Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

206 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
noted, there is hardly any Jewish testimony on the subject of proselytes; the
Berber language left little trace in written Judeo-Arabic culture; and the Old
Testament was never translated into Berber. The fact that the Jews adopted
Arabic very quickly after the Muslim conquest, whereas the Berbers put up
stronger resistance to the linguistic acculturation, proves that the former were
not of Berber origin. As for the story about the Judaized queen, it was not
very meaningful, since she did not act in the spirit of Judaism and ultimately
contributed nothing to it. In fact, her name was Kahya, and the Arab writers
misread it as Kahina. 31
Hirschberg knew, of course, that the Berbers' culture was largely an oral
tradition, and consequently no traces of it are to be found in the Arabic literature
and language of North Africa. He knew that there were many names,
family appellations, superstitions and customs common to Jewish believers
and Muslim Berbers. (For example, the custom of splashing passers-by with
water at Pentecost was both Jewish and Berber; the relatively free status of
the Jewish women also resembled Berber custom rather than Arabic; and so
on.) In many Jewish communities the family name Cohen ("priest") did not
appear at all, while in others almost all members of the congregation were
called Cohen but had not a single Levy—which could have indicate collective
conversions. Moreover, some Islamized Berber tribes had retained certain
Jewish customs, such as not lighting fires on Sabbath eve and avoiding leavened
bread during the spring festival. Yet this last fact only served to reinforce
Hirschberg's conviction: "Ancient Christianity disappeared completely from
North Africa, while Judaism persisted through the ages. Indeed, not only the
Christian Berbers became Muslim—so did the proselytized Berbers. Only the
Jews of the seed of Abraham remained." 32
So firm was Hirschberg's conviction that he forgot his ethnoreligious belief
that the Arabs, too, had descended from the great patriarch. But this typical
slip is marginal. His constant effort to prove that the Jews were a nation-race
that had been torn from its ancient homeland and gone into a wandering exile
was far more significant, and, as we have seen thus far, it met the imperative
of mainstream Zionist historiography. His inability to rise above the purifying
essentialist ideology that guided all his research damaged his work, and it was
31 Ibid., 94-7,
32 H. Z. Hirschberg, "The Judaized Berbers in North Africa," Zion, vol. 22, 1957, 19,
See also another careful article that seeks to adopt Hirschberg's "ethnic" outlook, J. Chetrit
and D. Schroeter, "Les rapports entre Juifs et Berbères en Afrique du Nord," in P. Balta, C.
Dana, and R. Dhoquois-Cohen (eds.), La Méditerranée des Juifs, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003,
75-87-