What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
- Thread starter jacob ningen
- Start date
The problem is Deuteronomy 23:4-7, which forbid Ammonites and Moabites from becoming Jews. There was a Mishnaic-era ruling that this prohibition applied only to male Ammonites; the justification was that the women didn't participate in refusing to give bread and water to the Israelites, but the real and obvious reason was that many descendants of mixed marriages would otherwise be subject to mamzerut. The same pragmatic tradition will most likely lead the Sanhedrin to oppose anything that might reopen that issue. Which doesn't rule out rabble-rousers (e.g., in opposition to a mixed marriage), but one thing about committees of rabbis that skew 50-plus in age is that they tend not to take the side of the rabble.
I believe this subject came up in this thread once before, and this is where another face of rabbinic jurisprudence would kick in: the part about putting fences around the law and not taking any chances. They're certainly not going to claim Muslims and Christians as Jews against their (the Christians and Muslims') will, and they'll insist on a conversion, albeit maybe a streamlined one in which a profession of distant Jewish ancestry is treated as automatic good cause for wanting to convert, for non-Jewish neighbors who want to join the tribe.
The Circassians in Egypt were fine IOTL, so I'd imagine they would also be fine ITTL - although, given that the Hejaz ITTL is currently ruled by Ibrahim Bey's Mamluk dynasty, they might also find more of a welcome there.
The pleasure was mine - thanks again for the document you gave me.
not necessarily but it does help especially since the Sanhedrin is well aware of how rocking the boat nearly killed the institution twice once with the Maharitz and during Napoleon and Molcho.
They'll also remember the first years of the revival (1538-41) when their ascetic/flagellant tendencies started riots and almost brought them down before they'd got fairly started, and they'll know the history of the infighting during the Hasmonean period. There's a lot of institutional history they'd have to overcome before embracing a Savonarola.
I don't understand, what's so foreign about the Krymchak rite that the Rabbi would want to change it rather than accept it as they did all the other minhagim?
It's not so much that the Sanhedrin would want to change them - as mentioned in the story, the rabbis told them there was nothing to forbid - as that, as a small and mostly illiterate minority among the Jews of the Yishuv, they wouldn't be able to avoid assimilating. If they don't stay together, their kids will go to schools run by the rabbis of the villages where they settle and will end up adopting the practice of those villages.
Which is exactly what happened to the Krymchaks historically. We don't have any unique practices left, at least not in my family.
THE WISE MAN OF ASTRAKHAN APRIL-MAY 1840
THE WISE MAN OF ASTRAKHAN
APRIL-MAY 1840
APRIL-MAY 1840
Nahum Groysman, as fitting for a man with that name, was big. In fact he was almost a caricature of his name: six foot five, tipping the scales at a seventh of a ton, heavily-built and muscular like the carter’s son he was. His beard and sidelocks were flecked with red, a silver ring adorned every finger, a silver lion of Judah buckled his belt, and he wore a black silk Persian caftan over his shirt and trousers. He swaggered as a Cossack might, whether in the Jewish quarter by the Bolshiye Isady market or at the docks on the Volga, and not even the Cossacks objected. He was not, in brief, a man to escape notice.
Which may have been why, on the last day of Adar Sheni in the year 5600, a Kazakh cotton-seller at the market handed him a letter.
The letter wasn’t addressed to Nahum, but nor was it to anyone; the writing on the envelope, in a spidery Hebrew hand, read “To the Persian Jews.” Nahum was not – both his parents were mitnagdim from Lithuania, and he’d been born in Birzh two years before Napoleon invaded Russia – but to a Kazakh, he no doubt looked like one. And there were certainly no others, in the market or anywhere else in the city, who stood out as much as he did.
He wondered how long the Kazakh trader had carried the letter or where he’d otherwise planned to deliver it, but by the time he looked up from the envelope to ask, the trader was gone. And that left the question of where Nahum would deliver it.
He turned that question over in his mind as he left the market, with its smell of sturgeon and dyes and spices and the sound of wares being cried in Russian, Kazakh, Armenian, Farsi and even Hindustani. It took him through narrow streets of wooden houses where the conversation was in Yiddish and Georgian and Tat and the smells were of shashlik and stuffed cabbage being cooked for Sabbath dinner, and brought him to the Street of Three Synagogues.
There were four kinds of Jews in Astrakhan – mitnagdim, Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, Gurjim from Kartveli, and merchants from Tabriz and Isfahan. Twenty years ago, the city governor had granted their petition to build synagogues, but decreed that they all had to be in the same place. His intent had been the same as what Tsar Nicholas, may the Name curse him, intended later: to push the Jews of the frontier into a few enclaves. No matter that the Mountain Jews and the Gurjim had lived where they’d lived for centuries; it was the Listed Towns now, or else the Tsar’s soldiers. And where there might have been a dozen synagogues, there were three.
The Lithuanian synagogue was the closest to the market. Nahum, a child of ten then, had helped to build it, as had all the mitagdim; his father had sent him to help in the raising of the Georgian and Tat synagogues as well. He’d have worked on the Persian one too, except there had been none; the Tats were Persian in their rites, more so than the Persian Jews themselves these days, and the Isfahani merchants had found their synagogue, and their daughters, congenial. Nor were they the only ones. Nahum still followed the doctrines of the mitnagdim and the ethical teachings of Rabbi Salanter that were beginning to spread through the land, but after a dozen years as a caravan guard in Persia and the Caucasus and the Turkmen lands, he was more comfortable with the Mountain Jews’ ways.
And the Mountain Jews were warriors – Bar-Kokhba’s sons, they called themselves. That, too, was a comfort.
Nahum found Rabbi Melek ben Moshke in the synagogue storeroom with a broom in his hand, preparing to clean before the evening service. The rabbi took a rag from atop a pile of same and handed it to him. “You can dust while I sweep,” he said. “That’s what being early earns you.”
“I’ll dust your head,” Nahum answered, but he took the rag willingly enough; it was a fair price for the favor he would ask. He handed the rabbi the letter in exchange. “Do you know who should receive this?”
“To the Persian Jews, is it?” Rabbi Melek turned the envelope over in his hands and peered at it, trying to divine its secrets without looking inside. But there was no way to do that, and he was obviously intrigued. “Maybe I am Persian enough.” And before another word could be said, he took his belt-knife and slit the letter open.
Inside was a folded sheet of paper inscribed in the same hand as the envelope. Melek, cleaning forgotten for the moment, held it up so the late-afternoon light coming through the window would catch it, and Nahum read it with him. Or rather, he tried to read it. The letter, though in a Hebrew hand, was written in a type of Farsi, and while Nahum could speak Farsi well enough, written Farsi, especially this form of it, was hard going.
The rabbi, though, nodded knowingly. “This is Dari, or maybe it’s Tajik. It comes from Bukhara.”
Nahum knew where Bukhara was, but he’d never been there; few subjects of the Russian Empire had, because its emir was exceedingly distrustful of them. He’d heard that Jews lived there, but knew nothing of them beyond that. Evidently Rabbi Melek knew more.
But he didn’t know everything, and the surprise that came over his face as he read on made that unmistakably clear. “The writer of this letter had Jewish ancestors,” he said. “But in the days of our grandfathers, the ulama forced them to embrace Islam. Since then they have practiced Judaism in secret; they are called the chalas – neither one nor the other – and they live on the edge of ghetto and city both. The writer is asking the Persian Jews to send money so they can come to the Tsar’s lands and be Jewish again.”
For a moment, Nahum was incredulous – Jews who sought to flee to Russia? But then it made sense. The Tsar, despising Jews and Muslims equally, wouldn’t care if the descendants of forced converts renounced Islam. The Shah, the Sultan, the emirs who ruled the steppes and mountains north of India and east of China – all of them would consider such a thing apostasy.
“What do we do then? Collect money for them?” If so, then perhaps it was best that Melek had the letter – he was good at begging funds from his congregation, and Nahum was not.
“Maybe that, or maybe something else. Come and clean with me; the kildim will start soon.” The kildim, the gathering – a word that the local dialect of Russian had borrowed from the Turkic tongues, as eggplants here were called demianka rather than baklazhany. “And after, we will talk more about the letter and its writer, and how we might respond to her.”
Nahum, rag in hand, followed Rabbi Melek to the sanctuary where books had been laid on the cushions, and suddenly, the rabbi’s last word registered.
“To her?” he asked.
“Of course. Look at the handwriting – can’t you see? This letter was written by a woman.”
_______
Rabbi Melek brought Nahum home for Sabbath dinner that night. His wife Zoya and his daughters Sarit and Yasmin had laid the table with dumplings, rice with yogurt and cucumbers, khoyagusht meat pies baked with lamb and eggs, cowpeas, and mulberry wine. They spoke of the week’s parsha, the news from St. Petersburg and Konstantiniyye and Tzfat, the gossip of the market – as the cinnamon-sweetened porridge was brought out and the wine, and then the arrack, flowed, the first two gradually yielded to the last.
At last, though, Melek rose from the table and motioned to Nahum to follow him. “It’s time to be serious again,” he said. “Have you had enough to drink, or should I give you more before I send you to Bukhara?”
Nahum was drunk, but not Purim-drunk – even arrack doesn’t work so quickly on a man who weighs a seventh of a ton – and he laughed out loud. “Just a trip to Bukhara? Can’t be far – what is it, fifteen, sixteen hundred versts? Let me leave now so I can be back before breakfast.”
Melek’s hand was suddenly on Nahum’s shoulder. “Listen to me, my drunken friend. We don’t truly know who wrote this letter. We don’t know if she is truly what she says or if she’s a charlatan or a robber. There have been many charlatans in our history. The Rambam says we have a duty to ransom captives, but should we raise money only to give it to thieves? If you take the money there yourself, you can see if there are truly people to bring out of captivity – and if there’s trouble, you will be there to help bring them out.”
“Bukhara – the emir has decreed against the Russians and the British. It would be dangerous…” Nahum trailed off as he realized – or maybe he was drunk enough to realize – that the danger was more an enticement to him than a deterrent.
The rabbi looked at Nahum’s face and smiled – he must have seen the same thing. “How much greater a mitzvah would the Rambam say it is to bring the captives home yourself? And you are not the only child of Bar-Kokhba in Astrakhan. I will not send you alone.”
Curiously enough, it wasn’t the Rambam who came first to Nahum’s mind. He thought instead of Rabbi Salanter’s writings on musar, on moral conduct, and his teaching that deeds as well as words must be kosher. He remembered, as well, a book he’d read years ago about the Sanhedrin’s jurisprudence on forced conversion, their commentaries on Sa’adia ben Maimon’s writings on anusim, their rulings that the duties of Jews toward fellow Jews applied fully to those who had been separated from Judaism against their will. But those writings and the Rambam all led to the same place.
_______
Three days later, Rabbi Melek had money and Nahum had companions. They met before dawn in the square opposite Ivan the Terrible’s kremlin, and there were five of them, one for each green-domed tower of the cathedral. Nahum and Melek were two, and Nahum was unsurprised to find that he knew the others; there were several kinds of Jew in Astrakhan, but the city was not a large one.
Yevda, another of Rabbi Melek’s sons of Bar-Kokhba, a builder who came from a village near Nalchik and who’d fought in Chechen clan wars in his youth. Iraj, the younger son of a Tabriz spice merchant who hadn’t come to terms yet with the fact that he would never inherit. Hershel, a carter like Nahum’s father had been, weathered and tough from hard work. They were all a head shorter than Nahum, but few people weren’t, and they looked worldly-wise and capable.
They were also dressed as Persians, and no sooner had Nahum noticed this than Melek took his fur hat off his head and handed him a turban.
“The emir of Bukhara has banned Russians,” he said. “So if we are to go there, we must not be Russians.”
Very well, then, we are not. Nahum looked at the members of their company again and realized that Melek had picked well; even Hershel had taken his cart into the mountains often enough that he spoke some Tat and Farsi.
The docks were a short distance west, where Astrakhan island met the main flow of the Volga, and there was a boat leaving that morning for points east. By noon, Nahum stood on deck as the boat steamed through the maze of salt marshes and algal flats that was the Volga delta, and as the sun was low, they entered the open Caspian.
“Iraj will speak for us when he can,” Rabbi Melek said to him that night as the boat made its way across the shallow sea. “But you are the man everyone will notice, and the man they’ll greet. You can pass for a Persian Jew – I know that – but can you be a Muslim too if you need?” He cast his eyes at the place where the dagger at Nahum’s belt made a bulge in his caftan. “In Bukhara, Jews do not go armed.”
“My sidelocks…”
“I will cut them,” said Melek, and did so. “They will grow again. I will cut my own as well, and all of ours. Even the Rambam would cut them if it needed to be done to rescue captives. And without it, could you be a Muslim?”
“I’ve traded with Muslims. I know how to say ‘inshallah.’” Nahum laughed – in Astrakhan, even the Russians said “inshallah” sometimes, though never where priests could hear. “I’ve seen them lay down their rugs and pray on the street. But I’ve never been in a mosque – I don’t know the prayers.”
“You won’t have to. No one will ask you to go to jumu’ah. You just need to keep your head enough to fool the passers-by and the soldiers. And if anyone asks why we are in Bukhara, you tell them we’ve come to visit the tombs of the seven saints.”
“The seven saints?”
“The founders of the Nakshbandi order. They lived in Bukhara. They were wise men – holy men. I will tell you something of them and their teachings, so that if you are asked, you will know.”
And he did, for the two days that the boat steamed across the endless ice-flecked sea, past marshy islands, and finally into a stunning blue bay with an ever-changing shoreline. The port there was no more than a village with a pier and a small market; at the market, Iraj took part of Melek’s money and bought camels which they would resell in Bukhara. They camped that night by the shore, and the next morning they climbed a switchback up the looming cliffs to the Ust-Yurt.
The clay desert that awaited at the top of the cliffs was the bleakest landscape Nahum had ever seen – bleaker, in fact, than he’d imagined possible. “This is a place to make a big man small,” he told Rabbi Melek that evening, gathering his caftan against the night chill of the desert. “The seven saints – their teachings of contemplation and awareness – it’s easy to follow them here, isn’t it? Imagine if ha-Ari had lived in this desert.”
“Deserts are mystic places, yes – like mountains, but in a different way. I wonder what the great cabalists of Castile and Provence would have made of this place.”
“Or Sabbatai Zevi, if the vultures didn’t pick his bones.”
They were a week crossing the Ust-Yurt before they came to the shores of another sea – “Aralskoe More,” said Hershel, who in childhood had liked to look at maps. They rode from fishing village to fishing village and finally to the Amu Darya, the river of Gozan. From there, they traveled on riverboats when they could and by camel when there were rapids; at length they reached the confluence with the Zeravshan, and a day later, a city of domes and towers and dun-colored brick that gleamed gold in the waning sunlight.
Bukhara.
_______
“The seven saints, you say?” said the guard at the gate. As Melek had predicted, the guard had indeed assumed that Nahum was the leader of the party. He was now looking them up and down, seeing three men who could be Persian and two who, despite their dress and their fluency in Farsi, bore the stamp of much more northerly climes. But many Persians were fair, and though the guard stared a moment longer, he found no reason not to let them in.
They found rooms and stabling for their camels near the gate, and then they went forth into the city. Bukhara was a far older city than Astrakhan, and an imperial city at that; it was the seat of an emir and had been the seat of a khan where Astrakhan was merely a provincial capital. The mosques and madrassas beside the Registan and in the central streets were grand, and the minarets at the fortress gate had stood for a thousand years. There were separate markets for hats, for silk, for silver and gold. But the city beyond was a city of wood like Astrakhan was; some of the houses were mansions, and their windows and doors were elaborately carved with filigrees and pointed arches, but they were as impermanent as the houses of Russia.
“Only Jerusalem is eternal,” murmured Nahum when he was sure that no passers-by could hear.
They hadn’t been long in the city when Nahum began to see Jews. They wore ropes rather than belts, their heads were shaven but for their sidelocks, and they wore black caps instead of turbans as the law required of them. Many of them were dye-stained, and when Nahum followed the smells of cochineal and larkspur and indigo, they led to the Jewish mahallah, the ghetto, where the city’s dyers dwelt.
There were fine houses among the dyers’ shops and tenements here too, but they were far more dilapidated – Jews could repair old houses, but not build new – and rags hung from the lintels to denote who was inside. There were synagogues, built of brick and domed like the mosques, but lower in height lest the ulama or the emir’s soldiers destroy them, and with the marks of five hundred years of repairs. The people in the streets here had their eyes cast down, the Jews from long habit and the others from embarrassment at giving Jews their custom.
The five men from Astrakhan cast their eyes down too. “We should go into the dyers’ shops,” said Hershel. “No one will suspect us for talking to the Jews there – we will simply be sampling their wares. They might tell us who wrote the letter.”
“The letter wasn’t written by any of them,” Yevda answered, “and they weren’t the ones who invited us. Maybe they hate these anusim as much as the Muslims do. Maybe, rather than telling us, they would turn us in.”
“Why would they hate the anusim?” said Nahum. “Look around you – anyone can see that but for the grace of the Name…”
“Even so, there are those who see anusim as no different from apostates, no matter what the Rambam or the Sanhedrin say. ‘If only they had more courage…’”
Rabbi Melek held up a hand. “Maybe they care for the anusim, maybe they don’t. But if they don’t tell us, who will? Should we ask the city qadis, or seek an opinion from the ulama?”
No one had an answer to that, and besides, Nahum could see that they were beginning to draw attention. He walked into the nearest of the dyers’ shops before another word was said, not waiting to see if the others followed.
“Can I be of assistance, your excellencies?” said the dyer. He was fifty, graying, running slightly to fat; he was obsequious, but no more so than any merchant would be to a customer of obvious prosperity. Nahum understood him readily; spoken Tajik was closer to the Farsi he knew than written Tajik, although it sounded archaic to the ear of someone who’d guarded caravans through Persia.
“I would like to commission a wall-hanging,” he said, and suddenly realized how to ask his question without asking. “In a ram’s-horn pattern.”
The dyer drew in his breath, and the question written on his face was the same one that Yevda had asked moments before: do I take a chance? And then courage – or perhaps curiosity – got the better of him. “You are not one of the chalas,” he said. “I have never seen you. But no one else among the Muslims would want such a hanging – that would be the chalas’ secret and theirs alone.”
“I can’t say who we are. But we were sent for by them – by one of them. Where do they live? Where do they meet – where is their mosque?”
“They don’t have a mosque – did you think the ulama would allow them to pray together in just one? But I can tell you where they live – just on the other side of the mahallah, at the edge of the city. Most people still consider them halfway to being Jews – few will live with them or marry with them. Maybe if you go to the marketplace there, you will find the one who sent for you. And now, buy some cloth from me, but in a striped pattern, not ram’s horns. I have fine cotton here – do you see?”
Nahum did see, and when they left the shop, he carried a bolt of it; he could sell it again in Astrakhan, and the price was fairly owed.
The neighborhood where the chalas lived was near the tomb of one of the seven saints, and the five men went there first. They arrived at the time of asr, and they put their rugs down, faced in the direction the others faced, and knelt. All of them had seen the movements and prostrations used in the rakat – as followers of the Persian rite of Judaism, they used many of the same movements themselves – and they did them well enough for no one to notice, except perhaps those who noticed Nahum’s size. Nahum prayed silently as if for mincha, though he found himself beseeching the Name to let him partake of the saint’s holiness; he knew not what the others prayed for.
After, he led them back into the poorest neighborhood they’d yet seen, looking for the marketplace. Men in shabby clothing – not distinctive as the law required of the Jews here, but very plain – mingled with women in black robes and veils. Even the Jewish women had been veiled. They were strangers here, Nahum realized, even more than in the dyers’ streets; they were drawing stares, although no one dared speak to them.
Until, suddenly, someone did – one of the women, one of the indistinguishable, faceless figures in black that thronged the market square. She was walking quickly as if to pass them, but as she did, she looked up sharply to Nahum, her eyes piercing his, and said, “have you come?”
And then, as quickly, she was gone.
_______
Nahum stood stunned, and the others with him were no less so. The woman who had spoken to him was the author of the letter, he was sure of that, but how would he find her again? There was a ready excuse to go to a market or a dyer’s shop, but there was none to seek out the house of a woman to whom one was not related.
But the question answered itself a moment later, in the form of a young man in the clothes of a baker. “I am Laila’s brother,” he said. “Come with me and share the evening meal.”
The young baker – Nursultan, he named himself – led them to a small house on an alley and to a room inside where Laila, her veil now off, sat with a circle of children. She’d made honey-cakes for the youngest in the shape of Hebrew letters, and looked on as the older children, who had books, made them name and pronounce the letters before they ate. She herself had a book spread out in front of her, a Persian Jewish book of prayers two hundred years old.
“Who would suspect a woman?” she said, answering the question that not even Rabbi Melek had the courage to ask. “We are invisible, and everyone knows none of us can read; who would even notice us? So the men obey the imams and go to jumu’ah every Friday, and while they do, I teach the children and prepare to light the candles.”
Nahum stared in amazement, but he saw something different in Yevda’s face – something more like awe. And he remembered the Tats’ stories of what had happened all too often under the khans, and realized, just as Yevda had, how brave Laila must be.
He searched for something, anything, to say. “How did you know who I was?”
“My father took me to Russia to trade once, as a child. I knew you were no Persian, though you dressed as one. And we practice yad-dasht – concentration – as the Nakshbandis do, and I saw the presence of the Name in you.”
Nahum shook his head; he was a caravan-guard, not a tzaddik. But Rabbi Salanter had written that holiness lay partly in deeds; was that what Laila had seen?
Rabbi Melek forestalled that question with a more practical one. “How many of you want to leave?”
“Six hundred,” Nursultan said.
“A thousand,” said Laila. “More, if there is truly a way. Have you brought enough to buy provisions, to see us along the road? And can Russia truly be a home?”
“Astrakhan can be a home.” It was Herschel, not Nahum, who said so. “And you will not be the first Jews to flee there. And if Nicholas – a curse upon him – decides otherwise someday, there is the Holy Land. The Jews of the Galilee are ruled by a woman, though. You would not be above suspicion there.”
Laila, at last, laughed. “I wouldn’t need to be. But Astrakhan first, I think. Is there a Bukharan bakery there?”
“There is not. And I think one would be the sensation of the Bolshiye Isady.”
“First you have to get there,” said Iraj. “We have camels to carry water and baggage, and we can get more – I know the markets well. But it will take time to gather provisions…”
“And we will have to leave in secret,” said Laila, “by night.” She looked at each of the men from Astrakhan in turn, but only Yevda understood. “The Jews in the mahallah – they can go as they wish. But the ulama know there is only one reason for us to leave, and they would keep us here rather than let us become apostates.”
Rabbi Melek looked at Nahum and Nahum at Melek, and they realized the same thing in the same moment: that they had come to ransom captives in truth.
“The southern route, then,” Hershel murmured – remembering another map, Nahum guessed.
Iraj nodded. “The border is less then a day away, in that direction. From there we can return through Merv and Ashkhabad, through the Turkmen lands. But the hard part will be leaving the city without being noticed.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Nahum said, his mind racing with sudden inspiration. “The only thing anyone will notice is me.”
_______
There was a new storyteller in the chalas’ market the next day, a giant of a man, six foot five and red-bearded, who told tales of the seven saints. The watchmen wondered where he’d come from, but the caretakers at the sheikh’s tomb confirmed that he’d prayed there the day before, and the guard at the Talipach Gate said that he’d come with four other pilgrims and been seen with them at their devotions. If some of the stories he told weren’t the ones the city folk had heard, who could say how far the saints had traveled and who could count the miracles they’d performed? And if a few of the stories were also told about Rabbi Akiva or Isaac ha-Ari or the Rambam or ibn Ezra, no one was the wiser.
The storyteller was seen by night at the serai where he and his fellow pilgrims lodged, deep in discussion after the evening prayers. Surely they were speaking of the saints and contemplating the divine.
Which they were. Among other things.
No one at all took note of Laila and the other Chala women laying in provisions, nor did anyone wonder where they’d got the coins to buy them.
At last, on the day that all had been made ready, the storyteller spoke of the greatest of the seven sheikhs, Khoja Abdulkhalik Ghijduvani, and bade all who heard him to trek the twenty miles to the saint’s tomb and to keep vigil there all night. A thousand people followed in his wake, streaming out the north gate in the afternoon; sunset found them miles outside the city, where the storyteller’s companions waited with camels. And none but those companions saw them turn from the north road and march west all night, carrying their children, never stopping until they had left the lands that paid tribute to Bukhara and entered the khanate of Khiva.
“Forgive me,” whispered Nahum to the saint as he marched with the column, a child on each shoulder and camels in tow. “I am sorry to have taken your name in vain. But the rescue of captives comes before all else. And deeds are what matter, in the end.”
The Rambam would understand. And as Nahum looked up to where the Milky Way ran high above the desert, marking the path to Astrakhan, he was suddenly sure that the sheikh would understand as well.
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Notes to The Wise Man of Astrakhan:
1. Astrakhan was part of the initial Pale of Settlement in 1791, which, as has been mentioned before, allowed Jews to live in certain parts of the Russian Empire where they hadn’t lived before but where the empire wanted non-Muslim colonists. IOTL, Nicholas I removed Astrakhan, as well as other peripheral territories, from the Pale during the 1820s and 1830s. ITTL, with a substantial community of mitnagdim in Astrakhan due to the events of the Napoleonic period, expelling them was written off as too difficult and costly; instead, Nicholas I has used the city to concentrate the Jews of the Caucasus and lower Volga in one place and has “encouraged” Georgian Jews and Tats (Mountain Jews) to move there. Some Persian Jewish merchants have also settled there to take part in trade with Russia – the Russian policy at this time both IOTL and ITTL was to allow “Asian” Jews to live and trade within the empire – and the side effects of this have included raising the educational level of the Mountain Jews (who follow the Persian rite and now have easier access to religious texts) and partially assimilating the mitnagdim to Eastern Jewish cultural traits.
2. Travelers to Bukhara before the Russian conquest, such as Wolff (1832, 1843-44) and Vámbéry (1863), uniformly described the social status of the Jews as low. The persecution was not unremitting – one emir, for instance, was reportedly friendly with the leaders of the community and visited them during Sukkot – but the Jewish community was heavily taxed, and ritual humiliations such as ghettoization, distinctive clothing, restrictions on the height of houses and stores, prohibition from building new synagogues, and the ceremonial slap by the collector of jizya, were still enforced. There were also periodic forced conversions which resulted in the creation of a crypto-Jewish community known as the Chalas (derived from Tajik for “neither one nor the other”), which figure in the story, although AFAIK, there is no historical evidence of them using women as cultural transmitters.
3. The most significant way in which the Bukharan Jews ITTL are different from IOTL is that Rabbi Yosef Maimon ha-Maaravi (or al-Mugrabi), one of their principal OTL lawgivers, never got there. IOTL, Rabbi Maimon, originally from Morocco, taught at a yeshiva in Tzfat in the late 18th century, went to Bukhara (among other places) to solicit donations, saw the low state of the Bukharan Jewish community, and educated them according to the Sephardic nusach. He, and the yeshivot he established, effectively replaced the Persian rite which the Bukharan Jews had previously followed.
ITTL, yeshivas in Tzfat don’t need foreign donations, so Rabbi Maimon – who most likely lived out his life in Tzfat ITTL as a teacher and member of the Sanhedrin – never went to Bukhara. This in turn had two results: the Bukharan Jews never forsook the Persian nusach (ironically becoming more Persian than the Persian Jews themselves, who were in the process of assimilating to the Sephardic rite by this time), and their educational level remained lower, leaving them more vulnerable to more forced conversions. The Chala community ITTL is larger, and it’s more in danger of losing its roots.
4. IOTL, Bukharan Jews began to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine as early as the 1860s, and there was a Bukharan quarter in Jerusalem by the end of the 19th century. Part of the impetus for them to emigrate may have been Rabbi Maimon’s proto-Zionism (the sources on this, or at least those available to me, are conflicting), which obviously won’t be a factor ITTL. But the greater interconnectedness of the Jewish world ITTL may compensate, and also, the greater pressure that the Chala population is under will give them in particular a reason to go someplace where they can return to Judaism.
OTOH, not all the Bukharan Jewish emigrants will make it as far as the Yishuv. Astrakan itself, which is physically and culturally closer to home and which has a Persianate Jewish population already there, could become a destination in its own right, although the Russian Empire’s Jewish policy later in the century might change this. Most of those who do go to the Holy Land will likely end up in the Galilee; while their situation bears some resemblance to the Krymchaks, they are an urban population and won’t face the Krymchaks’ difficulty in staying together, and the developing Tzabar culture is more congenial to them than the Yerushalmi community would be. Also, the Galilee is autonomous enough that the Zaydani emirs can pretend not to notice the Chalas reverting to Judaism, which could still be an issue with the Nabulsi ulama despite the tolerance of their rulers.
1. Astrakhan was part of the initial Pale of Settlement in 1791, which, as has been mentioned before, allowed Jews to live in certain parts of the Russian Empire where they hadn’t lived before but where the empire wanted non-Muslim colonists. IOTL, Nicholas I removed Astrakhan, as well as other peripheral territories, from the Pale during the 1820s and 1830s. ITTL, with a substantial community of mitnagdim in Astrakhan due to the events of the Napoleonic period, expelling them was written off as too difficult and costly; instead, Nicholas I has used the city to concentrate the Jews of the Caucasus and lower Volga in one place and has “encouraged” Georgian Jews and Tats (Mountain Jews) to move there. Some Persian Jewish merchants have also settled there to take part in trade with Russia – the Russian policy at this time both IOTL and ITTL was to allow “Asian” Jews to live and trade within the empire – and the side effects of this have included raising the educational level of the Mountain Jews (who follow the Persian rite and now have easier access to religious texts) and partially assimilating the mitnagdim to Eastern Jewish cultural traits.
2. Travelers to Bukhara before the Russian conquest, such as Wolff (1832, 1843-44) and Vámbéry (1863), uniformly described the social status of the Jews as low. The persecution was not unremitting – one emir, for instance, was reportedly friendly with the leaders of the community and visited them during Sukkot – but the Jewish community was heavily taxed, and ritual humiliations such as ghettoization, distinctive clothing, restrictions on the height of houses and stores, prohibition from building new synagogues, and the ceremonial slap by the collector of jizya, were still enforced. There were also periodic forced conversions which resulted in the creation of a crypto-Jewish community known as the Chalas (derived from Tajik for “neither one nor the other”), which figure in the story, although AFAIK, there is no historical evidence of them using women as cultural transmitters.
3. The most significant way in which the Bukharan Jews ITTL are different from IOTL is that Rabbi Yosef Maimon ha-Maaravi (or al-Mugrabi), one of their principal OTL lawgivers, never got there. IOTL, Rabbi Maimon, originally from Morocco, taught at a yeshiva in Tzfat in the late 18th century, went to Bukhara (among other places) to solicit donations, saw the low state of the Bukharan Jewish community, and educated them according to the Sephardic nusach. He, and the yeshivot he established, effectively replaced the Persian rite which the Bukharan Jews had previously followed.
ITTL, yeshivas in Tzfat don’t need foreign donations, so Rabbi Maimon – who most likely lived out his life in Tzfat ITTL as a teacher and member of the Sanhedrin – never went to Bukhara. This in turn had two results: the Bukharan Jews never forsook the Persian nusach (ironically becoming more Persian than the Persian Jews themselves, who were in the process of assimilating to the Sephardic rite by this time), and their educational level remained lower, leaving them more vulnerable to more forced conversions. The Chala community ITTL is larger, and it’s more in danger of losing its roots.
4. IOTL, Bukharan Jews began to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine as early as the 1860s, and there was a Bukharan quarter in Jerusalem by the end of the 19th century. Part of the impetus for them to emigrate may have been Rabbi Maimon’s proto-Zionism (the sources on this, or at least those available to me, are conflicting), which obviously won’t be a factor ITTL. But the greater interconnectedness of the Jewish world ITTL may compensate, and also, the greater pressure that the Chala population is under will give them in particular a reason to go someplace where they can return to Judaism.
OTOH, not all the Bukharan Jewish emigrants will make it as far as the Yishuv. Astrakan itself, which is physically and culturally closer to home and which has a Persianate Jewish population already there, could become a destination in its own right, although the Russian Empire’s Jewish policy later in the century might change this. Most of those who do go to the Holy Land will likely end up in the Galilee; while their situation bears some resemblance to the Krymchaks, they are an urban population and won’t face the Krymchaks’ difficulty in staying together, and the developing Tzabar culture is more congenial to them than the Yerushalmi community would be. Also, the Galilee is autonomous enough that the Zaydani emirs can pretend not to notice the Chalas reverting to Judaism, which could still be an issue with the Nabulsi ulama despite the tolerance of their rulers.
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and in fact if folklore can be trusted did do so.
Rabbi Melek is well read.
the away from things does that.
buberian asking without asking.
Like in Portugal. And Rome and Jerusalem. or the maiden of Ludmir
most tzaddikim dont think themselves to be tzaddikim.
doesnt that break fiqh. I know the Rambam's case was thrown out due to being forced to convert
I love how you note Churchillian drift here.
The Nakshbandi sheikhs were (and are) well known throughout Central Asia. It wouldn't be unusual for a rabbi in a crossroads like Astrakhan (or at least one with Melek's curiosity) to know of them.
The last of whom, IOTL, moved to Jerusalem about this time, didn't she? Maybe she will bring both joy and trouble to the nagidah. Although having her own Hasidic principality in Russia would be almost better.
It would break Fiqh (or at least I think it would) for first-generation converts, but the forced conversions of the Chalas both IOTL and ITTL began in the late 18th century, and by 1840 many would be second or third-generation and would be regarded as true apostates if they returned to open Judaism. Not to mention that if the Bukharian ulama is doing forced conversions in the first place, they'll bend Fiqh if necessary to enforce them.
Everyone loves new stories of their great people. Even if they're someone else's stories with the serial numbers filed off. It's happened to us plenty of times too.
Thank you! I think the "1765 format" is working out well for the 1840 stories, of which there will be five or six more (three in the Yishuv, two or three in the diaspora). If I end up doing 1875-80, I'll probably use the same format for that too, albeit with fewer stories - I've learned better than to let a project get too big.
BTW, @dcguy3, any thoughts on the New York-Philadelphia story, given that it's your expertise? It's great to have knowledgeable people to keep me honest.
This was true to some extent IOTL - obviously there was no historical exodus to Astrakhan, but many Central Asian Jews welcomed the Russian conquest because they would now be equal to the Muslims. It helped that the worst abuses of Nicholas I had ended by that time, and the weird Tsarist racialization of "native" Jews as compared to Ashkenazim ("you're a Christ-killing Zhid, but at least you're not one of those Christ-killing Zhids") sometimes worked in their favor.
The Tsars weren't good to Jews but they did recognize exceptions, and there's a lot about the future of Russian Jews ITTL that's still contingent.
At this point most clothing is still made at home, so the Galileans' finery is a patchwork of traditions from the communities that contributed to it - "all holidays are Purim," the saying goes. For day-to-day occasions, the well-off tend to dress like wealthy Egyptians and the less well-off have adopted local clothing (both adapted for tzniut, but they don't need to be changed a great deal). The styles in Acre and to some extent Nablus are more Western or Egyptian-Western fusion (we might see this in the next story), the moshavim are more baladi, and some of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem remain as stubborn about retaining Polish clothing ITTL as IOTL.