I always had an interest in knowing the history of ancient jewish communities which for various reasons disappear over the course of time. Since the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, nearly one million Jews living in Arab countries and Iran were driven out and incorporated into the nascent state as well as elsewhere. The Jewish communities of Cochin, Rangoon, Penang, Batavia are all but memories.
Apart from Cochin which had been settled for centuries, most of the far eastern communities were of recent origin, such as the community in Calcutta and Rangoon, made up of Iraqi traders. Both are no more, as is the community in Penang.
But there are other ancient communities which can go back thousands of years. I have become interested in visiting two of them. Djerba in Tunisia and Bukhara in Uzbekistan.
above is a video of a slice of Jewish life in Bukhara in 2019. Like many other communities, Bokharan jews will also disappear taking with them their 2000 year old history
According to ancient texts, Israelites began traveling to Central Asia to work as traders during the reign of King David of Jerusalem as far back as the 10th century B.C.E. When Persian King Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC, he encouraged the Jews he liberated to settle in his empire, which included areas of Central Asia. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish settlement in Central Asia was in the Emirate of Bukhara.
Bukharan Jews relate their own ancestry to the members of the Ten Tribes of Israel who, after the seizure of Israel in 733/732—722 B.C. by the Assyrians, were driven deep into the Assyrian empire. These lost Israelite tribes include the Tribe of Naphtali and the Tribe of Issachar of the Ten Lost Tribes, who were exiled during the Assyrian captivity of Israel in the 7th century BCE. Isakharov (in different spellings) is a common surname. Bukharan Israelites associate one particular place in Assyria in which they settled, Habor, mentioned in the Bible (2 Kings 17:6), with Bukhara; the identity of consonants in the two names is offered as proof of this. In the opinion of some scholars, Jews settled in Central Asia in the sixth century, but it is certain that during the eighth to ninth centuries they lived in Central Asian cities such as Balkh, Khwarezm, and Merv. At that time, and until approximately the sixteenth century, Bukharan Jews formed a group continuous with Jews of Iran and Afghanistan.
The Bukharan Jews are considered one of the oldest ethno-religious groups of Central Asia and over the years they have developed their own distinct culture. Throughout the years, Jews from other Eastern countries such as Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Morocco migrated into Central Asia (by way of the Silk Road
