Rafael Potelyakhov — merchant and industrialist with roots in the Russian Empire
Rafael ben Shlomo Potelyakhov was born in Bukhara, in 1865 according to the Jewish Virtual Library or 1868 according to a Russian reference work, into a Bukharan Jewish family. The Emirate of Bukhara was then a protectorate of the Russian Empire rather than part of its territory; his connection to the Empire lies in the city where he made his fortune, Kokand, in the Fergana Oblast of Russian Turkestan. He studied at a yeshiva, learning Hebrew and the Talmud, until he was eighteen.
After the Russian conquest of the Kokand khanate in the 1870s, the Fergana Valley became the leading cotton-growing region for the textile industry of central Russia, and many Bukharan Jews moved from the emirate to Kokand to trade in cotton, wool and silk. After his father's death in 1885, Potelyakhov and his wife, Pnina, settled there, by most accounts in the late 1880s, and opened a drapery business with a partner, Sholomo Musaev. When Musaev left for Jerusalem, he handed Potelyakhov his share, which Potelyakhov invested in trade.
He became a merchant of the first guild and head of a trading house with shops across Turkestan, the Emirate of Bukhara, Moscow and Orenburg. He owned cotton gins, two cotton-oil plants, soap, tea-packing and tobacco factories, land with coal and oil deposits and a narrow-gauge railway in the Fergana Valley, and was one of the largest suppliers of cotton to the Russian market; with families such as the Vadyaevs, the Simkhaevs and the Davidovs he belonged to the small group of Bukharan Jewish entrepreneurs who were among the wealthiest in the Empire. In 1905 he and the Vadyaev brothers founded a Bukharan Jewish school in Kokand, in 1907 he built a residence there, and in 1908 he was made a hereditary honorary citizen of the city. A visiting Russian minister of finance awarded him a medal.
After the October Revolution he served as a minister in the short-lived government of the Kokand Autonomy, proclaimed in November 1917. When it fell he was imprisoned, charged with financing a revolt. He later left with his family for Berlin and then London, where he died in 1936. His life and the Bukharan Jewish merchant class are now the subject of academic research in Israel and Central Asia.
"Moved from Bukhara to Kokand in Russian Turkestan in the late 1880s; after the Revolution and imprisonment he left with his family for Berlin and then London, where he died in 1936."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kokand, Fergana Oblast, Russian Turkestan (now Uzbekistan); born in Bukhara (Emirate of Bukhara)
Born in Bukhara, then a Russian protectorate, he built his business in Kokand, in the Fergana Oblast of the Russian Empire, from the late 1880s, became a merchant of the first guild and a hereditary honorary citizen of Kokand, and left Soviet Turkestan after the Revolution.
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Kokand, Fergana Oblast, Russian Turkestan (now Uzbekistan); born in Bukhara (Emirate of Bukhara). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.