Shared Spaces: Jews and Interethnic Encounters in Central Asia and the Caucasus, 19th–20th Centuries(Central Asian Studies)

This book explores a little-known but richly layered history of Jewish communities in one of the world's most diverse and dynamic regions. Spanning over a millennium, the Jewish presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus has often been overshadowed by broader imperial, colonial, and Soviet narratives. This groundbreaking collection sheds new light on how Jews—Bukharan, Mountain, Georgian, and Ashkenazi—lived, worked, and interacted with their Muslim and Christian neighbours across shifting political regimes. Drawing from fresh archival research, oral histories, and interdisciplinary approaches, nine scholars examine the complex cultural, linguistic, economic, and political entanglements that defined Jewish life in the region during the long 19th and 20th centuries. Topics range from demographic reviews, religious prejudice, trade networks and wartime evacuations to literary crosscurrents and everyday coexistence under Russian and Soviet rule. At its heart, the volume reveals how Jews were not peripheral actors but key contributors to the development of modern Central Asian and Caucasian societies. Accessible and insightful, Shared Spaces: Jews and Interethnic Encounters in Central Asia and the Caucasus, 19th–20th Centuries is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of minorities, interethnic relations, and the making of modern Eurasia. It invites a broader understanding of how diverse communities shaped the region’s shared past. The chapters in this book were published in Central Asian Survey.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Jews and their neighbours in Central Asia and Caucasus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 1. Native, but unique: Jews of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and their neighbours revealed through their twentieth century demographic profiles 2. Russian imperial borderlands, Georgian Jews, and the struggle for ‘justice’ and ‘legality’: blood libel in Kutaisi, 1878–80 3. Iranian, Afghan or Central Asian? Patterns of mobility among Persianate Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries 4. ‘Linguistic compatriots’: on the relationship between Tajik and Judeo-Tajik language and literature 5. ‘I became an Uzbek’: Jewish-Uzbek encounters in World War Two evacuation 6. Interethnic relations in the Nazi-occupied North Caucasus: a case study of the Mountain Jewish communities in Bogdanovka and Nalchik 7. Local identity and intergroup relations: Jews and Muslims in Ferghana Valley in late Soviet Era 8. Georgian Jews and Georgian non-Jews: Soviet experience through the prism of nostalgia

About the Author :
Zeev Levin is a Historian of Central Asia and the Caucasus, focusing on Jewish communities in the Soviet periphery. He directs a research center at the Ben-Zvi Institute and has authored and edited several works, including studies on Soviet-era Jews in Central Asia and wartime displacement across the USSR.