The Language We Forgot
What the Bukharan Jews of Vienna can teach us about rebuilding Jewish–Muslim trust in the West
There is a moment near the end of Ariane Sadjed’s new study of Central Asian Jews in Vienna that I have not been able to stop thinking about. A scholar gathers eight people in a room in June 2022 — four Bukharan Jews, four Afghans — and asks them to read Persian poetry together. The Jewish participants, whose grandparents once spoke a Persian dialect called Bukhori, can barely manage the language anymore; for most of them it has been displaced over two generations, first by Russian, then by Hebrew or German. A Bukharan woman named Keren is startled to discover that the Afghans across the table speak Persian at all — the same language she grew up with. She had never been certain her mother tongue was even related to Tajik, because she had never heard Tajik spoken. It was simply, in her words, a Jewish dialect.
By the end of the session, an Afghan woman named Shirin says something that reads like a small miracle of recognition: you understand that you are not alone with your story. Two communities that had shared a homeland, a literature, and a language for centuries had arrived in the same European city convinced their histories were unrelated — and it took a reading group to remind them otherwise.
I want to sit with that scene, because I think it contains a roadmap for one of the hardest problems in interfaith work today: how do Jews and Muslims in the West rebuild a relationship that geopolitics keeps tearing apart? And I think the answer Sadjed’s research points toward is one we have been slow to take seriously. The bridge already exists. It is the Sephardic and Mizrahi experience — the memory of Jews who lived, for the most part well, inside the Muslim world. We have simply forgotten how to speak it.
How forgetting happens
The first thing Sadjed’s work makes clear is that estrangement between Jews and Muslims is not the natural state of things returning after some brief modern interruption. It is manufactured, and recently so.
Consider what she found among the Bukharans. The community traces itself to the Emirate of Bukhara, where Jews held real standing. One of her interviewees, a rabbi she calls Aharon, proudly recounts the story of Levi Babakhanov, a Jewish court musician to the last Emir, and shows her a nineteenth-century letter from a Samarkand rabbi describing the community living “under the wings of the kingdom of Ishmael, the kings of grace and mercy, lovers of Israel.” The rabbi’s own holiday robes — a white velvet coat with silk embroidery — closely resemble the traditional garments of Bukharan Muslims. Jewish and Muslim musicians performed together. The boundary between communities ran along profession, locality, and family far more than along an absolute religious line.
And yet the same rabbi, telling the same story, layers onto it a narrative of coercion — the Emir summoning the musician on a Jewish holiday, the Jews remaining separate, “of course there was no assimilation.” Sadjed gently observes that this reading “seems more like a contemporary interpretation, layered onto events of the past.” This is the crucial insight: the memory of coexistence survives, but it is being re-narrated in the present to fit a new story in which Jewish and Muslim identities were always, fundamentally, opposed.
What drives that re-narration? Sadjed identifies several forces, and none of them is “ancient hatred.”
One is the experience of arrival itself. When Bukharans reached Vienna in the 1970s, they were not embraced by the established Ashkenazi community; they were mistaken for Turkish guest-workers, excluded, and in some ugly cases racialized with slurs. The pressure to be accepted as real Jews — within a European Jewish framework defined by religious law and observance — pushed the community toward a more legalistic, more bounded Judaism than the locally rooted, tradition-based Jewishness their grandmothers had practiced.
A second force is institutional and political. Drawing on Gadi Abutbul-Selinger’s research, Sadjed traces how the Israeli party SHAS, founded in 1984 under Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, reframed the ethnic and class discrimination that Middle Eastern Jews suffered in Israel as a matter of religious identity instead — uniting Jews from across the Muslim world under a single “Sephardic” banner and, in the process, teaching them to define themselves by religion rather than region. The later arrival of Chabad accelerated the shift. One Chabad figure in Vienna tells Sadjed bluntly: “there are no Bukharan traditions that one could teach… Many Bukharan traditions are Muslim things that we adopted. The religious don’t do that anymore.” Religion, in this telling, gets “purified” of everything that smells of the Muslim world the Jews came from. What is discarded as mere “folklore” is precisely the shared cultural inheritance that once linked the two communities.
The third force is the one we know best, and the one that should make every interfaith practitioner pay attention.
When minorities are played against each other
Sadjed’s Vienna is not a neutral backdrop. It is a country where, as Ruth Wodak has documented, mainstream conservatism normalized far-right politics, and where antisemitism became a political instrument. Successive governments paired demonstrative pro-Israel symbolism — the Israeli flag flown over parliament, a national strategy against antisemitism — with the aggressive problematizing of Islam: an “Islam-map” of Muslim organizations posted online (after which some mosques were attacked), a 2025 requirement that refugees sign a declaration against antisemitism to receive asylum.
The political logic is to cast one minority as in perpetual need of protection from the other. Antisemitism gets reframed as a foreign import carried in by Muslim immigrants, which conveniently absolves the host society of its own long record and, as Sadjed notes, hollows out the very concept of antisemitism, turning it into “a political tool for justifying other agendas.”
You can watch this discourse take up residence inside a person. Leila, a Bukharan woman in her late fifties, recoils from Syrian refugees — “the black that they would wear” — and praises Sebastian Kurz precisely because “he loves Israel. He loves the Jews.” She has absorbed the frame whole: Muslims as threat, the strongman as protector of the Jews.
And here is the part that should give us hope. The same woman, a few minutes later in the same interview, describes buying a bird online and discovering the sellers were an Afghan family. She spoke to them in Bukharan — “It’s almost the same language” — and they welcomed her, set a table, treated her with honor. They still call to ask how the bird is doing. “We have a lot to learn from them,” she says. “They are not all bad. Right?”
The abstraction — “Arabs,” “the refugees,” “Islam” — produces fear. The encounter, conducted in a shared language, produces kinship. Leila could not hold both at full strength. The shared tongue cracked the frame open.
The Sephardic-Mizrahi bridge
This is where I want to make the argument that the article gestures toward but, being a careful ethnography, leaves for the rest of us to draw out.
Most Western interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims is, whether we admit it or not, built on an Ashkenazi template. The Jewish partner in the room is usually of European descent; the historical reference points are the European ones — the Holocaust above all, and a Jewish-Muslim relationship imagined mostly through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framework has enormous moral weight. But it also structurally positions Jews and Muslims as strangers who must laboriously build a relationship from nothing, across a chasm of grievance.
The Sephardic and Mizrahi experience tells a different and, I think, more useful story. Here are Jews whose ancestors prayed in Arabic and Persian, whose poetry and music and cuisine and even clothing were continuous with their Muslim neighbors’, who experienced the Muslim world not primarily as a site of persecution but as home. This does not require romanticizing that history — there was dhimmi status, there were periods of real hardship and violence, and Mizrahi Jews left Muslim-majority countries under genuine duress. The point is not that coexistence was perfect. The point is that coexistence was normal, sustained across centuries, and that it produced a vast shared cultural inheritance that is still, barely, recoverable.
When the reference point shifts from European catastrophe to Levantine and Central Asian coexistence, the entire geometry of dialogue changes. Jews and Muslims are no longer strangers negotiating a treaty. They are estranged relations who once shared a household and have forgotten the fact. The work is not construction; it is recovery.
And recovery is a far more powerful psychological and spiritual posture than construction. You cannot argue someone into trusting a stranger. But you can remind two people that they already belong to overlapping worlds — and that reminder, as Leila’s bird and Keren’s poetry both show, can do in minutes what argument cannot do in years.
What this means for our work
I draw four practical lessons from Sadjed’s research, offered to anyone doing Jewish-Muslim work in the West.
First, center the Jews of the Muslim world. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, and Jews from places like Bukhara, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Iran, and India, are too often invisible in interfaith settings dominated by Ashkenazi institutions on one side and Arab or South Asian Muslim institutions on the other. Their presence alone disrupts the assumption that “Jewish” and “Muslim world” are opposites. They are living proof of the bridge. Seek them out; give them the microphone.
Second, use shared culture as the doorway, not theology. The Vienna reading group did not begin with a debate about scripture or sovereignty. It began with a poem by a poet — and a language — that both peoples claimed. Food, music, poetry, language, the texture of a grandmother’s home: these are the low, wide doors through which people walk toward one another before they realize what they have done. Build programs around them.
Third, name the political manipulation out loud. The Austrian case is a warning that minorities can be deliberately set against each other by majorities who benefit from their division — Jews enlisted as a cudgel against Muslims, antisemitism weaponized rather than fought. Interfaith work that ignores this dynamic will be outmaneuvered by it. Part of solidarity is refusing to be played, and saying so plainly to one another.
Fourth, expect the encounter to be temporary and fragile — and do it anyway. Sadjed is honest that the reading group “temporarily” unsettled hardened boundaries. The frame snaps back. Leila still fears the Syrians. But “temporary” is not “worthless.” Every encounter that reactivates the memory of shared history widens the space in which a different relationship becomes thinkable. These moments accumulate. They are how cognitive isolation is worn down — not in one conversation, but in a hundred.
There is a phrase the Samarkand rabbi used in that nineteenth-century letter that has stayed with me: the Jews living “under the wings… of the lovers of Israel,” referring to their Muslim rulers. It would be naïve to read that as a description of unbroken harmony. But it would be a different kind of error — the error our moment specializes in — to insist it was never true at all, that Jews and Muslims have always been and must always be enemies.
The Bukharans of Vienna are forgetting Bukhori, and with it a whole world of relation. Most of us in the West have forgotten far more. The task in front of interfaith communities is not to invent a Jewish-Muslim friendship from scratch. It is to remember one — to recover a mutual language we have allowed to fall silent, and to discover, as Keren did across that table, that the person we were taught to call a stranger has been speaking our mother tongue all along.
Sources
Abutbul-Selinger, Gadi. 2017. “Shas and the Resignification of the Intersection Between Ethnicity and Religion.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (9): 1617–1634.
Barth, Fredrik. 1994. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo: Waveland Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2009. “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism.” Annual Review of Sociology 35: 21–42.
Cooper, Alanna E. 2012. Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Khalid, Adeeb. 2003. “A Secular Islam: Nation, State and Religion in Uzbekistan.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (4): 573–598.
Sadjed, Ariane. 2025. “Iranian, Afghan or Central Asian? Patterns of Mobility among Persianate Jews in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.” Central Asian Survey 44 (2): 183–201.
Sadjed, Ariane. 2026. “(Re-)Covering a Mutual Language: Memory and Contemporary Muslim–Jewish Relations among Central Asian Jews in Austria.” History and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2026.2657847.
Sapritsky, Marina. 2012. “Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientations in Post-Soviet Odessa.” In Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja, 65–93. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
Shohat, Ella. 2017. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings. London: Pluto Press.
Wodak, Ruth. 2023. “Analyzing the Shift to the Far Right: The Austrian Case.” International Politics 60 (2): 482–491.
Inspiring.
Super interesting read