Cross-border biographies: representations of the "Bukharan" Jewish self in changing cultural and political settings.

Scholarly and popular literature dealing with the Persian-speaking Jews of Central Asia tends to divide the history and historiography of these Jewish communities along political boundaries that came into being only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The "Bukharan" Jews are commonly portrayed as an ancient, secluded, and isolated "ethnic" Jewish group, disconnected from neighbouring Jewish communities and the wider Jewish world. Looking into a set of Bukharan Jewish family stories, this article is meant to complicate the narrative, offering "mobility" and the metaphor of "border crossing" as a different paradigm to understand Jewish history and geography in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]