ABSTRACT
Of all the sundry characters of the Jerusalem Yishuv who came under the rubric "maskils," Nissim Bekhar stood out as a somewhat lone and marginal figure. Many returned to North Africa, although they remained one of the largest Middle Eastern Jewish groups until World War I. Despite the Yishuv's limitations, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the immigration of yet more Middle Eastern Jewish groups, encouraged by religious aspirations, by economic developments of which they heard from Jerusalem emissaries, and by the immigration of other Jewish groups. The decades of the 1870s and 1880s brought additional Jewish immigrants from the Muslim region of Bukhara, to the north of Afghanistan. Bukharian Jews had almost assimilated into the surrounding society before a Sephardi emissary brought them back to Judaism at the end of the eighteenth century; almost a century later, they constituted a large and devout community.
