“We are the Turkestan Rothschilds”: Jewish Firms and Trading Houses in the Turkestan General-Government

Abstract

The entrepreneurial activity of the Jews flourished in the Turkestan region after the conquest of the territory of Kokand and part of the Bukhara khanates by the Russian Empire. Starting from the 1870s, Jews who had long lived on the territory of the Bukhara Emirate began to move to the Samarkand and Fergana valleys. The main actors in the economy of Turkestan were the “national” groups of merchants who controlled the entire economic life of the region. On the eve of the conquest of the Turkestan region by Russian troops, Bukharan Jews and the so-called “Sartian” merchants played a significant role in international and domestic trade in the Khanates. In fact, the entire international trade of the khanates was in the hands of intermediaries – Bukharan Jews. With the arrival of the Russians in the region, they stepped up their activities in the newly created Turkestan and tried to take all the threads of the economy into their own hands. The main emphasis is on the activities of Jewish firms and trading houses and their role in the Central Asian economy. For the first time, archival documents are introduced into academic circulation, covering the trading operations of Jewish firms and trading houses in Russian Turkestan. The article also attempts to prove that the adoption of restrictive laws did not affect the successful development of the substantial Bukharan-Jewish capital in the Turkestan region. Based on archival documents, the author demonstrates that the imperial authorities, institutions, and structures actively interacted with substantial Jewish capital in the imperial periphery.