‘I became an Uzbek’: Jewish-Uzbek encounters in World War Two evacuation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Examinations of WWII-era Jewish evacuation to Central Asia traditionally focus either on the elite or the common people, subsequently concluding that the locale either fostered interethnic harmony (usually among the intelligentsia) or bred antisemitism (usually among the common people). In this article, however, I argue that both social strata witnessed and participated in these phenomena, using the lens of Uzbek-Jewish relations to evaluate the reality of interethnic encounters in evacuation. Indeed, Ashkenazi Jewish evacuees’ oral history testimonies demonstrate their multifaceted interactions with Uzbeks, in addition to their acquisition of substantial knowledge about their new neighbours, sometimes used to mitigate instances of popular antisemitism. Similarly, periodicals and archival sources’ coverage of the evacuated Ashkenazi Jewish intelligentsia shows not only high-level cultural cooperation and similar knowledge acquisition, but also its use of jointly produced cultural products to combat antisemitic stereotypes. As both antisemitism and interethnic cooperation featured in the first en masse encounter of these two largely unfamiliar ethnic groups, I suggest using it to test the on-the-ground success of the Soviet state’s ideology of the ‘friendship of the peoples’, which specifically prescribed interethnic friendship and the exchange of information about national culture.