synagogue is. This picture is by Oleg Yunakov in Wikipedia.

But the main city for Jews in Uzbekistan is Bukhara, with which I have a pending subject to fullfill! In the country there are around 13.000 Jews and Bukhara has two synagogues. They are recognized as a native group.

The presence of Jews in the land is documented for more than 1000 years and some historians state that Jews are settled in Bukhara since the time of the King David. In 538 aC, the Persian king Cirus the Great (VI century aC) liberated the Jews that had been deported to Babylon and welcomed them in his empire, that spanned from all the current Turkey to the river Indo at the East and to the Aral sea at the North. The religion of the Persian was the Zoroastrianism but Ciro the Great allowed big religious freedom. The current Jews of Central Asia could be descendents of those released from Babylon.

This outstanding picture of Bukharan Jews is from the very recommendable web Enlace Judío:

Until the Middle Ages, Bukhara was the biggest settlement of Jews in Central Asia (Mizrahi Jews, practitioners of Sephardic Judaism). Nowadays, the youngest speak mainly Russian but the older ones keep the bukhori language, that is based on classical Persian, seasoned with words from Hebrew and languages from the surrounding countries.

From the mid of XIX century, the emigration of Jews from Uzbekistan to Israel has been constant. The Bukharian quartet from Jerusalem took shape at the end of XIX century. The Soviet Regime didn’t make things easy, specially in terms of religious practices, so many Jews emigrated to Palestine. The Holocaust made that many Askhenazi searched for shelter at the URSS, and many ended in Bukhara. Waves of mass emigration would happen mainly in 1972 and after the fall of Sovied Union.

About todays, Uzbekistan is a secular state of Sunni Muslim majority and with 16 different faiths. There are around 13000 Jews. I invite you to watch this short and nice video about the current Jewish community in Bukhara. I hope they will be able to develop their lifes and keep their faith and practices without fear.

The true is that all this is fascinating but what took us here is the music: the recording by Deben Battacharya made in 1957 in Israel, from a group of Bukharan, lead by Menahem Eliezacoff. I have chosen a love song, consisting of a series of verses in Persian called shair. The instruments are chang (harp), kamancha (bowed string instrument), tambur (plucked string instrument) and doiras (frame drum).

This recording is included in the compilation released in 2014 by ARC Music under the name of Music of the Oriental Jews from North Africa, Yemen & Bukhara. You can find more info about this compilation, here.

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