ABSTRACT
The Bukharan Jews traditionally spoke a variety of Persian called Bukhari or Judeo-Tajik. Judeo-Tajik is very similar to the language of the Bukharan Muslim majority, which is just called Tajik. Many Bukharan Jews also spoke Uzbek, the local Turkic language, in addition to Tajik (see Turkish). In the 19th century, we begin to see works that look more distinctive from Judeo-Persian, and in the 20th century, political policies helped further distinguish Tajik from Persian, and hence also Judeo-Tajik from Judeo-Persian. The Jewish dialect—that is, Judeo-Tajik, or Bukhari—was essentially the same as the Tajik language spoken by Muslims, but because it was written in the Hebrew script, it was recognized as a separate language by the Soviet government. Soviet rule brought educational reforms to the Bukharan Jews, and Judeo-Tajik literary production increased. Bukharan Jews living in the Uzbekistani cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and the capital Tashkent published a number of new Judeo-Tajik newspapers with the first of the appearing in 1925.
