The road between the Afghani cities of Ghazni and Bamiyan is fraught with
danger. The Kabul-Kandahar highway that makes up most of the journey was
improved and reopened in 2003, but in the last several years travelers on this
road have been targets for Taliban, insurgents, and bandits of all stripes. A recent article in Afghanistan Today reports that hundreds of
people are kidnapped and attacked on this route every year.
The road was also dangerous, so it seems, in the
Middle Ages. A cache of Jewish documents was recently discovered in Afghanistan,
and among its contents is a trader's letter written in Judeo-Persian; like
Yiddish, this Jewish language sounds similar to the standard Persian spoken in
Iran and Afghanistan today, but is written in the Hebrew script. In the
still-unpublished letter, the author, a trader in Ghazni, complains to his
brother that he is far from his wife and family in Bamiyan. Despite the relative
closeness of the two cities, for the author a journey was out of the question.
"I am not a man of traveling and absence from home," he writes, expressing his
grief at the absence of his loved one: "My heart is occupied with her, for I
know she is in distress."
This trader's letter is just one of the documents
that have the potential to shed new light on the history of medieval Afghanistan
and its Jewish community. The documents include not only letters, but contracts,
poetry, theology, biblical interpretation, and more. While the vast majority of
the documents are as yet unavailable to scholars, experts who have seen the
texts, such as Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, are certain
that the documents can be dated between the ninth and the early thirteenth
century, when the Mongol invasion devastated the region's Jewish
communities.
Most scholars agree that the history of the Afghani Jewish community goes back to the seventh or eighth centuries. Beginning as a community of traders, like our letter writer, who traveled as far as China and India along the branches of the Silk Route, with time Jews settled permanently in cities like Kabul, Ghur, and Herat. As indicated by their knowledge of Persian, Afghani Jews seem to have spread east from Iran, where, by the time the new documents were written, Jews had lived for over one thousand years.
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