A Jewish Family’s Legacy in Central Asian Textiles
My love story with Central Asian textiles began at a very early age, discovered and slowly galvanized while browsing old picture albums, visiting relatives in Jerusalem or listening to ancient family stories as recounted to me by my father. I was always very curious and aware of ‘where I came from.’ Both my parents were Jews of Mashhad, a city located in northeast Persia, and this, alone, carries with it an immense historical legacy.
Communities of Jews had begun migrating to Persia not long after 597 B.C., when King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia conquered Jerusalem, took as captives 10,000 Jews and destroyed the Temple. In 539 B.C., Cyrus, King of Anshan, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, invaded Babylon and allowed the Jews to either follow him to Persia or to return to Jerusalem and rebuild Solomon’s Temple. Many of them, lured by the prospect of religious freedom and a benevolent leader, chose to follow Cyrus and managed, over the course of history, to integrate themselves into the fabric of Persian society, coexisting peacefully at times while suffering persecution at others, most especially after the introduction of Shi’ism by the Safavids in 1502.
In 1739, Nadir Shah, the ruler of the Afsharid dynasty, plundered India, returning a year later with his looted treasury to his palace in Kalat, located in the Khorasan province near Mashhad. He was particularly suspicious of the people surrounding him, such that, in 1746, he decided to relocate there forty Jewish families from the cities of Qazvin and Dilman, trusting that they would safeguard his treasury. As these families were in the process of migration, Nadir Shah was assassinated. Stranded in Khorasan, the Jews eventually decided to settle in the nearby Muslim holy city of Mashhad, although the local Shi’a population was vehemently opposed to it.
The Eidgah Jewish ghetto was located in an enclosed area very near the Imam Reza Shrine, which is the largest mosque in the world, housing the mausoleum of the prophet Reza, one of the most sacred destinations for Shi’a Muslim pilgrims. The Jews were living in a perennial state of fear, locking the gates to the ghetto at night in order to prevent attacks. Indeed on March 27, 1839, the ghetto was raided by an angry mob upon an unjust pretext. The Jews were would now face certain death if they did not immediately convert to Islam. This incident became known historically as the ‘Allahdad.’ Many refused conversion, but those who agreed would continue to observe the Jewish faith and traditions in secret. In the years that followed, the ‘crypto-Jews’ were greatly limited in their freedom, particularly when it came to conducting their businesses in Mashhad. Eventually, many would be forced to migrate to neighboring countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, often leaving their families behind, but returning periodically to see them and bring sustenance.
I managed to trace my family tree back to the 17th century, when Abraham Levi was a member of the Jewish community of Qazvin. Two generations later, Simcha Levi was born in Sabzevar, near Mashhad, and had six male children, all born before the Allahdad and each responsible for the considerable expansion of the Levi family. My great-great grandfather, Isaac Levi, was the second of these six brothers, born around 1805, and his four children were all given Muslim names, including my great grandfather, Ramazan. By the time my grandfather, Ghassem, was born (whose Jewish name was David), the entire community in Mashhad was living a double life, fervent Muslims on the surface and Orthodox Jews undercover.
My father and I must have inherited our flair for travel and business ventures from my grandfather, who was one of the first of his generation to leave Mashhad for Marv (in Turkmenistan), where he had soon established himself for trading rugs and textiles with the local Turkmen population, who would gather weekly at the Takkeh and Vakil bazaars. He would then proceed to export these goods along the Silk Road to his family and business contacts stationed in India and London. The Turkmen people, who were Sunni Moslems, liked dealing with the Jews, both sympathising with their plight of living amongst Shi’a Moslems and respecting them for their honorable business practices. This enabled my grandfather to grow his business in ways that were not at all possible in Mashhad and to soon purchase some land in and around Marv.
The success of this enterprise encouraged him to venture still farther, this time to Uzbekistan, where he soon established himself in Samarkand and Tashkent. There he traded in silks and karakul (a tightly-curled, glossy, black lamb fur) with the local ‘Bokharans,’ this being the term used in my family when referring to the local population. Many of these Bokharans were of Jewish origin and he soon learned from them that their community was beginning to settle in a specific neighborhood of Jerusalem, close to the Old City. Beginning in the 1870’s, they had purchased land there and, by 1891, had decided to build a quarter in the neo-Gothic and Neo-Moorish architectural styles of Europe’s major cities.
For my grandfather, Jerusalem represented an opportunity to redeem the Jewish future of his family. His elderly cousin, Haji Esmail Yehetzkel Levi, who had been fervently practicing the Muslim religion and built public bathhouses in Mashhad in 1898, had earned his ‘Haji’ title through a pilgrimage to Mecca, which led him to visit Jerusalem. By the turn of the century, he had reconverted to the Jewish faith and was happy to leave Mashhad once again for Jerusalem, this time with the intention of building a synagogue. Informed about the growing neighborhood by his Bokharan business colleagues, my grandfather encouraged him in this venture and entrusted him with his first-born, ten-year-old son Ramazan for assistance, as Yehetzkel and his wife Michal didn’t have any children of their own. In 1905, the Haji Yehetzkel Levi Synagogue was built and still stands today as one of the landmarks of Jerusalem’s Bokharan Quarter.
This synagogue has always been the locus at which I could most fully connect to my heritage. My childhood memories are filled with holiday celebrations during which the synagogue was fully dressed with glistening, festive textiles. I remember a picture I once saw of the Torah ark covered by a parokhet made of a finely embroidered antique, dark-coloured, silk suzani of the Shahresabz type. The cover of Reuben Kashani’s ‘The Crypto-Jews of Mashad’ contains a frontal image of the synagogue’s interior, displaying another dark suzani of the Shahresabz type used as a tevah cover, against which stand three Torah scrolls. In another image, we see that the tevah is covered by a Nurata-type nim suzani. These were most probably gifts of my grandfather, who was dealing in them while in Uzbekistan and would send them to Jerusalem via his family members.
Collecting these textiles became equivalent to weaving together the threads of family history. Holding on to these fabrics is like holding on to a past which I only know of by way of narration but which I feel has still exerted an enormous, shaping identity and influence. Dealing in antique rugs and textiles has always been extremely natural for me, as if it were part of my DNA. I was very fortunate that my interest in central Asian textiles was sparked at around a time when, following the breakdown of the Soviet wall, many of them became available at the Istanbul bazaar, arriving at night in huge suitcases carried by equally portly Uzbek women, or in the alleyways of Jaffa’s flea market in Israel, brought into the country by the huge wave of Russian immigrants. A good majority of these textiles were in pristine condition, having been stored away as prized dowry objects and used only during special occasions. Most had patterns and formats which concealed their true function and scholarly material about these niceties was still fairly scarce. It was like pioneering a field that was begging to be discovered. Searching through piles of these made me aware of channeling my grandfather David, as he once rummaged through the dusty alleyways of Samarkand. I felt like the torch-bearer of the family tradition and sensed he would be very proud of that.
Three decades of antiques hunting in New York also offered me the opportunity to get in touch with Mashhadi rug dealers who were often brokering the sale of some family heirloom textiles. I was particularly happy to purchase, from these sources, a stellar purple-ground, silk suzani and a polychrome, ikat-ground suzani, both from Shahresabz, as well as a very fine Nurata suzani—a pristine, small-format Bokhara suzani which was probably used as a table cover as well as a baby-sized Ikat coat. The Jewish legacy with Uzbek suzanis is further corroborated by two inscriptions, hand-written in Hebrew and Farsi on the backing of the Nurata nim suzani and embroidered with a flame-stitch variant, indicating that it was purchased in Isfahan and that it belonged to a Jewish gentleman. Indeed there are many images in literature illustrating the ritual use of ikats and suzanis in Jewish festivities, particularly among Persian Jews.
Wherever I would travel, my eyes would always wander about, looking for any hidden treasures. By the time I met Anna, my wife to be, the private collection was already taking over a good portion of my bachelor pad, draping the few empty walls or covering tables and beds. Sometimes I was even wearing some of the ikat coats at my gallery openings, always instigating much interest among the fashion-driven Milanese. Anna was quickly enamoured of all this and encouraged me in many of our future acquisitions. Soon we were travelling together and enjoying hunting through all the markets we could find, looking for that elusive piece that was still felt to be missing. For our wedding ceremony, we decided to decorate the entire matroneum of Milan’s central synagogue with a selection of suzanis from our collection. Seeing them hanging from across the entire perimeter of the synagogue helped in creating an atmosphere of festivity and love. I was instantly transported to what my ancestors must have felt when they embellished the walls of our synagogue in Jerusalem. These objects were woven with love and as an ode to love. Our dream is that these textiles will continue to bring joy in our family for the generations to come, creating an ever-enduring legacy with our glorious past.