At the beginning of our spring 2026 semester, we explored the drawers of the Textile Resource Center, pulling out objects that drew our attention and laying them on the table. The room felt like a treasure chest. One of the textiles on the table was a cap: a flat, round top, with a cylindrical brim descending straight down by a few inches. I recognized it immediately.

“Floral Chain Stitch Cap” looked exactly like the kippot, plural for kippah in Hebrew, or yarmulke in Yiddish, that my childhood friend Eli wore throughout our twelve years in Jewish school together. Eli’s mom, along with a lot of the Jewish mothers I grew up with, persuaded their children to wear what we knew as the “Bukharian kippot” because the pillbox shape meant it would not fly off the boys’ heads while we were running on the playground.

After finding this photo of Eli wearing an almost identical kippah to the one on the table in front of me, I asked:

A cap, a kippah, and the problem of naming

Kippot, or Jewish skullcaps, can be worn by anyone. It is even respectful, and often requested, that a non-Jew wear a kippah as a sign of respect when entering a synagogue or another Jewish religious setting. There is no halacha, Jewish law stated in the Talmud and discussed by rabbis, against a non-Jew wearing a kippah even outside of a Jewish setting, just as a cap or head covering for a personal reason. It is possible that this hat I know as a kippah was worn by someone else within the last years of its life as a secular cap. In many Jewish settings, non-Jewish visitors may be invited or expected to wear a kippah as a sign of respect. This means that the presence of a kippah-like form does not automatically prove the wearer’s identity or the object’s use, but it does make the cataloging question more important.

That uncertainty does not make the naming question less important. It makes it more important. A catalog title can determine how an object is found, who recognizes it, and which histories are made searchable.

I searched through the rest of the cap section, drawer C3, and was drawn to another cap that felt similar in visual language, technique, and construction: 22.17, currently titled “Blue & Metal Turkish Cap.” I have seen many kippot that resemble both the “Floral Chain Stitch Cap” and the “Blue & Metal Turkish Cap,” and the visual similarities between the two warranted attention.

In my prior research on ceremonial objects, I learned how Jewish communities across history and land participated in the visual cultures around them without giving up Jewish identity. They were not assimilating, they were participating, creating new ways of communicating religiousness through changing, transforming, and carefully using motifs and methods also used by other religious and ethnic groups in the area. Looking at the two caps, I wondered if this might be a similar situation.

A little bit of background

To understand the traditions which inform these textiles, we must first understand the places and peoples they are from. 

Growing up, I knew many Bukharian Jews and heard about Bukharian culture, but did not really understand what the word “Bukharian” actually meant. Many Jews from Central Asia identify as Bukharian, even if they are not from Bukhara, a city along the Silk Road in Uzbekistan. Central Asia encompasses many cultural and ethnic groups and a vast land area, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Bukharian Jews traditionally speak Bukhori, a Judeo-Tajik dialect of Persian. Bukhori blends Farsi, Tajik, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and was originally used by Jews living in Uzbek cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Much like the textile traditions of the region, Bukhori constitutes an important part of Central Asian Jewish culture, one that is distinct and increasingly endangered with the older generation.

My understanding of Bukharian Jews, people who are part of my own community, has vastly grown and changed throughout this project. The scholarship on Jewish material culture of Uzbekistan and of the region as a whole is slim, partly because Jewish material culture is often treated as a component of broader material culture, but also because of the waves of suppression and oppression Central Asian Jews faced across rulers and time periods.

I began my research in photo archives, trying to find pictures of Central Asian Jews living in Central Asia and wearing kippot of any kind. I wanted to better grasp what their traditional garments looked like and to determine whether there were visual differences between the clothing and textiles of sub-communities living there. Could I more definitively say that the “Floral Chain Stitch Cap” was a religious object? At the same time, I was searching for visual evidence that the “Blue & Metal Turkish Cap” originated in one of the five countries that currently make up Central Asia, rather than Turkey.

Many of the photographs I encountered were taken for the “visual survey” ordered by General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, the first governor-general of Russian Turkestan. Although I am using this collection to access photographic evidence of Jewish attire and customs, we should also be critical of it. A “comprehensive visual survey” is never truly comprehensive, and it is always influenced by the photographer’s assumptions, the commissioner’s purpose, and the limits of the archive itself.

In the photograph of a Jewish man preparing for prayer in Samarkand, he wears a tilpak, a dark, undyed sheepskin or fleece hat, along with his tallit and tefillin. The tilpak looks vastly different from either of the kippot found in the TRC collection. Why might that be? To understand the vibrant, silk Bukharian kippot, we have to first discuss the textiles that preceded them, and what caused their transformation.

Geography, clothing restrictions, and textile implications

Within the Emirate of Bukhara, an Uzbek monarchy that remained in power from 1785 to 1920, Jews were legally considered dhimmi, a protected non-Muslim status. Dhimmi status meant discriminatory rules, including residential segregation, forced discriminatory clothing, and restrictions on movement and travel.

The regulated clothing directly informs the textile traditions of Bukharian Jews. They were forced to wear exclusively black and yellow attire, and were prohibited from participating in the style of bright, colorful, heavily dyed fabrics worn by other residents of the region. Silk was prohibited overall, and leather belts were reserved for non-Jews to emphasize a position of higher social status. All head coverings had to be black or dark brown, round hats made of undyed and unadorned sheepskin.

Under these restrictions, Jewish residents were often limited in what they could wear, even while Jewish artisans and workers contributed significantly to textile production, dyeing, and trade. This tension between making textiles and being restricted from visibly wearing certain forms of textile wealth is central to the story of Bukharian Jewish material culture.

The prohibition on using richly colored textiles is particularly interesting because multiple primary sources state that the Jewish community contributed to the gathering of cochineal, used to make red dye. They were also responsible for indigo dyeing, which was seen as lowly or dirty by other dyers because it stained the artisan’s hands a deep blue. For a time, this body stain could signal both a person’s field of work and their Jewish identity. During the Emirate of Bukhara, there was much Jewish contribution to the production of textiles, but very little permission to use them.

As Russia came to power in Central Asia, these clothing restrictions relaxed. Jewish men, especially younger Jewish men, started to wear hats made or lined with dyed silk and cotton, with colorful floral and geometric shapes. In the archive, we begin to see this shift: older men still wearing tilpaks, and younger men appearing in brighter caps and kippot.

From suzani to skullcap

Another photograph from the Turkestan Album, titled “Jewish Customs: The Appearance of the Holiday Tent,” shows what I read as a sukkah, an outdoor, three-walled temporary structure with a branched roof, used to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot every fall. Woven fabrics are strung between wooden poles to create the walls, and a suzani, highly embroidered with floral, circular, and branch-like motifs, creates one of the upper front wall panels.

The Central Asian suzanis I compared to this image use similar plant and nature-inspired shapes. These fabrics were usually silk, from silkworms kept and processed by women working as a group in their homes. Large suzanis were embroidered by multiple women at once using chain stitch, often in long strips that were then sewn together. Both men and women spun thread, although weaving, abr, and abrbandi, Persian for “cloud” and “tying the clouds,” were predominantly done by men.

The circular, branch-like, petal-like, and plantlike forms of these suzanis closely reflect the motifs and circular layout on the “Floral Chain Stitch Cap,” which I refer to moving forward as the “Floral Chain Stitch Kippah.”

Reading about the relationship between suzanis and caps helped me understand why these small objects matter so much. Suzanis were traditionally part of a dowry and were hung or laid within the home, on the wall, window, table, or bed. Caps, by contrast, were portable. They were worn, moved, and carried with the wearer. It makes sense that Central Asian caps became smaller versions of suzanis. The wealth, social status, and cultural identity communicated by large-scale suzanis could also be transmitted through the small-scale, everyday wear of skullcaps.

Mapping the cap as a smaller suzani

I started to map out the Floral Chain Stitch Kippah by thinking about it as a suzani scaled down and made three-dimensional. I arranged the brim and top pieces as if they were seen flat, like a suzani on the wall. In that flattened view, the top becomes a medallion field and the brim becomes a border. The cap can be read not only as a garment, but as a portable textile architecture.

Looking closely at object 22.18, the chain-stitched floral forms appear arranged in a circular system. I see curling vines, petal-like clusters, leaf forms, and small repeated shapes that resemble broader Central Asian textile vocabulary. I do not want to claim one fixed meaning for every flower, horn-like curve, or branch form. Instead, I want to notice how the repetition, placement, and circular arrangement connect the cap to a wider textile world.

This matters for cataloging because the cap is not simply “decorative.” Its decoration is part of how it communicates. It carries visual language across scale, from wall textile to body textile, from home to head, from community to archive.

Close looking at object 22.17: Turkey, Turkmenistan, or Central Asia?

The second cap, 22.17, currently titled “Blue & Metal Turkish Cap,” opened a different type of question. Because the object was found or donated to the collection from Turkey, I first began researching the Silk Road and the prevalence of Jewish merchants in textile trade. I wondered whether the brightly colored lining fabric could be kutnu, a twill or tabby woven fabric with a silk warp and cotton weft that looks similar to ikat or abrbandi, but is printed or dyed after weaving instead of before. This was one hypothesis because kutnu is associated with Gaziantep, Turkey.

Under the microscope, that hypothesis started to fall apart. I tested perpendicular threads separately to determine whether one direction was silk and the other cotton, which would support the lining being kutnu and the cap being from that region of Turkey. Instead, both warp and weft appeared to be silk.

I moved on to a second hypothesis: that the object was actually a Central Asian cap. The jiyak,the horizontal band around the circumference of the cap, is a cotton tablet weave embroidered with chain stitching. It is woven as a long, thin strip and then attached afterward, a Central Asian technique. I also took a sample from the outermost stripe on the jiyak, a faded blue color. Because of its fadedness and blue tone, I wondered if it was indigo dyed.

Under magnification, the ribbon-like qualities of these threads suggested cotton. Some fibers appear damaged from wear and time. Other cross-stitched sections appear to be silk and metal, and the metal strip is characteristic of a tubeteika as well. These material observations did not prove a single answer on their own, but together they supported a Central Asian reading more strongly than the current Turkish catalog title.

Proposed cataloging language

I am proposing that “Blue & Metal Turkish Cap” be renamed “Tubeteika (cap).”

I am also proposing that “Floral Chain Stitch Cap” be renamed “Floral Chain Stitch Kippah.”

These proposed names do not close the research. They open the record to the histories that the objects already carry. They also make the objects more findable for people searching through terms like kippah, yarmulke, Bukharian, Central Asian Jewish, doppa, doppi, tubeteika, jiyak, suzani, silk, chain stitch, and indigo.

The question is not only whether one object is “religious” and the other is “secular.” The question is how an archive can hold uncertainty without erasing cultural meaning. A cap can be a cap, but it can also be a kippah, a memory object, a community textile, a record of migration, and a small surface where religious identity and local textile language meet.

Who gets to wear identity visibly?

Toward the end of my research, I found a photograph of a young girl wearing a head covering similar in shape and form to those worn by boys and men of the same place and time period. That image brought me back to Eli, to the boys in my school, and to the kippot I saw every day but was never expected to wear myself.

Finding photographs of girls and women in similar head coverings complicated what I thought I knew. The object in the drawer was not only evidence of Bukharian Jewish textile history. It also opened a question about who gets to wear identity visibly, who is discouraged from doing so, and how archives can help us see traditions differently.

This project began with recognition, with the surprise of seeing something from my childhood on a table in the Textile Resource Center. It became a study of naming, looking, dye, restriction, migration, and visual memory. The small embroidered cap was never small. It was a way into a culture, a set of textile traditions, and an archive that still has more to say when we know how to ask.

Image Credits and Sources Consulted

• Textile Resource Center collections, SAIC. Object photographs by Micah Shaffer, April 25, 2026.

• Author photograph, personal collection, taken 2006.

• Library of Congress, Turkestan Album, Ethnographic Part, accessed April 2026.

• Dudin Samuil Martynovich, “Teacher having classes with boys in the open porch of the Kinesoi Gumbaz synagogue. Bukharian Jews. 1902,” Russian Ethnographic Museum catalog.

• George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum collection records for Central Asian headwear, including Bukhara examples.

• The Jewish Museum collection record for a Jewish skullcap from Uzbekistan, early twentieth century.

• Museum of Applied Art of Uzbekistan collection record for suzani examples.

• Russian Ethnographic Museum, Kinesoi Gumbaz synagogue photograph: https://catalog.ethnomuseum.ru/entity/ARTICLE/2358

• GWU collection, headwear garment from Bukhara: https://collections-gwu.zetcom.net/en/collection/item/50537/

• GWU collection, cap from Bukhara: https://collections-gwu.zetcom.net/en/collection/item/20071/

• The Jewish Museum, skullcap from Uzbekistan: https://collections.thejewishmuseum.org/collection/17590-skullcap

• Museum of Applied Art of Uzbekistan, suzani reference: https://artmuseum.uz/en/manual_embroidery.html

• Museum of Applied Art of Uzbekistan, collection item: https://new.muzeyart.uz/site/collection-all?id=241

• Society.uz cultural reference: https://society.uz/culture/39

• Golden Threads, suzani embroidery tradition: https://www.goldenthreads.uk/blog/suzaniembroiderytradition

• Bukharacity.com, Jews in Bukhara: https://www.bukharacity.com/jews.htm

• Primitive Rug Journal, Uzbek Julkhirs Samarkand: https://primitiverug.com/journal/uzbek-julkhirs-samarkand