Shimʿon Ḥakham שִׁמְעוֹן חַכָם

Born in Bukhara in 1843, died in Jerusalem in 1910; from the circle descending from Yosef Maman.

His work was the Jerusalem printing programme in Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Tajik: roughly a hundred and twenty books issued in Jerusalem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He translated and published Scripture, commentary, halakhah, history, and moral and narrative literature—into the language Bukharan Jews actually spoke. His Musā-nāma was edited by Herbert H. Paper at Cincinnati in 1986.

Something should be said here that changes the balance of the whole Bukharan chapter. It is usually built around Yosef Maman: an emissary arrived and changed everything. But the change that can be measured is this one: the language spoken at home acquired a printed library. Before, the Jewish book in Bukhara was in Hebrew and in manuscript, and so within reach of few; after, there were a hundred and twenty printed books in the vernacular. That is the revolution, and it was made not in Bukhara but in Jerusalem, by Bukharan immigrants, on Bukharan money, in the same years the Bukharan Quarter was being built.

One point about the language. Judeo-Tajik—Bukhori—is not "corrupted Persian" and not a secret tongue: it is Tajik with a Hebrew-Aramaic lexical layer, written in Hebrew script. The shift from Judeo-Persian to Judeo-Tajik is visible in eighteenth-century books—Yosef ben Isaac's Antiokhus-nāma of 1749 is taken as a marker of that shift—and Shimʿon Ḥakham's printing programme is its completion: the language acquired a standard, a typeface and a readership.