Samarkand סמרקנד
The second city of the Bukharan Jews: in 1843 the community bought land from the emir and built its own quarter—a thing unheard of under Muslim law.
Jews lived in Samarkand long before the nineteenth century, but the notices of those ages are scant and mostly at second hand. The firm history of the community begins with a purchase of land.
In 1843 the Jews of Samarkand bought a plot from the emir for a quarter of their own—ten thousand silver tangas. Under Muslim law land was not sold to unbelievers, and the transaction was unheard of; it was carried through by the head of the community, Avezbadalboy, and the young Moshe Kalontar, who handled all the paperwork. So arose the mahalla-i yahudiyon, the Jewish quarter, where the community lived by its own court, its own synagogues and its own crafts.
Learning came here from Bukhara, where half a century earlier Rabbi Yosef Maman had arrived from Safed and found a community without books and without teachers. Samarkand became the second city of Bukharan Jewry; and from here, in 1890, came those who founded the Bukharan Quarter in Jerusalem.
After the Russian conquest of 1868 the city opened, trade grew, and with it the wealth of the Samarkand merchants. Soviet times closed the schools and the synagogues, and at the end of them the community left almost entire—for Israel and for America.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The bill of sale for the land of the Samarkand Jewish quarter, 1843 — the price, the parties and the names: Avezbadalboy, Moshe Kalontar
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the community's history, the Russian conquest, the departure at the end of the twentieth century
Basis: documents and evidence.