Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

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REALMS OF SILENCE 203 mighty forces of Hassan ibn al-Nu'man). Five years later, after the queen had implemented a scorched-earth policy and destroyed towns and villages along the coast, Arab reinforcements arrived and overwhelmed the forces of the bold Berber ruler, and she herself was killed in battle. Her sons converted to Islam and joined the conquerors, and this was the end of her long reign, which remains shrouded in myths and mystery. Ibn Khaldun was not the only Arab historian to describe the fascinating deeds of Dihya al-Kahina. Earlier Arab writers, from the ninth century CE, described in detail her fight against the Muslim conquerors. The Baghdadbased writer al-Waqidi emphasized her cruel treatment of her own subjects; Khalifa ibn Khayyat al-Usfuri dated her defeat to 693 CE; the Persian historian Ahmad al-Baladhuri recounted the story in brief; and Ibn Abd al-Hakam, who lived in Egypt, expounded the story of the queen's son who also fought against the invaders. 22 Muslim historians who followed Ibn Khaldun continued to write about the Judaized queen, and her story was picked up by modern scholars. Many legends formed around the acts and personality of the female Berber Jewish leader. During the colonial period, French writers revived the old myths in order to highlight the historical fact that the Arabs were invaders whom the local populace had fiercely resisted. Later, in the postcolonial period, Kahina became an Arab—sometimes a Berber—heroine, a forerunner of the French national heroine Joan of Arc. Since Arabic literature referred to her as a mysterious Jewess, some Zionist historians were intrigued, and a few took up the story as though Dihya was a late incarnation of the biblical prophetess Deborah. Nahum Slouschz, a diligent Zionist historian of North Africa's Jews who completed his doctoral thesis in Paris, was the first to install Kahina in the modern Jewish memory. 23 As early as 1909 he published two essays about the Jewish Berbers, and an article entitled "The Kahina's Race." 24 He argued that North Africa was settled by large numbers of Jews who came from Jerusalem, 22 On these authors, see Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, A North African Heroine, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001, 2-15; also H. Z. Hirschberg, "The Berber Kahina," Tarbiz 27 (1957 [in Hebrew]), 371-6. 23 He was preceded by a French Jew named David Cazes, who argued that the great Queen Kahina was not Jewish, and indeed persecuted the Jews. For it is known that the "Children of Israel" have always been weak and persecuted, and could never be tyrannical rulers. See in this connection, Hannoum, Colonial Histories, 51-5 24 Nahum Slouschz, Un voyage d'études juives en Afrique: Judéo-Hellènes et Judéo- Berbéris, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1909; and "La race de la Kahina," Revue Indigène: Organe des Intérêts des Indigènes aux Colonies 44 (1909), 573-83.
204 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE and was ruled by them for a long time before the arrival of the Muslims. To his mind, Kahina the warrior queen could not have been a mere proselytized Berber—she had to have been a Jew "by race." In 1933 Slouschz expanded his publications and reissued them as a book in Hebrew. Dihya al-Kahina ("Judith the Priestess") contains fascinating historical material tinged with romanticism and seasoned with folklore and picturesque tales that Slouschz had borrowed from Arabic and French historiography. 25 He argues that Kahina's noble tribe, the powerful Djeraoua tribe of the Aurès— whom he calls the Gera—was "a nation of the race of Israel." 26 These "Geras" had come to the region from Libya and had previously lived in Egypt. The priests, who led the tribe, had come to the land of the Nile in the reign of Judah's king Josiah, in the exile of the Pharaoh Necho. Dihya was an affectionate Jewish nickname for a woman named Judith, and she was certainly of a priestly family. Jewish tradition does not permit women to be priests, but as the Canaanite influence was still strong among them, the Geras dubbed her a kahina. Slouschz could tell that Kahina was good-looking and strong; she was said to be "handsome as a horse and powerful as a wrestler" 27 French scholars compared her to Joan of Arc, but Slouschz, drawing on Arab sources, stated that Kahina "indulged in carnal love with all the passion of her fiery youth," and was married three times. The problem was that these husbands were not Jews of her tribe, and it is known that one of them was a Berber and the other a Greek—namely, a Byzantine. Would a kosher Jewess have married uncircumcised gentiles? Slouschz explained that the Judaism of the Berber tribes was not of the severe, rabbinical form known to us; hence their customs were of a different sort: [Kahina] remained faithful to her ancestral faith in its ancient, "pre-Ezra" form, which was common among the faraway Jews in Africa, a Judaism that did not yet distinguish between peoples and continued to marry its neighbors, and would never keep up with the special isolation of the "Pharisees" that was predominant in the Roman and Arab cities. 28 In this way Slouschz could remain an "ethnocentric Zionist"—asserting that the legendary amazon and her priests were of the right race, while admitting 25 Nahum Slouschz, Dihya al-Kahina (Judith the Priestess): A Heroic Chapter from the History of the Faraway Jews in the Wilderness of the "Dark Continent,"Tel Aviv: Omanut, 1933 (in Hebrew). 26 Ibid., 31. 27 Ibid., 62. 28 Ibid., 68-9. The image of Dihya al Kahina intrigued many people, and she was the subject of several historical romances. See, for example, Gisele Halimi, La Kahina, Paris: Plon, 2006.
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The Invention of the Jewish People
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English edition published by Verso
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Contents PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LAN
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Preface to the English-Language Edi
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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDI
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2 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPL
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CHAPTER TWO Mythistory: In the Begi
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Acknowledgments I am deeply gratefu
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316 INDEX Aulus Plautius, 171 Ausch
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3l8 INDEX La Création des identit
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320 INDEX 251-54, 259, 261-62, 265-
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324 INDEX Jews and Arabs in Pre- an
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330 INDEX Sarah, 110, 153 Satires (
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332 INDEX xenophobia, 50 Yaari, Ehu
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Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

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