Persianate Jews: Mobility, Community, Memory

Project description

Who are Persian Jews and what can we learn from their history? Looking back on a history of almost 3000 years, the majority of Jews left the Persianate world from the mid-20th century onwards. As Jews who lived in Muslim cultures, their trajectories do not fit into mutually exclusive concepts of “Jews” and “Muslims”.

However, we hardly know how interactions between Muslims and Jews worked on a daily basis. Contemporary narratives about Jewish-Muslim relations tend to be highly polarized, and access to sources in Persianate societies is hampered. Based on different forms of interconnectedness, the project PersCom aims to provide a comprehensive study about Jews from Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan, from the 19th century until today. It analyses Jewish contacts within and outside of these communities in everyday life, to shed light on the various forms of connection with and separation from the surrounding societies.

The research highlights religious identity as applied in context, rather than as fixed and static notion. Methodologically this will be achieved by combining a variety of sources that have not been brought into dialogue until now, including the different languages Persianate Jews used. Focusing on non-elites and everyday life also includes a completely new pool of data that until now was considered too mundane for analysis. Yet, exactly these documents from „ordinary“ people and daily encounters provide significant new insights into Jewish life in the region and the role of local and transregional networks.

In this way, PersCom aims to overcome the geographic, disciplinary and linguistic separation that has shaped modern Persian Jewish history to date. Working in a number of different public and private archives and extensive interview research in many locales where Persian Jewish communities lived and live today will generate new insights into Jewish life in a region is often considered exotic or at least remote – yet not only places such as Mashhad, Herat, or Bukhara, but also the frontier regions and smaller villages of the respective countries were home to many different Jewish communities. PersCom contributes to preserving this endangered heritage, which is of relevance both to Jewish history as well as to the history of Persianate societies.