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<<Catalog TOC <<Page ו NOTES ON BUKHARAN MUSIC IN ISRAEL Mark Slobin, Middletown, Conn. The present paper describes the findings of a six­week research trip to Israel in May­June, 19711. Having specialized in the music of Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia, I was attracted by the possibility of finding sur­ vivals of Bukharan traditions in Israel, particularly in the area of secular music. This interest was stimulated by the observations of Israeli scholars, who have remarked that "basic research ... should begin immediately, before the loss of those few who still remember Bukhara in all its splendour" )Lancet­Muller 1967: n.p.). Although the scopeof the inquiry was limited by a serious dearth of musicians among the Israeli Bukharans, the data col­ lected nevertheless afford a glimpse into the past and present state of Bukharan music among Central Asian Jews. The origin of the Central Asian Jews (collectively termed "Bukharan Jews1' by western scholars) is unclear; the evidence on the history of settle­ ment patterns is contradictory and ambiguous. According to V.V. Bartold )qaoted in Kalontarov 1963:611), there were more Jews than Christians in eastern Iranian lands (Khorasan, northenr Afghanistan, Transoxania) in the tenth century A.D. However, the same authority (ibid.) indicates that most of the Central Asian Jews immigrated to Transoxania from Iran dur­ ing the vast ethnic upheavals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tamerlane's capital, Samarqand, seems to have been the original area of settlement for Jews, who reached the Ferghana Valley and the highland Ta­ jik areas only in the nineteenth century (ibid.). The most useful census of Central Asian Jews dates back to 1934, coin­ cidentally a period of interest for the present paper2. At that time there were 1. The research trip was made possible by a grant from the Wenner­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am very grateful to the scholarsof the Jewish Music Research Centre, in patricular Bathja Bayer and Amnon Shiloah, for their patience and advice, as well as to the Aminoff family of Jerusalem and the Telayof family of Tel­Aviv for their kind assistance. 2. Exact information is lacking as to the current number of Central Asian Jews since recent cen­ suses have not distinguished European from Asian Jews. The best guideline available in the 1970 census (Wixman 1972) gives a ifgureof 25,000 for Jews residing in Central Asia who give Tajik Per­ sian as their native language. An estimate given me in 1968 by a Jew of Bukhara cited 10,000 Jews for that city, or about 109i> of the ottal population. Catalog TOC <<Page>> 226 Mark Slobin some 24,000 Jews in Soviet Central Asia, with the largest concentration of population in Samarqand (5750) and Tashkent (3340; Amitin­Shapiro 1938:54). In addition there was a small group of "semi­Islamized" Jews who maintained both Jewish and Muslim traditions and practiced en­ dogamy (Babakhanov 1951). Ethnographic data on the traditional way of life of Central Asian Jews is quite limited, with the most accessible and ex­ tensive studies being those of Amitin­Shapiro, particularly his 1933 monograph on customs relating to pregnancy, child­birth and early childhood. While concentrating on distinctively Jewish customs, most writers also stressed the extensive adoption of the traditions and languages of the principal groups among whom the Central Asian Jews lived: The Ta­ jiks and the Uzbeks. The Tajiks are an Iranian people speaking a variety of eastern Persian dialects and represent the old Persian cultural continuity of Central Asia. The Uzbeks, on the other hand, are recent arrivals (c. 1500 A.D.) and relfect the strong Turkic component of the region. Together, Ta­ jiks and Uzbeks formed a shared culture in those cities of Transoxania which also served as focal points of Jewish population. This urban way of life featured a high degree of bilingualism (including sharing of both lexical and syntactic features; see e.g. Menges 1967), joint holidays, considerable intermarriage and other traits of cultural fusion. To a certain extent this situation has persisted to the present (e.g. Sukhareva 1966), though the Uzbeks and Tajiks now form two titular ethnic groups in statistics and pat­ terns of social organization. Thus, it is not surprising that the local Jewish population made its own contribution to this milieu of cultural sharing despite ghetto walls and restrictive laws. In the realm of music particularly Jews in Central Asia ­ as in several regionsof the Near East and North Africa ­ became renowned ofr projecting their talents beyond the Jewish quarter into the sur­ rounding Islamic community. As in the Arab world and Iran3, Transoxania boasted a large contingent of highly popular Jewish performers of the local secular classical court musics. In the case of Central Asia, the regional style consisted principally of an extensive cycle of six suites known as the Shashmaqam, or six maqams (meaning both modes and forms), and, as one writer has put it, "national Jewish singers (hafiz) were praised as among the best performers of the classical melodies of the Shashmaqam. The /_/. Information on this point was gathered in conversations with Dr. Bathja Bayer and Amnon Shiloah of the Jewish Music Research Centre, Jerusalem, and Dr. Laurence Loeb, Lehman College, New­ York. Catalog TOC <<Page>> Notes on Bukharan Music in Israel 227 names of the best pre­Revolutionary singers were famous across all Central Asia.. ." (Kalontarov 1963:629). This situation has not changed; in 1969 performers of the Shashmaqam in Tashkent told me that Jews make up at least 3O9S> of the present contingent classical musicians in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Central Asian Jews continue to make their mark in other areas of the arts as well; to cite just two examples, the much­honored iflm director Kimiagarov and the artist Eliezerof (Kalontarov 1963:630), who both carry family names found also in Tel­Aviv. Jews made their musical contribution not only in the rarified sphere of the Shashmaqam. Traditionally, Jewish performers were active at all levels of the music culture, from court patronage to street performance, form public holidays to private festivities, both Jewish and non­Jewish. Of some signiifcance in understanding the local music culture is the often subtle in­ terplay between Jewish religious music on the one hand and secular music, both Jewish and Islamic on the other, a topic to which I shall return below, as Kalontarov (ibid.) points out: "The folklore of the Central Asian Jews borrows much from their neighbours, the plains Tajiks and Uzbeks ... Shared melodies were related to the cycles of secular music and were usually performed at family festivities and holidays as entertainment for guests ... there were also their own national motives which accompanied religious singing and prayers." It is apparent from the available evidence that musical acculturation lfowed in two directions: On the one hand, Jewish performers were in­ strumental in the creation and maintenance of a basically non­Jewish , secular court music tradition, while at the same time the tunes and practices (instruments, forms) of the non­Jews ifltered back into the area of domestic Jewish music­making. It is the surviving elements of this cultural background that I hoped to ifnd in Israel today, in a milieu untouched by the Soviet process of moder­ nization which has so deeply affected Bukharan music in its home area. I soon discovered that to a large extent Bukharan music has also been moder­ nized and even lost in Israel; this is only to be expected given the fact that Bukharan families arrived in Jerusalem as early as the 1880's and have taken an active part in the growth of a national music culture in Israel. All roads of inquiry led me to one family of musicians, the Eliezerofs of Tel­ Aviv, who have maintained the older Bukharan repertories. Talks with Dr. Catalog TOC <<Page>> 228 Mark Slobin Bathja Bayer of the Jewish Music Research Centre indicate that the reduc­ tion of a given Jewish community's musical storehouse to a handful of car­ riers is not an unusual occurence in Israel. The data included in the present paper derive only from the Eliezerofs, the prime (perhaps the only) expo­ nents of traditional Bukharan secular music in Israel today. There are two Eliezerof brothers, Mashiah and Menahem, who with their wives (Adina and Berachah respectively) represent Bukharan music. The "representation" aspect of their careers is quite important: For example, at Yom Yerusalayim (Jerusalem Day) 1971, Menahem and Berachah together with their son provided Bukharan flavour for the festivities. Israeli radio and television has featured the Eliezerofs, and they can be heard on tapes dating back many years in the National Sound Archives. Bukharan Jews themselves invariably hire the Eliezerofs on the somewhat infrequent occa­ sions when traditional music is required at weddings. The family's reper­ toire includes older and newer Israeli favorites as well as the music of their area of origin. The Eliezerofs biographies are of considerable interest in providing con­ crete examples of the recent history of Bukharan Jewry. In their early sixties today, the brothers represent the firstpost­ Revolutionary generation of musicians. Trained at first in the oral tradition by relatives and then by professional musicians, Menahem and Mashiah were later (early 1920's) integrated into the newly­created group ofstate ­supported performers. The new ensembles were part of an extensive Soviet program to build "modern" Central Asian music cultures (for varying points of view on Central Asian musical change see Vinogradov 1967, Spector 1967 and Slobin 1971). Similarly, the Eliezerofs' wives became members of the new women's troupes, at first greatly despised by the local Islamic populace but gradually accepted as a part of the emergent socialist society.

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