Mikra Mephurash - Chamishah Chumshei Torah. With commentaries.

(BUKHARIA).

Shmuel HaLevi Zuckerman

Jerusalem

1902-06 (i.e. 1901-03)

Complete in five volumes. Text in Hebrew and Bukhari. Translated by Shimon Hakham. Most volumes with woodcut of Holy Sites on final page, title-pages in gold.

A. Yaari, Siphrei Yehudei Bucharia, in Kiryath Sepher (1942) no. 84 (noting correct dates of publication).

The first Chumash specifically printed for the Jews of Bukharia. Scarce. According to Worldcat, only one copy located in the US (Yale). Uzbek born Rabbi Shimon Hakham (1843-1910) was a Bukharian scholar, one of the founders of Jerusalem’s Bukharian Quarter, who encouraged his co-religionists toward Torah observance via his publications in the Bukhari vernacular, also known as Judeo-Tajik. His “crowning glory” was this translation of the Pentateuch. “With this monumental achievement he entered the ranks of the great Jewish Bible translators” (see EJ Vol. X col. 436). Although an earlier translation existed, it was a remote, scholarly enterprise, composed in a stilted classical Persian. Rabbi Hakham composed this edition of the Chumash in the more popular Arabic dialect of the Bukharian Jews, specifically for direct, daily usage. See L. Jung, Jewish Leaders (1964) pp. 535-47. Today the territory of the defunct Bukharian emirate lies mostly in Uzbekistan, with portions in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.