Yosef Maman in Bukhara: a change of rite and the birth of a legend

R. Yosef Maman Maghribi, a native of Tetuán in Morocco, was a shaliaḥ—an emissary of the Safed community—came to Bukhara on a fundraising mission, and stayed. The arrival is conventionally put at 1793.

What is reliable: he replaced the local Persian-Khorasani rite with the Sephardi one—the only point on which all the sources agree, and the only one with lasting liturgical consequences. He founded an academy for ordaining rabbis, introduced the study of the Zohar, imported Hebrew books from Europe, and set going the emissary-and-book link from which the Jerusalem Judeo-Tajik printing programme later came.

Four corrections, all from Alanna Cooper's study of how this narrative was assembled. The date 1793 is a convention: the five primary sources collected by Avraham Yaari give four different arrival dates—1747, 1771, 1792–93 and 1805—and disagree even on his first name (Joseph or Abraham), his route and the length of his stay; Yaari dismissed three of the five as unreliable and then used them. It should be printed as: "conventionally 1793; the sources range 1747–1805."

The "total backwardness and religious dissolution" of pre-Maman Bukhara is a construct. The manuscripts Elkan Nathan Adler bought in 1898 show a community holding texts that had circulated in the Jewish world for centuries; the sophistication of the sermon Maman is said to have delivered on arrival presupposes hearers already literate; and the Minhag Khorasan rite is itself proof of an intact transmitted tradition—one cannot have a named regional rite and total ignorance at once. Cooper reads the standard tale as a centre-and-periphery narrative that credits the Land of Israel and erases the community's own agency.

He was not uniformly "orthodoxising": Yaari omitted Joseph Wolff's report that Maman permitted certain leniencies to elite followers. And "Maman founded Ḥibbat Ṣiyyon" is an anachronism: the movement arose sixty years after his death.

What, then, was the real revolution in Bukharan literacy? Not an emissary's arrival but a Jerusalem press: some hundred and twenty books in Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Tajik, issued in Jerusalem at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by R. Shimʿon Ḥakham (1843–1910), from the same circle. The language spoken at home acquired a printed library—and that is measurable.