Jewish Merchants in Central Asia

About the Project 

Merchants of the Empire: The Rise and Fall of Central Asia’s Bukharan Jewish Entrepreneurial Class (1860–1920)

This project examines the rise, transformation, and dismantling of the Bukharan Jewish merchant class in Central Asia from the Russian conquest in the late nineteenth century through the Bolshevik Revolution and early Soviet consolidation. 

Drawing on multilingual archival materials, communal records, memoirs, trade documents, and oral histories, it reconstructs the economic activities, social networks, and cultural influence of a mercantile elite that functioned as a key intermediary between local Central Asian societies and the expanding Russian Empire. Challenging portrayals of Bukharan Jews as marginal, the study re-centers them as active agents of economic modernization and cross-cultural exchange, while also analyzing their rapid destruction under Soviet policies of nationalization and repression. By illuminating a non-European, non-Ashkenazi merchant elite, the project complicates dominant narratives of Jewish modernity and contributes to economic history, elite studies, and colonial and postcolonial scholarship. 

Developed in close cooperation with the Ben-Zvi Institute and within an international research network spanning Central Asia, Europe, Israel, and the United States, the project integrates diverse methodologies and underexplored sources, and will culminate in an international conference at Tel Aviv University to advance collaborative scholarship on Bukharan Jews, imperial Central Asia, and minority elites under colonial rule.